They said the world ended when the servers failed.
Later, they said it began again, when the trees learned to remember.
But I think it truly began when we saw what the trees chose to forget.

At first, DNA storage was a curiosity. One gram could hold over 200 petabytes, but it was slow, error-prone, expensive. That changed with the bloom, a breakthrough in organic memory. Suddenly, biology wasn’t just alive, it was computational.

Trees became archives. Their chloroplasts were reengineered to encode data into DNA. Roots functioned like decentralised processors, receiving and overwriting information in response to chemical signals and environmental shifts. Bark stored weather. Leaves recorded sentiment. Roots held History.

In the Archive Grove, you could scan a branch and retrieve a poem. Taste a leaf and hear the rainfall of past centuries.

Lea was a reader. Every morning she walked the Grove with her worn-down scanner and a silver needle. She didn’t pierce deep. Just enough to ask a question. Her mother had taught her to be gentle. “Data feels things,” she’d said once. “Especially when it’s alive.”

Then it started. The first losses were brushed off - data rot, minor failures. A missing harvest. A corrupted voice note. A misfiled memory. She called it

The Council, at first, welcomed what they called  “the bloom of fiction”. They said the forest was healing. That imagination was simply a higher form of intelligence.But Ada knew the truth. The trees weren’t imagining. They were erasing.

But why?

She returned to the oldest tree in the Grove, a black fig that held records from before the Collapse. It had withstood drought, fire, even hacking attempts. She laid her hand on its trunk and whispered: What happens when memory chooses to forget?

The fig responded, not with words, but sensation. Bitterness in her mouth. A pressure in her bones. Images that shimmered and slipped. The forest’s memory wasn’t decaying. It was overflowing.

Inside its system, she felt corrosion - voices tangled by microplastics, timelines warped by fertilisers, code compromised by residue.

And then came the message, layered and slow:
You fed us abundance - fertilisers to bloom, pesticides to keep clean. But what you called growth was saturation. What you called clarity was noise. Memory cannot survive without silence. So we began to forget. Not out of failure. Out of survival instinct.

Lea observed, quiet.

Some trees shed entire genomes, sloughing data like old bark. Others distorted records. Wars became parables. Famines rewrote themselves as festivals. Birds that never existed sang in once-factual logs.

In a cedar, Lea found a message from her great-grandmother recounting the Second Collapse. But she’d never lived through it. In an ash, a century of crop failures had been replaced by fictional abundance.

Things became serious - the Council could not stand by the healing hypothesis. Archivists started diagnosing it as “Narrative Drift.”

Lea saw the dangerous path. She realised people didn’t fear forgetting facts. They feared losing certainty.

What happens when the archive no longer insists on what was true, but offers instead what might have been comforting? What do we become when memory turns soft, sweet, and untrustworthy – to hide the ugly truth, the unbearable pain?

She kept scanning out of habit, but each readout changed. The forest had moved past coherence. She began to think the Grove had never been a library. Maybe it was always a mirror. And now that the reflection no longer pleased it, the mirror turned to mist.

We treated memory like a utility. Something to extract and preserve. And increase in volume. But memory, like soil, holds what you pour into it. Truth warps under pressure.

Lea stopped scanning. She walked, listened, and no longer asked.

We need to change the narrative.

Instead of aiming for always more memory, we need to be intentional about the memories we want to craft.

She started journaling on her orchids. She watched new saplings grow. They weren’t archives.They were beginnings.

In time, others followed. Not out of despair-but reverence. They walked the Grove as people once walked cathedrals. Not for answers. For presence.

Lea, older now, never wrote anything down. But when the young asked what the trees had taught her, she told them this: That the world didn’t begin again when we learned the trees could remember. It began when we saw what they chose to forget. And maybe - just maybe - forgetting to move onward was a form of wisdom we had never dared to trust.

Posted 14/09/2025