She has planned this for months, though it has lived within her for generations. It started 28 years ago, mouth sucking on her mother’s milk, eyes searching the world around her. They sat under an elm tree in the garden, her mother’s strong back meeting the silvery ridges of the trunk. In that moment, Aida’s mother saw the dancing leaves and swaying branches reflected in her daughter’s wide, fearless eyes and felt the child’s plump body fill with the tree’s ancient verse. She knew then that Aida had the gift passed down through all women in her family. The gift of hearing the voices of the trees, the sigh of grasses, the hum of the flowing river and the call of the wind. This innate ability to tune into the natural world meant they had always lived in balance, tending the land, knowing how much they could take and what belonged to other beings. Plant, soil, spider, fox, human—a tapestry of coexistence.
By the time Aida pulled herself up for the first time—small hands grasping the elm’s supportive trunk—she already felt the shift. A growing sorrow vibrating from deep within the tree. She would bury her face into the bark, wrapping her arms around its great girth. But nothing could stop the change from coming, not her will and not the women’s gift. The warning signs and crises—war, viruses, natural disaster—hadn’t been enough. Even the science was mostly ignored back then as the world hurtled towards breaking point, the token “sustainability” gestures not nearly enough. As Aida grew, the plants and elements no longer gently whispered when they needed to replenish nor swayed in the breeze to signal they were ready for harvest. By the time she was 15, she heard the wheat scream for nutrients in dead soil and the ocean weep as it began to acidify. And the chokes of her elm tree, now ravaged by hungry beetles, their numbers swollen in the rising heat.
Over the years, many of the women lost their gift, the grief of hearing the lamenting planet too much to bear. Aida tried to unhear it too, moving far from the lush green of her childhood and into the dense grey of the city. She locked herself away in a concrete box, muffling out the natural world. At first, she practised coding as a distraction; she relished the thrill of a string of characters prompting a learned response. Somehow it reminded her of communing with nature—create the right conditions, and it will develop and regenerate on its own. From her self-imposed cell, she typed, creating advanced systems to categorise, interpret and understand.
Even through the concrete and distractions, the wild still spoke to Aida in a stifled murmur, a constant ringing in her ears she was so used to that she sometimes didn’t hear it. But in time, she began to tune in and listen again. And in time, she began to teach her code to listen too. With every cry from the Earth, she worked, writing increasingly complex instructions so her machine could hear what she heard, then waiting for it to learn enough to regurgitate the language of nature into written word. Fragments of a plan emerged as she worked, gradually fusing to become a coherent idea. An idea to share her gift. For what if the ones who pumped the oil and slashed the forests, who burnt the coal and polluted the waters could know the voices of their victims? Would that stop their plundering?
She started testing it on house plants—a wired disk slipped into the soil, the blinking cursor on the screen hesitating before interpreting messages from the plant’s intricate roots. The initial translations were basic, single utterances—“Sun.” “Grow.” “Enough.” As her code advanced, so did the machine’s understanding, and so did the plants’ utterances. “It’s too dark in here.” “I need more space!” She let a philodendron wilt to near death and recorded its screams before reviving it, tears streaming down her face. The machine understood so much now, and she wanted to test its limits in a wilder and vaster ecosystem. She collected samples from the thick, sickly river that weaved through the city. But her machine only identified disjointed messages, half words, the ends of sentences. A sample wasn’t enough; she needed to listen to a whole body. She chose a lake on the edges of the urban sprawl, once a dumping ground for waste and surrounded by monocrops that stripped the earth of nutrients and leached substances into the water, ageing it in fast motion.
Rain pockmarks the lake as Aida lowers the disk into the water. But even without using it, she already hears the lake’s anguish—a terrible rasping from the near-lifeless depths. She remembers her grandmother’s stories about lakes that sang to the million organisms thriving within their flanks. Aida isn’t sure if her machine will function in this expanse, with all its complexities and suffering. This is no house plant or river sample. At first, the machine splutters a few words onto the screen, deletes and blinks. Aida waits. Then suddenly, a flourish of characters. A story that begins thousands of years ago, when melting ice filled deep cavities in the earth and the lakes of the land were formed. A story that tells of bounteous life, of wild and unimaginable swimming creatures now long gone, of flourishing ecosystems where every otter, fish, plant and microorganism sustained one another. And of human life. Of people who once worshipped the lake, who survived out of it so nurtured it and who took only their share of the bounty. Of people that began to change and disconnect from the Earth, taking too much and ignoring the calls of the elements to stop.
A lake’s voice, a machine that learnt to render it and a woman with a tool for change. But would they listen?
This narrative is based on a scenario collectively conceived and developed by core group participants in a Collaborative Foresight cycle. The group's voice was captured and creatively expanded by the writer.
