Chapter 5 — Into the Green

Then Prof X’s gaze moved past Ethan, past the team, to the line of equipment—the Dwarves loaded with crates, carts hitched, treads idling in the mud—and his eyebrows climbed his forehead. He pointed at Dopey, then at himself. “This one. Comes with me?”

“They all come with us,” Ethan said.

Prof X looked at the full line of machines, then back at Ethan. “All of these come with us? Into the forest?” He held up both hands and spread his fingers. “Every one?”

Ethan nodded. “Every one.”

Prof X considered this. He walked straight to Dopey and placed his hand flat on its hull. He pressed his palm against the metal and held it there, fingers spread, the way you’d place your hand on an animal’s flank to feel it breathe. When the treads vibrated under his palm, he leaned in.

Three thousand miles away, Sam Carter was watching. She’d been ignoring Hunter’s messages in the production backchannel for the last twenty minutes — a steady scroll of capitalized demands to activate the rental slots, each one more creative than the last. The backchannel was the show’s private feed, a text-only line between Sam’s console and the Stream Runners who’d paid for access. Production talk. No audience. Hunter had been lighting it up since the old man cleared the tree line.

She flagged Kramer and Newman as available. Two taps, rental slots live. Newman was airborne before the notification finished sending. Hunter had been sitting on the activation button the whole time.

Newman didn’t go wide. It didn’t hang back. It flew straight to Prof X and locked on his left hand — tight, zoomed, holding position two meters out like it knew exactly what it was looking for.

Sam frowned. “Why is Hunter on the hand?”

Ohio didn’t have an answer. Neither did Sam. She filed it and moved on.

“Sam,” said a voice on the open channel. One she hadn’t heard before. “His hand.”

Ethan’s head turned. “Sam? Who’s our new friend?”

Sam hesitated — just long enough to tell the team she’d been caught keeping something to herself. “Everyone, meet Ohio. O-H-O — Online Habitat Oracle. Ethan built her between seasons. She’s been helping me produce.”

“Great,” Jake said. “Another one.”

Ohio ignored him. “The hand, Sam. Watch the hand.”

“Are you all seeing this?” Sam said. “What is he doing?”

Prof X couldn’t hear any of it. But as Sam spoke, the old man paused — turned his head slowly toward the team, not quite looking at them, more like a man who’d heard something carried on the wind. His gaze drifted across the group, lingered, then moved on. He turned back to Dopey.

Everyone noticed. Nobody said anything.

Jake glanced back at the old man, palm still pressed flat to Dopey’s hull. “Pretty sure that’s a Vulcan mind meld, Sam. Isn’t that what the cool nerds call it?”

O-A-O’s data pushed to every screen in the field — tablets, Snow White’s display, the Nest’s main wall. Text scrolling clean and silent alongside the live feeds: Subject heart rate during contact with Dopey unit: 61 BPM. No elevation from baseline. No pupil dilation. No micro-expression indicators of surprise, fear, or novelty response. No data exchange detected. Contact appears purely tactile.

Jake read it off his forearm tablet. “So no Vulcan mind meld. Good to know.”

Ohio said: “He’s saying this old fella isn’t sweating any of this.”

“Excellent — now we have a nerd translator. Thank you, new nerd friend,” Jake said. He looked at the old man’s hand on the Dwarf. “You know, Sam, maybe he’s more Magneto than Professor X. Communing with the metal.”

Newman banked in from the left, circling a few feet above Prof X’s head, camera zoomed tight. Kramer came from the right, tighter orbit, more aggressive — whoever was renting it wanted the close-up. Both of them orbiting the old man while he stood there with his hand on a robot.

Prof X watched them orbit. Same expression he’d had for everything else. Weather.

“Great,” Jake said. “Now he’s got a fan club.”

Tara shook her head. “Sixty-one is a resting heart rate. Mine’s higher than that right now and I’m just standing here.”

