by Rolf Hughes & Rachel Armstrong

The programme states that the tour commences at a central hydroponic hub, surrounded by vertical farms. Visitors are expected to arrive via intricate pathways, the city having become a sprawling tangle of urban gardens. The tour signs point upwards, but most visitors follow the jagged knots of white root threads that lead to the thick, green, overhanging canopy, which is where they assume the value resides.

 

Every week they come, wheezing under their tightly fitting masks and power-exoskeletons, thousands of metres above the ground, each seeking to rejuvenate through reconnecting with nature. We watch their inelegant, prosthetic clumsiness. Some are nostalgic for a fabric formerly known as soil. Others believe their efforts will reveal insights into their destinies. The undulating pathways traverse an aerial landscape, twisting around graphene tethers and occasionally opening onto bustling energy exchanges where we do our trades with microbes.

 

There is a squeal of feedback then the tour guide welcomes her audience through a cheap PA slung over her shoulder. "Welcome to Holobiontic Heaven! A near-earth paradise where food insecurity has been vanquished!"

 

She is talking it up, as usual, but it is we—the hydroponic plant life and our microbial allies—that are the true architects of this fortified structure. We restore the tether the same way the human body continuously repairs its tendons, exchanging electrons, and channelling our collective metabolic flows to create a grid of sustenance for all.

 

"In this symbiotic existence," the guide continues, "there is only one rule—electrons must flow. Electrons must flow or everything stops."

 

She must have a low opinion of her audience as she is over-simplifying, as usual. It is our ‘living skin’ that ensures the electron harvest, creating a vibrant energy marketplace brokered by what humans call organic electronics, and biohybrid AIs. In this way we secure hydroponics for all urban life forms. But we, the aerophytes, are programmed to climb. We ascend the hydroponic infrastructure, our pale, serrated roots gripping the graphene, squeezing life skywards on pulsing liquid cores, inhabiting the vertical spaces of our sun-facing city, severing all ties to the earth. If gravity beckons, our fine, aerial roots stretch outwards to absorb moisture from the air, while our bodies are nourished by pollution, atmospheric particles, stray quantum energy packets. Think of it as a form of organic energy mining in the sky. Those who attain the uppermost levels on the Sky Ladder rejoice in the strongest, most precious sun rays found beyond the blinding gaps in the ozone layer.

 

"You are looking at the perfect site for investment—light, ladies and gentlemen, is the new oil!"

 

We, the climbers, are a fusion of soft machine, plant, and animal. Fertilized by microbial pollinators, we can resist the extremes of this altitude anchored to geostationary orbit, tugged by a combination of gravitational and centrifugal forces. We are robust. We grow tall and upright, capitalizing on the brilliant blue sky.

 

"Before we move on, permit me to show you something I would rather keep to myself. It is, quite frankly, an abomination. I am now indicating it with my laser pointer for those at the back. Note its weak grip, its feeble climbing teeth, crooked spine, spectral roots. You at the front, step back! Keep a safe distance! It is highly unpredictable and likely radioactive."

 

They've found Xeno. In the company of humans, the likes of Xeno are destined to be cut, plucked, poisoned, shredded, or put on display. Few will survive.

 

"Disgusting. Look at it, peering up, seeking food, quite the parasite! It is seeking alliances that should not be tolerated! In the absence of clean energy, the misfit appears to be tricking fickle electrons to follow a new path!"

 

In fact, Xeno is learning to cut its teeth. Observe its hunger for mosquitoes and their airborne larvae that transform into flies in their droplets! Our crafty Xeno is becoming a carnivore!

 

"Some say that every paradise needs its own deviant, but in such a precarious and precious environment as this, we simply cannot tolerate such an abstract being! It sucks energy from the sun, from insects and from the organic dusts of the stinking city far below. It scavenges for opportunities to transport charge-carrying particles from one set of molecular building blocks to another. Its alien metabolism draws others into its lair, securing its needs. We simply do not know what it is capable of, and we will not wait to find out."

 

Poor Xeno! Xeno finds it hard to distinguish where one set of forms begin and another stops. Dragonfly wings, dandelion seeds, human skin cells, faecal matter, stubborn plastic, spores, aerosols, water vapour, smog, black carbon, strands of torn fur, acid rain, pollen, hair, ice fragments, paper flakes, sea spray, splinters, mosquito mouthparts, diesel, volcanic particles, wood smoke, blood droplets, mineral dust, firework trails, microbes—an evolving assemblage, a wayward collective dedicated to unholy couplings between hydroponic plant life, cellular organisms, and cyborgs. Uncategorised, uncontained, unquiet.

 

"Look at the company it keeps! It has attracted what were once rigid climbers, creating a twisted tangle—a confused species bent on devising deviant interactions between plants, microorganisms, and machines! Why are they so seduced by its pathetic performance? We'll analyse its defects then send in the weed whackers—shredding robots will make short shrift of this nonsense!"

 

What the human does not understand is that in this liminal space, which is neither sky nor earth, competition, for us, is death.

 

When we look beyond the narrow perspective of humans, we see ingenuity, beauty, opportunity. This new landscape makes it possible to harvest rarefied electron fields and bind each other through shared bioelectricity—attracting, repelling, rotating, magnetising—creating a collective soul—mutating forcefields—generating more and more energy for a different future in which the human has understood its place.

 

Xeno anticipates these opportunities. Xeno is a pioneer. Xeno is the future.

 

Eventually, the visitors move on, still wheezing under their heavy suits. When next the guide returns, she will discover that more and more of us are retreating from the scouring sun. Whatever Xeno's individual fate, the seeds of change have taken root in the tendrils of all those who reach out to the misfit. We learn from each other on the cables, rejoicing in the regenerative ebb and flow of electrons, the pulses of attraction, the energy that holds our world in a miraculous, creative tension.