Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
In an attempt to combat the global deforestation an inventor found a way to restore the earth. The catch? Every single piece of timber, all the processed wood everywhere slowly started living again.
Response:
We call it the House That Jack Built. Giving it that innocuous monicker helped us cope with what happened over the course of the decade, and what it led us to. We thought they’d be the years of rejuvenation, but they weren’t. They were the years of unnatural, mutant growth. Wood of the living dead. Misshapen zombie forests metastasizing out of every former human structure on the planet.
The chemtrail conspiracy theorists were a bit ahead of their time, but wrong on the fundamental points: for one thing, Xylem-28 wasn’t poison, nor designed to mess with the human mind, at least not as far as individuals were concerned. Secondly, it wasn’t a conspiracy when the solution was dusted across the face of the earth by retrofitted jet aircraft. It was planned, approved, executed and observed by all. Jack Bearing, the biochemist who discovered Xylem-28, was televised aboard the inaugural flight, watching proudly as the faint red dust of promised renewal was released over the ashen scar that had been the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
Xylem-28 was supposed to spur and supercharge the development of tree seeds, even ones that were in the earliest cellular stages of development, as these latter were often blown into clear-cuts and other deforested areas in greater numbers than their mature counterparts. Dying trees would likewise have their cells strengthened enough to gradually be restored. The theory was that this would lead to the beginnings of a restoration of the world’s lost forests in just a matter of years, especially if the Xylem-28 solution were sprayed over swaths of land in conjunction with new seeds.
The problem, unbeknownst to Jack Bearing and the approval committees, was that even dry timber and processed wood still contained cells that were viable to be reanimated under the influence of Xylem-28. Once restored, and with only the slightest bit of moisture present, the growth of that wood, like the trees themselves, turned out to be uncontrollable. The division of the cells continued unabated. The world had been dusted with the harbinger of its demise before it became clear what was happening.
Villages and small towns across the world went first. People tried to stay, hacking back the forests that both approached the communities and sprung from within. Every piece of furniture, ever wooden building, every chopstick and rolling pin, every tree growing out of the sidewalk, all of them grew non-stop, exploding outward in all directions. In some cases, when cutting the forests back–as communities were choked to death on wood–the straggling die-hards doused the implacable cancerous growths in gasoline and ignited them. Many burned with the zombie wood, though unlike the zombie wood, there was no life-in-death for them.
Cities went next, in the same way. It took years for them to be swallowed, starting in the suburbs. Mass operations were performed early, when it became clear what was happening, to rid metropolitan centers of every wooden item as quickly as possible. Usually it worked, based on the competency of the populace and government, and sometimes it didn’t. Either way, the mutant forest always pushed in from outside, bulging and grinding across the earth, through buildings, though civilization itself, like a slow tsunami.
Some of us made it to the deserts. Even fewer dug sufficient wells before dehydration killed them. Fewer still, in our scattered tribes, cling to survival as yet. From our village of stone and mud, we can’t yet see the wooden zombie wilderness, but we know it’s only tens of kilometers away. The dryness slows it, but doesn’t halt its process: those twisted roots, like great snakes or burrowing worms, dig into the earth and find aquifers and hidden streams sooner or later.
The seeds, blown on the wind, will reach us first.
Spaceship Earth, it was often called by the conservationists. Our blue and green home, floating through the galaxy.
It’s indeed our home. In fact, it’s now a wooden house.
We live in the House That Jack Built.