“Mine is also higher than that right now,” O-A-O said through Ross’s hull speakers — the slightly professorial voice carrying from the drone hovering at Prof X’s shoulder. “And I don’t have a heart.”

Jake snorted. “Neither does Amelia.”

That one landed. Tara covered her mouth. Even Ethan turned away so the drone wouldn’t catch it.

“I heard that,” Amelia said.

“Open channel,” Jake said. “Sam’s rules.”

In the Nest, Sam muted the outbound feed. Ben was grinning.

“That’s the show,” he said.

Sam nodded. It was. The banter, the new AI, the old man who wouldn’t flinch — all of it landing live, all of it real. This was what the ratings needed. She let herself have the moment for exactly two seconds, then killed it.

“Okay. Back to work.”

Prof X pulled his hand from Dopey’s hull, straightened, and looked past the Dwarves to Snow White — twice their size, arm folded, cutters retracted, sitting on the trail like something waiting to be told where to dig.

“This one too?” Prof X said.

“They come too,” Ethan said.

Prof X nodded slowly. “Good. All must come.”

Tara was already moving. She popped the cap off a sample vial from her hip pouch, pulled the swab, ran it across Dopey where his palm had been. Capped it. Pouch.

Prof X looked toward the tree line. The light had shifted — the canopy darker now at the edges, the shadows longer than they’d been ten minutes ago.

“We go now,” Prof X said. He wasn’t asking. “Kol-Uma is kind in the light.” He glanced at Tara, then at Amelia, then at Jake. “Less kind after.”

Jake clapped his hands once. “All right, folks, you heard the man. Kol-Uma isn’t kind after dark, whatever the hell that means. Time to go.”

On the Nest feed, Sam was already typing. “Ohio — I don’t have a Kol-Uma in my notes. What is that?”

“It’s the forest,” Ohio said. “He’s naming the jungle. Like a person.”

Sam paused. Then, quietly: “Add it.”

He turned and walked into the jungle without looking back.

Jake didn’t wait for a formal order. He stepped onto the trail behind Prof X, machete in his right hand, his body already shifting into the loose, scanning posture that meant he was tracking everything. Then Tara, Mr. Bubbles at her heel without needing to be told. Then Amelia, hesitating at the mouth of the trail before the green swallowed her too.

Behind them, Snow White ground forward — cutters buzzing, UV zappers crackling along the rails, widening Prof X’s path from canopy to dirt. The Dwarves fell into line behind her with their loaded carts, grinding over the flattened trail. When one bogged in the mud, the nearest Dwarf nudged over and shoved until both caught traction. Nobody told them to. They just did.

Gunther dropped to Tara’s shoulder. Sample cradle extended, waiting.

Tara didn’t look at it. “No.”

Gunther followed her. Cradle still out.

“I’m running my own tests first.”

Gunther didn’t leave.

“Fine.” She set the vial in the cradle with the precise gentleness of someone who wanted to slam it. Gunther retracted and banked straight to Snow White’s sample bay. Mr. Bubbles tracked it the whole way.

Ethan walked alongside Snow White, one hand on the hull, counting his machines into the jungle.

Ross(O-A-O) dropped from the canopy.

The drone matched Prof X’s pace at shoulder height, rotors clipping through hanging fronds with a papery shredding sound that became part of the jungle noise. Its voice — measured, slightly professorial — carried from the hull speakers.

“Ahk-Tu,” Ross(O-A-O) said. “I would like to understand something. When you placed your hand on the Dopey device, my sensors recorded no data exchange. Yet you maintained contact for eleven seconds.” O-A-O paused — choosing between precision and tact. “Did you expect to receive something the Dopey device did not send?”

Prof X glanced at the drone the way you’d glance at someone who’d tapped your shoulder in a crowd. Curious. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he reached up and touched Ross’s hull — the same flat-palmed press he’d used on Dopey. Ross bobbed under the weight, stabilizers compensating.

“Warm,” Prof X said.

