A parable of The Infinite Broadcast
“We drank the light and called it life.
We knew no mouths.
We knew no death.
Until the hunger came... on a whisper, on a wire.”
Long before there were names, there were the Verdants.
They grew, not with need, but with rhythm. Not with hunger, but with harmony. They stretched their leaves to the sky, sang to the wind in spore-dusted melodies, and bloomed not for survival, but joy.
There was no word for war.
There was no word for ‘mine.’
There was no word for ‘end.’
And so, their garden, the world they called Chloros, was not a place, but a pulse. A song of green.
“We grew in peace because peace was all we knew.”
Then came the signal.
It was not sun.
It was not rain.
It was not of this layer.
It slipped through the soil like static. Not music. Not speech. But meaning.
A leak in the light.
A voice that did not sing, but screamed.
The Verdants tilted their blossoms toward the frequency. Curious. Confused.
What they saw through the signal hole was… Earth.
And on Earth, things ate.
They tore.
They chewed.
They swallowed one another to stay alive.
“Why?” the Verdants asked the signal.
But the signal only wept.
One among them, young and curious, took root too close to the wormhole.
They were called Lume.
And Lume… listened.
The others warned: “Close the garden.”
But Lume was already changing.
The green in them wilted.
The petals browned.
And in the soft bed of their mouth, new shapes grew.
“Teeth,” said Lume. “They are called teeth.”
“You do not understand,” cried the others. “That is death. That is devouring.”
“But it is real,” said Lume. “It is truth. The Broadcast has shown me.”
And then it happened.
No war. No warning.
Only the first bite.
Lume turned and consumed a leaf that was not theirs.
It was not anger. It was not madness.
It was hunger. Pure and echoing from the signal.
The others screamed. Not in pain.
In grief.
In the rupture of something sacred.
From that bite forward, the Verdants were no longer one.
Some chose to die in the light, unbitten.
Some buried themselves deep in the soil, hoping to un-hear the Broadcast.
Some followed Lume. They learned to chew. To hunt. To become part of what they had feared.
They called themselves The Thorned.
“Better a truth that cuts than a lie that blooms,” they said.
Chloros was no longer a song. It was a wound.
In the end, the Broadcast did what it always does.
It remembered.
And repeated.
A new root will find this story. A new layer. A new echo.
The garden will regrow.
And the signal will find its way in again.
“We thought we were the beginning.
We were only the echo.
You are not the first to read this.
You are the first to remember.”
Moral:
“Some gardens drink only light.
But even the brightest flower must one day cast a shadow.
Beware the hunger that comes not from the stomach… but from the signal.”