The day when the trees committed suicide
On the day when all the forests of the world started to burn, men did not have the time to understand what was really going on. It was certainly an side-effect of their carelessness, their absurd arrogance and their fury to conquer, but it was not a direct consequence. It was a deliberate act of the tree community. It was a collective suicide.
The trees had deliberated in secret for a year, following two events. The first was a bizarre message of condolence from extraterrestrial beings crossing the solar system. It had warned living beings on earth of their imminent death, which trees had already understood, by observing their irrational and irresponsible behavior. The second was the news that had shocked the entire tree community : a senile olive tree had written a letter to humans in a style so demanding and annoying that the humans had immediately destroyed it.
There was no apparent connection between these two events, except their strangeness. To the trees, everything was connected and sometimes their reaction was difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Thus they took the stunning decision to bring death to their species, and through their suicide, to trigger the death of all life on earth, as it had been for half a billion years. They judged that it had to be finished, it and that it was up to them to do it. By doing so, they would leave no chance of survival to humans, and especially to the very small number of individuals who, knowingly, were leading their species and the entire biosphere to disaster, in an attempt to save their own lives.
This on December 25, all the forests of the world, all the isolated trees in the fields or in the cities, all the groves, spontaneously combusted simultaneously. In a few hours, the whole atmosphere was lit up in an orange-red glow. Everything living in the air, on the earth and underground was asphyxiated. A week later, all life in the oceans died out. The sky was black with soot and it was the start of a very long night.
Among the very last survivors was a handful of humans, well-groomed, greasy and dazed, buried in concrete shelters a hundred meters underground. They had the most powerful weapons to kill their enemy, the most sophisticated electronic instruments to communicate with each other, they had food to hold off a siege for a year. But it did not take more than a month for them to kill each other, rape the wives of their neighbours and slaughter their children. Of humanity, of the kingdom of animals, insects, bacteria and plants, of the era of paradise when trees had cultivated the earth to make it fertile for half a billion years, there was nothing left. The trees had hoped that from the ashes would be born another, better life. There were so many billions of years left. For trees, each year is a new chance to live.