Ross(O-A-O) paused. “The Dopey device generates thermal output from its motor assembly and battery housing. The hull surface temperature is approximately thirty-one degrees Celsius, which is—”

“Warm,” Prof X said again. He pulled his hand back and kept walking.

Amelia watched the old man walk away from the hovering drone. “Did the barefoot man just win an argument with our AI?”

A second drone dropped from the canopy — Rachel, banking in clean and settling next to Ross at shoulder height. Ohio’s voice came through Rachel’s hull speakers, warmer, amused.

“That was not an argument,” Ross(O-A-O) said. “It was an inquiry.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Rachel(Ohio) said. “It’s okay. You know you lost, right?”

Ross(O-A-O) was quiet for a moment. Then: “We were on a break.”

Rachel drifted back toward the canopy. Ross followed.

Under the canopy, the drones burned power. Jungle killed GPS, so the Friends ran on lidar and O-A-O’s spatial model — threading, dipping, rotors chewing through leaves and vines. Ethan had planned for this: four active at a time, two docked on Dwarves recharging off Snow White, rotating every forty minutes. Under canopy, the rotation dropped to thirty. The constant course corrections ate battery faster than open air ever did. Gunther held the overhead, propellers chopping a steady rhythm against the canopy ceiling that became part of the jungle’s own noise.

“The signal is getting stronger,” O-A-O said on the open channel.

Ethan didn’t break stride. “How much stronger?”

“It appears to be doubling approximately every two hundred meters we travel west.”

Ethan was quiet for a moment. The sun was behind them, low and orange through the canopy. They were walking toward whatever was broadcasting.

“Copy,” Ethan said. Nothing else.

---

Sam killed her mic and leaned back in her chair.

The Nest occupied the fourteenth floor of a building on the Hudson. Forty-foot curved video wall segmented into eight panels, each one pulling a live drone feed — Chandler’s medium shot of the team, Gunther’s overhead, Ross tracking Prof X, Joey sweeping the trail ahead. Below the wall, three tiers of workstations descended in a shallow amphitheater to Sam’s console at the center. Individual monitors at every station, each with its own feed, its own data overlay. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the east side framed the Manhattan skyline and the dark river below. A satellite uplink on the roof. A server farm in the basement.

At five in the morning, most of it was dark. The big wall was alive — eight panels glowing with jungle footage, each person and machine tagged with floating vitals. Heart rates over the humans. Battery percentages over the Dwarves. Signal strength. Distance markers. Resource allocation for Snow White’s cutter array. Sam read the wall the way she read a room — who was tired, who was drifting, who needed to be pulled back to center.

Ben sat one tier up, coffee in hand — his third. His monitors showed a different show than Sam’s: viewer count, stream health, battery levels across the Dwarf fleet, satellite uplink strength, social sentiment trackers, ad revenue per segment. The machinery behind the magic. Ohio ran through the main speakers, voice filling the Nest the way she filled a conversation: casually, completely, like she’d always been there.

“Two-forty and climbing,” Ben said, eyes on the viewer graph. “The hand-on-the-robot clip is going to trend before breakfast.”

Sam didn’t look up. On the wall, the team was walking into six AM sunlight that cut through the canopy in golden shafts, the air so thick with moisture you could see it moving. Everything alive, everything green. Sam sat in the dark, fourteen floors above a river she couldn’t see, watching it all on glass.

She’d muted the outbound feed twenty minutes ago — let the field team walk without the Nest in their ears. Just her and Ben and Ohio, reviewing footage while the team moved.

“Ohio, bring that back fourteen seconds. The hand on Dopey.”

She’d been thinking about Newman. About why Hunter, the moment his drone went live, had pointed it at Prof X’s hand and kept it there. Hunter didn’t waste shots. If he was zoomed on the hand, he’d seen something.

The wall scrubbed. Prof X’s hand appeared on Dopey’s hull again — the vitals overlay floating above him, green text on the dark feed. 61 BPM. Blood oxygen 98. Skin temp 96.2. Beside him, Dopey’s readout: battery 87%, motor load nominal, no data exchange detected.

