-- *Mar*Of course 🌿 — here’s a short *original story* inspired by the themes of *“Feeling vs Engineering”* — the loss and rediscovery of connection between humans and the living world. ------------------------------ *“The Last Listener”*
In the year 2140, the air was clean but silent. The rivers ran straight and cold, polished by filtration systems that left no scent of moss or memory. Forests still existed—carefully maintained bio-parks—but their trees hummed faintly with embedded sensors, counting the rhythm of their growth. People no longer breathed the world; they filtered it. The sense of smell had become vestigial. Evolution, assisted by medicine and habit, had quietly deleted it. There was no need to smell when all air was pre-approved. Among the many citizens of New City-9 was *Ari*, a young “System Interpreter.” Her work was to monitor the FlowNet, the vast network of machines that balanced air, temperature, and soil chemistry across the planet. Each morning she connected her neural band and watched numbers pulse on the transparent screen—oxygen ratios, rainfall probabilities, heartbeats of forests far away. But sometimes, as the data flowed, she felt something she couldn’t explain—like the ghost of a fragrance, a trace of wet soil or fruit. She dismissed it as a neural glitch. Still, it came again. One evening, while recalibrating an old monitoring station at the edge of the preserved “Wild Zone,” she removed her mask. The rules forbade direct exposure, but she was curious. The air was dense, humid, and strange. She coughed—and then *smelled* something for the first time in her life. It was heavy, alive, impossible to categorize. Her neural band flickered, unable to process. She knelt beside a patch of moss, touched it, and heard—very faintly—a sound. Not from her ears, but through her skin. A vibration, like a heartbeat. That night she couldn’t sleep. The numbers on her screen seemed suddenly hollow. The FlowNet, perfect in its logic, felt like a cage pretending to be a sky. Ari began visiting the Wild Zone secretly. She listened to insects, learned the way leaves folded before rain. She realized that communication didn’t need language—it was pattern, rhythm, attention. Each time she returned, her sensors malfunctioned more often, as if her body were rejecting the filters. One morning, she stopped reporting entirely. The System flagged her as “noncompliant.” Drones were sent, but by the time they reached the Wild Zone, she was gone. Only her neural band remained—cracked open and sprouting a tiny green shoot through the circuitry. Months later, the FlowNet began to fluctuate in unpredictable ways. Weather no longer obeyed the algorithms. Trees spread beyond their assigned boundaries. Flowers bloomed where they weren’t programmed to. The engineers called it “environmental error.” But in the soft wind that passed through the cities, some claimed they could smell something—faint, earthy, and alive. And a few said that if you stood still enough, you could almost hear her— the *Last Listener*—whispering to the world that had begun to feel again. ------------------------------ Would you like me to make this story longer (for example, 2,000 words), or turn it into a short *allegorical fable* or *sci-fi screenplay* format? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHCLfNkRrhkK85etCGRuQW2yccj77q%3DRFYK_XqSRPaKE2Lg%40mail.gmail.com.
