Hello, my unfortunate miscreants! You seem to have lost your way... Would you like a story while you orient yourselves?

Alright then. It's called

The Difference between “Cut” and “Copy.”

People don’t often wonder about how a tree might feel. A long time ago, there were actually many humans looking out for us. I should know, I was once a tree hugger myself.

You might be wondering how a tree could be a tree hugger. Or maybe you aren’t. For all I know, you could be thinking up a new recipe for blueberry muffins, or failing to take your mind off an excruciatingly painful root canal you had earlier today. I don’t know, I’m just a storytelling tree.

Anyway, back to the tree’s narrative. I was actually a human at one point, but then plans went awry, as they sometimes do. During one particularly painful encounter with a buzz saw, it occured to me that no one was cutting down humans for firewood. If I could give the trees a chance to speak for themselves, the task of saving the rain forests should finish itself.

On one particularly sunny morning, I lugged a brand-new mind analyzer up a hill where a proud looking oak stood. Or maybe it wasn’t so proud. Perhaps it had unwittingly dropped an acorn on some poor, innocent squirrel, who had then run off in fright before the tree could apologize properly. In any case, with this new technology, you could analyze the minds of people, and manipulate the minds of organisms with lower thought processes than humans.

I had figured that I could copy my mind, and paste it to the tree. With the mind analyzer, I could prove to people that trees are just as intelligent as humans, and that we’d have to find an alternate source of fuel.

After the long and tedious task of hooking up the machine, I licked the final electrode and stuck it to my forehead. I laid out the digital formats for my mind and the tree’s side by side (both which were surprisingly small), selected my thought patterns, cut, moved them over to the tree’s, and hit paste. Then the world turned upside down. I suddenly grew thirty feet taller, and couldn’t move. After a few seconds of panic, I turned my attention downward. A very stupid looking-human was looking around confusedly, and looked upward at me. I tried to signal to it, but it wandered away. After a few days of trying to orient myself, I decided that my experiment had been a partial success; I had given a tree conscious thought, but had, in the process, lost my chance to utilize this achievement.

So that’s how I cut and pasted myself to a tree. I have a nice little hill all to myself now, and every once in a while, something exciting happens. A few years ago, a pebble rolled down my hill. But other than the miniscule landslides, it’s pretty dull up here.

So here’s the moral of the story: Be careful not to hit “cut” instead of “copy”. Things could wind up very different from what you plan if you do.

Copyright me, 2005.