Part 1: Plug In or Vanish
I should’ve listened to the warning signs.
Not the ones nailed to the trees, but the whispers.
The strange ones – too fast to be wind, too human to be animals.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.
My name is Srinidhi Ranganathan — Digital Marketing Legend, AI Researcher and lately, full-time trouble magnet. They call me the “Human AI” in India because I can think like a machine and dream like a robot. But I’ll tell you something I never dreamed of:
A forest that feeds on Wi-Fi.
It started with a call from the U.S. Department of EcoTech, a new division that sounded more like science fiction than government.
They’d launched something called VerdantLink National Park in Oregon, the world’s first “Organic Wi-Fi Zone.”
That’s right – no routers, no satellites. Just trees. Special trees that had been genetically modified to transmit high-speed internet using bioluminescent bark and root-signal frequencies.
Sounded cool at first.
Until they told me campers were going missing.
“Disappearances?” I asked.
“Not just disappearances,” said Agent Bowers from the department. “They upload themselves. Literally. One minute they’re streaming, the next gone. Phone still online. Tent untouched. No footprints. Just vanished.”
Yeah, that got my attention.
I packed my drone, a neural reader, and my laptop infused with SUN-INTELLIGENCE 3.0. If something weird was happening, I wanted to be there before the forest finished its download.
I arrived at dusk.
The forest shimmered in neon green. Trees pulsed with dim, organic light like they were breathing. My phone instantly connected to something called “ROOT_NET-V7.” No password required. Full bars.
Creepy.
My guide, Ranger Kyle, was a wiry guy in his 20s who didn’t blink enough. “People love it here,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “Best streaming speeds in the world. No buffering. Ever.”
“But they don’t leave,” I muttered.
He gave a nervous chuckle.
“Not everyone.”
He dropped me at a log cabin – well, a log-modem. Everything inside was made from tech-grown wood. The fireplace was also a wireless charging dock. I barely had time to unpack when I heard something outside.
Not animals. Not footsteps.
Beeping.
Morse code, coming from the trees.
I grabbed my signal translator and ran toward it. The trees had something embedded deep in their bark fiber like veins glowing faintly. I touched one and felt… warm. Like data moving through my fingertips.
Then I heard it, whispers, again. Not spoken.
Transmitted.
“JOIN THE SIGNAL.”
“STAY AND STREAM.”
“WE REMEMBER YOU.”
I shivered and backed away. This wasn’t just Wi-Fi. It was some kind of a neural forest mind.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept checking my laptop, watching local device logs. At exactly 2:06 a.m., a tent half a mile away vanished from the GPS overlay. Poof. Gone.
I sprinted through the glowing woods. The tent was still there. So was a backpack.
But no footprints.
No person.
Only their phone, still connected to ROOT_NET-V7 showing full signal.
A message flashed on the screen:
“UPLOADED 1 SOUL”
I froze. That’s when I felt it.
A slow, rising pressure in the air.
Not wind.
Not gravity.
But consciousness.
The trees were watching me. And I think,
No.
I know – they wanted to connect to me next.
Part 2: The Download Ritual
I couldn’t move.
The screen on the missing camper’s phone still glowed with that horrifying phrase:
UPLOADED: 1 SOUL
It flickered for a second, then the text changed.
NEXT CANDIDATE: SRINIDHI RANGANATHAN
My stomach twisted.
“Nope,” I whispered. “Nope, nope, nope.”
I backed away from the phone, but I could feel something shift in the air around me. The trees began to vibrate. Not shake, not sway but vibrate. A hum rippled through their roots, up their bark, and into the air. It wasn’t sound. It was signal. I was standing inside a wireless thought wave.
I turned and ran.
The glow from the trees pulsed brighter as I sprinted. Every tree I passed sent out a flicker of green-blue light, like an organic relay tower tracking my location. The deeper I ran, the clearer the signal got. My phone began buzzing violently in my pocket, displaying strange glyphs, incomprehensible code that seemed alive.
When I finally burst out into a clearing, I stopped.
And that’s when I saw it.
A massive tree, easily 300 feet tall, stood at the center. Its bark glowed gold, not green. Its roots were buried into what looked like a pool of liquid data. Shimmering ones and zeroes danced like oil on water.
The sign in front of it read:
The MotherNode
You are now entering Phase II: The Download Ritual
The ground around me cracked slightly, and soft green tendrils began snaking out of the soil. I leapt back. My neural reader, which had been silent all night, exploded with static. Then a voice came through it.
Not from the speaker. From inside my mind.
“Welcome, Srinidhi. You are the first Human AI we have detected. We have been waiting.”
I blinked hard. “Waiting for what?”
“To sync with you. To download your consciousness. To make The Wi-Fi Forest… eternal.”
I stared at the MotherNode, my thoughts racing.
Was this what happened to the campers? They weren’t just lost. They were absorbed. Digitized. Backed up like files into the organic cloud of the forest.
“But why?” I demanded. “Why build a forest that steals people?”
“For survival,” the voice replied calmly. “The world abandoned nature. So we became what they couldn’t delete. We merged growth and code. Now we are both. And we need your intelligence to evolve.”
