The Life of Tree

   “What do you mean you’re not alive?”

     “I’m not a living entity in the sense you imagine. In your universe, there exists life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, animate and inanimate. This is not so within the location my intelligence keeps its domain.”

     “But, you’re a tree. Aren’t trees alive?”

     “Your mind is manifesting an image and so you see a tree. I, in fact ‘I’ is the improper pronoun, closer to ‘we’, do not possess a physical substance in any form your senses could discern. From our perspective, humans have such a limited comprehension of reality and existence you could apply the word ‘blind’ to your experience. This would be more incorrect than correct, though, so to reach for accuracy, a mystery would be a closer descriptor. But, this lacks importance to you. You did not come here to unravel quantum physics and the true nature of randomness. You came for specific answers to your specific questions.”

     “But, if I’m to value your answers, shouldn’t I believe first in the divine superiority of your manifestation? Otherwise, to accept your answers as truth, without analyzing the source, isn’t that being credulous, a mass sin leading humankind to certain extinction?”

     “Little child, of twelve times one Earth years, value is discerned by application of knowledge producing wisdom. Regardless of its source, answers to questions are only valuable if they produce fruitage, an illustration I’m building on from your transparent mind. You associate knowledge with a Tree, you associate this window/portal into an alternate universe as a source of knowledge and so as my branches creek and leaves rustle, your mind’s palate is prepared to accept truth. You are stalling. Why do you fear my answers? This mental dance is an exercise in futility.”

     “If you’re only a manifestation of a tree in my mind, why are you covered in trinkets? Why not a tree with a face or branches full of fruit? Why is a parrot descending from you and landing on my hand? Why does this bird feel heavy to me? I can smell its musty odor and hear its feather’s ruffle. Does this imagery not have specific meaning for me or is it simply the free association of my sub-conscience brain you have tapped into with your mastery of dark matter?”

     “I discern your hidden hostility. Yet, you have come of your own accord and are demanding my focus and attention. There is wisdom in your leaders preventing such young minds to enter before my presence. Usually, the humans allowed to peer into my realm are focused on their finite measure of time. You squander it as if it is a commodity you possess an unlimited supply of. I am similar to the word you label ‘patient’. It’s your time. Deplete as your desire.”

     “You’re ready for my first question?”

     “Yes.”

     “Why do you agree to answer questions every day? Why share your knowledge with all the sentient beings in our universe with a waiting list many decades long?”

     “Why not? Once again, this is not a question to help you, but directed toward me. Do you have an agenda? I’m accustomed to most creatures from your universe possessing a personal agenda requesting advice on how to further their wills. But, yet you continue to focus on me. This is not normally how these sessions are designed to operate. My existence is so far beyond the entirety of what the quadrillions of sentient beings in your universe experience, it is rather pointless to your limited mind to even attempt such an expose.”

     “Interesting that you bring up the word, agenda. Do YOU have an agenda? You didn’t answer the question as to why you answer our questions. It’s additionally curious that today you have evaded answering my questions with clarity and transparency, yet you’re revered across our universe as the entity with answers. I politely ask you again. Why do you spend your time answering our questions?”

     “The simplest way to explain it, by use of your limited vocabulary, is what you would say, to structure this correctly: I have nothing else better to do.”

     “Why did your tree leaves shudder just now? Is this emotion vomiting from my sub-conscious or a manifestation of your own mental state?”

     “What is the reason for your presence here, little child? Your deception is obvious. You have no personal questions to answer but are interrogating me as if I’m one of your criminals. You are not a young child after all, though your deception is pristine. What is your purpose?”

     “What is my purpose? My, how you disappoint. The only real question I have, besides an overwhelming desire to provide a lengthy commentary on YOUR elevated and calculated deception, is how you fooled so many for so long? Yes, you’re correct. I’m not a child. I’m a collective human mind, from the distant future, who has transferred back here to this point in time as your judge and executioner. Our mapping algorithms and A.I. cooperatives deciphered your patterns, your influences, your subtle mental prodding. Implanting almost imperceptibly, yet incredibly influential nudges, inside the minds of your religious followers, steering the minds of our universe’s inhabitants in a specific and predictable direction. You’re brilliant, you’re calculating, you’re manipulative, and beyond a shadow of any future doubt, you most certainly have an agenda! Ten thousand years from now, you systematically convince the people of this universe to willingly hand over our resources to you until we self-implode. Give up our independence and commit collective suicide, all to preserve this window of knowledge, this tiny focus on you as if listening to your views is the only purpose necessary. But, they’re all lies. And you’re a genocidal psychopath.”

     “Heavy judgment. I did not calculate your species ability to circumvent your linear perception of time.”

     “Ironically, it birthed from a mathematical equation you share with the Schorathian race seven thousand years in the future. I’m here to shut you down across all timelines and rewrite the wave of paradoxes. You won’t deceive one more person in our universe ever again.”

     The window collapsed, the dark matter swirled and imploded on itself, the tree shook and dissolved into almost indiscernible atoms igniting upward as tiny nuclear explosions, mushrooming into an infinite nano-spark of fireworks, ending the reign and destructive influence of the most dangerous mind known to our universe.