My Bones will Nestle a Seedling Maybe

A forest floor is full of dead wood, littered with dead trees piled like pick-up sticks – slim young trees that never made it to the canopy layer, some that just died in the half-light, others crushed by tall old trees that rotted and tilted and crashed down through them.

A fire will come one day and clear the crackling debris and leave blackened stumps round which pretty flowers grow in the spring.

If I could die like a tree…after the ugly odour of death, life’s last protest, my bones would nestle a seedling maybe. 

“What are you thinking?” says Jamie. 

“I feel a great calm in a forest. If there is life on other planets, let there be no intelligent life. Let there just be forests.….”

Jamie didn’t reply right away, but I felt he was waiting to say something, thinking about how to put it.

After a while he says:  “Maybe the last 10,000 years, the period we call civilisation, are a transition. From the moment we began to accumulate knowledge we have been working towards higher intelligence, an intelligence that does not die.”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” he says. “We have built machines that are getting smarter all the time. Our mental capacity is fixed. Machine capacity is not fixed. One day our machines will become super-intelligent, that is, more intelligent than us.”

“And then?”

“That’s the question…”

Jamie would always take the longer, less frequented trails where there were few other hikers, where we were largely alone in the forest.