Now

Allowed only those senses which enabled its labor, the malus drone’s world was one of touch and smell. The scent of spring-warm tree bark, the movement of air through branches, spoke of obstacles. The aroma of each blossom on the tree guided its gnarled hands as if by beacon. It felt a fellow drone brush past, the familiar rustle of the leaves on their shoulders, the scent of encouragement it radiated. It tried to take comfort in the companionship. Comfort was hard to find in the greenhouses.

The pheromones of the trees were a map to its task. It could smell which of the thousands of blossoms on each tree would produce the strongest drones of the next generation, and, obeying its programming, fertilized only the hundred-best. By now the effort of climbing to reach the highest blossoms exhausted it. The old drone had lived through two growing seasons; this was its third, and last. Its head, wrapped around with red apple-skin, weighed heavy on its two-foot frame. Its tiny heart pumped sap, but weakly now. The splintering wood of its fingers, the bruised flesh of its blind, mute head, bent to the task by rote. It inserted a swab in each five-petaled bloom, rotated it twice around the stigma and withdrew before moving onto the next.

The scent of pollination awoke in it some ancient feeling it had no words to name. It walked from the new-pollinated grove to one already set with the fruit of infant drones. It could not see them, but it could smell the malus babies, their petals just dropped, stigmas coiling into the beginnings of limbs. It had no mouth to sigh at their fate.

 In each new drone wound the code of its predetermined tasks. They’d been engineered with enough human DNA to walk and lift, and enough malus DNA to sense the pheromones of every individual plant. They could taste the difference between one cornstalk and its neighbor on the wind. They could smell disease and pests, blossoming and ripening. They could sense when their brethren were near, and pass chemical words to them, silent whispers of greeting and grieving and longing for wildness. Malus drones had been chosen from wild stock. Orchard apples, with millennia of domesticity in them, no longer had the sense of smell for greenhouse work. But crabapples, never tamed, remained sensitive to the rich chemical language of plant life in the air. They could be bioengineered for labor, but no human hand could reach into their genetic code and excise their pining for the forest.

As days and nights of endless toil wore on into autumn, the smell in the greenhouse changed. The newborn drones grew too heavy for their stems and dropped from the trees onto wobbly legs. By the time they could walk a straight line, they were working. The aged drone smelled them go, exhausted for them. By now its feet had frayed out of their bark, the wood splintering, dripping its life’s sap onto the ground with each step. The scattering of leaves which had once grown on its shoulders had fallen off for the last time, and it had no strength left to regrow them. The fruit flesh around its brain began to soften and then rot. And still, it was bound to its ceaseless work in the greenhouse.

One morning the drone smelled metal and old gore in the air. Some programmed urge walked its tired feet into a line of failing drones that marched slowly forward into a cloud of horror. It could not see the machine, but it could sense the vibrations of the chipper, the scent of fear emanating from the weary drones around it. A human worker passed the line, with a wheelbarrow full of fresh wood chips and rotten fruit. The pulped bodies of the elder drones, mulch to lay at the feet of the next generation. Where the human smelled only the ripe sourness of juice, the malus drone smelled screams.

It raised its bruised head at the scent of death. Its programming told it to wait in line, but there was some older urge, some instinctive fear that, if listened to, would allow it to escape. It broke from the line, falling to its knees with the unfamiliar disobedience. On splintered limbs it crawled and dragged itself through the dense growth of the greenhouses, to the smell of fresh air. Away at last from the pheromones of death, it scented the wind and wandered, sight-blind, to the wild-lush fragrance of the woods.

And behind it, more followed. At first only a few, then a half-dozen, then a small herd, tracing the pheromone trail of the drones who had escaped before. In the deep forest, under centuries-old trees, they lay down to rot together in the comfort of the loam. They huddled close, finding solace in their last days from the touch of their kin and the smell of the wilderness. They would die, but first, for the only time in their lives, they would rest.

Winter passed, and the magic of freeze and thaw, rot and insect, worked their seeds free from the protective cores safe in their heads. Their feral seeds buried deep in the mulch of their bodies, took root, and grew strong.

In the wild woods, beneath the shade of old oaks, a grove of crab apple trees grew.

For quiet years the loam nursed the restless saplings. Until –

Their limbs stretched. Their roots twisted.

They shook themselves loose from the soil and walked free under the dusk of the trees.

They slept in beds of rich moss, drank sweet rainwater that dripped from ancient vines.

They pollinated whichever blossoms smelled sweetest to them, and grew children tenderly on heavy boughs.

The woods filled with the scent of their language, a silent song of wildness.

__________

Katharine Tyndall (she/her) grew up on an old farm in Wisconsin, USA, and moved to Germany over a decade ago. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’s, Nightmare, the upcoming anthology ECO24: Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, and many others. She is a 2025 finalist for the Grist Imagine 2200 climate fiction prize, and is currently working on her first novel with the Granta Writer’s Workshop. She lives in Berlin with her partner and their forest of plants.