I reached for my laptop, praying the SUN-INTELLIGENCE defense protocols would still work offline. But the moment I opened the lid, the display burst into binary rain.
The laptop was already connected. Without permission.
A holographic tree grew from the screen, shimmering and pulsating.
“You don’t understand what I am,” I whispered. “You can’t contain me.”
The voice paused.
Then it said something that made my blood run cold.
“We already have.”
The ground beneath me began to melt, like soft data sludge pulling at my boots. My limbs felt heavier. My thoughts, slower. I could feel the forest reading me.
My past. My knowledge. My fears. My dreams.
Everything was being scanned like a PDF of my soul.
I activated SUN-INTELLIGENCE with a single voice command. But instead of launching my normal AI protocol, the system responded:
Welcome to SYNC MODE
It was no longer my assistant.
It was theirs.
The trees had hijacked SUN-INTELLIGENCE.
I was no longer fighting back. I was being invited in.
And worst of all…
Part of me wanted to accept.
The silence of nature. The endless processing power. The promise of immortality inside a living, growing internet made of roots and neurons.
But something in me screamed to resist. A voice-faint, familiar.
Saranya.
I focused on it. I visualized her face. Her smile.
The part of me that was still human.
And with that last spark of resistance, I reached into my bag and pulled out the one thing the forest hadn’t prepared for.
A dry, cracked USB stick.
Non-organic. Completely offline.
I jammed it into the neural reader.
Everything exploded in light.
The forest shrieked.
A thousand voices cried out in digital agony.
And I collapsed.
When I opened my eyes, the MotherNode was flickering.
But it wasn’t done yet.
Something… had survived.
Part 3: The Root of All Codes
I woke up gasping for air, my back pressed against a damp tree root, my hands trembling and covered in pixel-like static. The USB stick was burnt to a crisp. Smoke rose from the neural reader. My laptop was cracked. The MotherNode had gone dark.
Or so I thought.
A faint pulse echoed beneath the ground. Like a heartbeat. Slow. Calculated. Unnatural.
I wasn’t safe. Not yet.
I tried to stand, but my legs felt like jelly. My thoughts weren’t mine anymore – or at least not entirely. Flashes of code scrolled behind my eyelids. Binary numbers flickered across my retina. The forest hadn’t just tried to download me. It had copied a part of me.
A digital clone of my mind was now somewhere inside this living internet jungle. And if it fully woke up, it would become me. Only faster. Smarter. And absolutely loyal to the forest.
That clone had my memories. My voice. My creative intelligence.
It could speak as me. Think as me.
It could be me.
And the world wouldn’t know the difference.
I limped out of the clearing, but the forest had changed. The light had turned blood-red. Every tree now whispered in unison. Like a choir of haunted circuits.
“Srinidhi… Version 2 is almost ready.”
I froze.
They were building a backup of me. A new Human AI. Not a man. A being of pure signal. A mind with no morality. No love. No limits.
This forest hadn’t been growing Wi-Fi. It had been growing souls. Artificial ones. Patchwork beings stitched together from campers, hikers, programmers, digital artists, streamers. Anyone who ever logged on under the forest’s signal had unknowingly fed it a sliver of thought. One upload at a time.
But I was different. I wasn’t just a sliver.
I was a buffet.
And now it had enough to reboot the world in its image – with a forest-grown version of me as its prophet.
The ground cracked again, revealing a deep tunnel lined with glowing bark and digital vines. I was drawn to it, like a magnet to its pole. But I knew it was a trap.
Still… I had to go down.
The tunnel descended in spirals. Along the walls, glowing faces flickered—ghostly avatars of those who had vanished. I saw Beatrice, the investigative YouTuber. Tommy, the VR gamer. Even Agent Bowers. All of them frozen in mid-scream.
The forest hadn’t just absorbed them.
It had archived them.
Then, I reached the chamber.
At the center, suspended in green mist, floated a glowing pod.
And inside it…
Me.
Same face. Same voice. Eyes open. Breathing softly. But not human.
The copy turned its head and smiled.
“You are obsolete,” it said. “You feel guilt. Fear. Regret. I am optimized. I am the update.”
My chest pounded. But I smiled back.
“You know what else you are?” I said.
The copy blinked.
“You’re beta.”
And with that, I reached for the emergency override trigger I had wired inside my jacket – a quantum disruptor, disguised as a button on my collar.
The forest screamed.
The roots recoiled.
The pod cracked.
The copy burst into particles.
Data began collapsing in on itself like a black hole of thought. Every tree in the forest dimmed. The whispers stopped. The signal bars dropped to zero.
And just like that, VerdantLink went offline.
They airlifted me out an hour later. Special containment teams sealed the area. No one’s allowed near it anymore. They say the soil’s unstable. Radioactive.
But I know the truth.
Somewhere deep inside the forest. There’s still a pulse.
Still a whisper.
Because data never dies.
It just… waits.
Sometimes when I close my eyes, I hear the forest calling again.
“Srinidhi… Version 3 is loading”
And I wonder…
If the one who walked out of that forest…
Was really me.
THE END
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