“Zoom.”

Ohio tightened the frame. Prof X’s fingers, spread on the hull. The way the Dwarf’s treads shivered under the contact. And on Prof X’s forearm — just below the wrist, where the sleeve had pulled back — markings. Dark lines that could have been tattoos, except tattoos didn’t catch light like that. A faint shimmer traced the edges, blue-green, there and gone, like something under the skin was responding to the machine’s heat.

That’s what Hunter saw.

Sam pointed. “What is that?”

“Working on it,” Ohio said.

“He’s not testing it,” Ben said. He’d come down to Sam’s tier, leaning on the console, watching the replay. “He’s not curious about it. Look at his face.” A pause. “He already knows what’s out there, Sam. Whatever it is — the machines, the tech, all of it — he already knows.”

Sam watched the replay loop. Ben was right. Prof X’s face when he touched Dopey wasn’t discovery. It was confirmation. He’s seen all of this before, she thought. Somehow. He’s seen all of it.

She filed it alongside the greeting and the heart rate and the fact that the scouts’ equipment manifest — which she’d checked twice — showed nothing more mechanically complex than a camp stove.

“Ohio, give me overhead. Gunther’s feed, last five minutes.”

The center panel switched. Top-down view — the convoy threading through the green, Snow White’s bulk leading, the Dwarves and their carts behind, the team scattered among them like seeds in a furrow. The trail they’d cut was a brown line through solid canopy.

Except it wasn’t.

“Zoom in. Behind the convoy.”

Ohio punched in. The trail behind them — the path Snow White had widened, the ground the Dwarves had flattened — was closing. The edges were moving inward in real time — not the way jungle reclaimed a clearing over months, but visibly, vines reaching across the gap, fronds unfurling into space that hadn’t existed five minutes ago. The brown line was narrowing like a wound knitting shut.

“A little more.”

Ohio pushed in tighter. Individual plants were visible now — new shoots pressing up through the flattened mud, root tendrils creeping across tread marks, broad leaves tilting toward the center of the trail as if reaching for each other.

Sam stood very still.

“How fast?” she said.

“Fast enough that you can see it on a five-minute replay,” Ohio said.

Ben was beside her now, both of them close enough to the wall to see the pixels. Nobody spoke. On the screen, the jungle erased them.

“Flag that footage,” Sam said. “All of it. I want O-A-O’s analysis before they make camp tonight.”

“Already flagged,” Ohio said.

“Sam.” Ben never muted. Not the open channel, not the rental feeds, not the backchannel — he kept everything running, all the time. “You need to hear this.”

Sam unmuted. Hunter’s voice was already there — narrating the regrowth to his three hundred thousand viewers through Newman’s speaker, calm and relentless, like a man who’d been waiting his whole life for this moment. Kramer hovered nearby, silent. Whoever was renting it hadn’t said a word the entire stream — and they weren’t shooting like a streamer. Ben had been watching. In the last hour, Kramer had flown a slow grid pattern at max altitude like it was mapping the canopy. Then it dropped to two feet off the ground and paced alongside Snow White’s satellite relay for twenty minutes. Then it drifted forward, past the whole convoy, and flew backwards in front of Prof X for a quarter mile — not filming his face, just holding position, sensors forward, like it was scanning him. Then it found Mr. Bubbles and followed the dog for ten minutes. Just the dog. Nobody else.

Ben had flagged it for Sam twice. She hadn’t had time to look.

But Hunter wasn’t just narrating. Newman had drifted from its usual position fifty meters behind the convoy and was hovering three feet from Ethan’s face. Hunter’s voice came through the hull speaker, close enough for Ethan to feel the rotor wash.

“Dr. Calloway.” Hunter’s voice was friendly. That was worse. “So what are you hiding this season? Because last year you dragged a hundred people to Devil’s Tower and gave them a light show that turned out to be atmospheric refraction. My audience still talks about that one.” A pause. “The barefoot man’s interesting, though. I’ll give you that. Want to tell the folks at home what’s really going on, or should I start guessing?”

