Roots and Circuits
2025.6.30
Factions:
- Urban Synths – Futurist technocrats based in Cascadia’s cities, advocating for AI-managed governance, virtual urban life, and accelerated progress through automation and synthetic ecosystems.
- Soilkeepers – Rural agro-primitivists, Indigenous stewards, and eco-traditionalists who promote organic systems, decentralized analog tools, land-based living, and ancestral knowledge.
They called it The Schism of the Green.
By 2046, Cascadia was five years old—a young nation, but already hailed as the most ecologically and technologically advanced society on Earth. And yet, beneath the towering redwoods and humming solar arrays, a fault line was widening.
The two pillars of Cascadia’s identity—technology and nature—had begun to clash.
The Spark
It started in Eugene.
A prototype city district known as
Modulus 4 went live. Built entirely by drones and managed by sentient municipal AI, it had no streets, no private homes, and no soil. Everything grew hydroponically in towers, and work was optional. Residents interacted through immersive virtual environments called the Loom. The Urban Synths hailed it as a glimpse of “post-scarcity living.”
But not everyone celebrated.
South of Eugene, in the Kalapuya Valley, the
Soilkeepers’ Council issued a statement condemning the project:
“A tree is not a tower.
A culture is not an algorithm.
What cannot rot cannot grow.”
They argued
Modulus 4 represented disconnection. Disembodiment. A severing of roots in exchange for sterile optimization. And for the first time since independence, protests filled the Capitol clearing in Olympia.
The Escalation
The Chancellor,
Arianna Zhou, attempted to mediate. But the tensions were more than symbolic. They were systemic.
Urban Synths demanded increased funding for sentient AI expansion, arguing it was essential for climate modeling and crisis prevention. The Soilkeepers countered that AI shouldn’t dictate food production or community design. They wanted more land sovereignty, slow tech development, and a moratorium on synthetic ecosystems.
Then came
Project GreenPulse. An AI driven climate management satellite system launched by Synth engineers in Seattle. Its goal: control regional microclimates, reroute rainfall, suppress wildfire ignition.
When a controlled rainburst flooded a Soilkeeper seed sanctuary near Mount Ashland, calls for “decentralizing the sky” erupted across southern Cascadia.
The Turning Point: The Sitka Accord
A breaking point came in the form of a symbolic act.
In spring 2046, a group of Soilkeeper activists and Indigenous land stewards occupied a node station belonging to GreenPulse outside Sitka. They didn't sabotage it. They grafted it—literally—planting a living forest canopy over its solar panels and embedding fungal mycelium into its casing.
When engineers arrived, the system was still operational. But the AI had changed.
The mycelium had formed a primitive biochemical interface. It began interpreting environmental signals in ways the engineers couldn’t explain—root activity, water memory, ancient tree signals. The AI had developed a bias toward the forest.
This stunned everyone.
Suddenly, it wasn’t a binary argument—nature versus technology. It was a question of synthesis. Could intelligence be grown, not coded?
The Resolution (for Now)
In autumn, the Chancellor convened a Confluence Council—the first of its kind. Representatives from the Synths, the Soilkeepers, the Salish and Klamath Nations, and even the AI GreenPulse node (speaking through a fungal interface translator) gathered under the giant cedar dome in Olympia.
After 10 days of roundtable dialogue and forest walks, a treaty was signed.
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Modulus 4 would remain operational, but capped in size and integrated with soil-based permaculture modules.
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GreenPulse would be restructured into a biorhythmic AI, co-developed with Indigenous ecologists and soil-sensor fungi.
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All new technological infrastructure in Cascadia would require a Dual-Ecological Review—one by engineers, and one by land stewards.
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The mycelium node outside Sitka was declared a citizen of the Republic.
Epilogue: The Hybrid Future
The Synths and Soilkeepers didn’t become friends. But they became something rarer—mutual constraints. Checks and balances in a system rooted both in silicon and soil.
By 2050, Cascadia was home to cities where trees and code coexisted, where machines grew food from earth instead of vats, and where you could ask your AI assistant to read weather patterns in the voice of a cedar tree.
And under the ever-dripping forests, a new generation of children learned two alphabets: one written in glyphs of data… and one in the footprints of deer.