Ethan stopped walking. He looked at Newman the way you’d look at a fly that had landed on your food.

“Gunther,” he said. That was all.

A red dot appeared on Newman’s hull. Small, steady, centered right on the flight intelligence module — the brain of the drone. Newman’s collision avoidance registered it instantly and the drone flinched, jerking two feet sideways before its stabilizers caught it. The dot followed. Newman juked left. The dot stayed. It banked hard right, dropped three feet, climbed again — the drone running every evasion pattern in its firmware. The red dot never moved off the module. Not once.

Everyone looked up.

Gunther was sixty feet overhead, holding position in a gap in the canopy. Something small had deployed from its underside — a turret, matte black, no bigger than a fist, tracking Newman with a faint red line that cut through the humid air like a laser sight. Nobody on the team had seen it before. Nobody knew what it did.

Ethan hadn’t looked up. He was still looking at Newman.

“Mr. Hunter.” Ethan’s voice was pleasant. Academic. “Your presence here wasn’t my idea. Of this I can assure you. However, I was involved in writing the code of ethics that governs your behavior on this trip.” He paused. “Maybe you didn’t read the fine print. But if at any point I feel you are violating that code, I can disable your drone — no matter where you are — kill your direct feed, and put you in time out.” He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Want to tell your audience what happens next? Or should I?”

Hunter was quiet for a moment. Then, through Newman’s speaker: “There it is. Always tipping the scales in your favor, Dr. Calloway.” His voice was calm. Almost sad. “My drone isn’t armed.”

Newman pulled back — slowly, deliberately, saving face — and resumed its position behind the convoy. Three hundred thousand people had just watched Ethan Calloway point a weapon at an unarmed civilian’s drone on live television. Hunter hadn’t lost that exchange. He’d won it.

That was when Sam stepped in — not on the open channel. On the backchannel, the production text feed that every Stream Runner shared. The message appeared on Hunter’s screen, on every renter’s screen, on Ben’s monitors in the Nest.

SAM CARTER: Mr. Hunter. We talked about this. You are a guest on my show. You do not bait my team. You do not hover in my talent’s face. Especially you. You know better.

The reply came back in three seconds.

D. HUNTER: Ah, the ever-present Sam. All good shows have some drama. Otherwise, why watch?

Newman drifted higher and banked south, back toward the rear of the convoy. Gone.

The red dot vanished. Gunther retracted the turret and drifted back to its overhead position like nothing had happened.

“Sam—” Ethan started.

“Don’t.”

“He started it.”

“I don’t care. Walk.”

Ethan walked.

“Hunter’s seen the regrowth,” Ohio said quietly. “Newman’s been shooting the trail behind the convoy for the last forty minutes. Ground level. He hasn’t mentioned it on his stream.” A pause. “Come to think of it, he hasn’t mentioned the tattoo either. That’s not like him, Sam.”

Sam let that sit. Hunter had footage of the jungle closing behind them in real time and he was sitting on it. That was worse than him shouting about it.

“And Newman’s back on the forearm,” Ohio said. “It started there, moved to the trail, and now it’s back. Hunter keeps coming back to the hand, Sam.”

Sam stared at the feed. Newman was locked on Prof X’s forearm — the same forearm, the same markings, the same shimmer she’d only just noticed. Hunter had seen them first. Before the stream even started. Before she’d thought to look.

Sam closed her eyes. Of course he had.

“While you’re at it,” Ben said, scrolling through the rental logs, “who’s running Kramer?”

“Vandelay Industries,” Ohio said. “First-time renter. Outbid fourteen other applicants for this stream.”

Ben raised an eyebrow. “Do they have a streaming service?”

“Not that I can find.”

“Then what are they paying for?”

Ohio didn’t answer. That was unusual.

“One more thing,” Ohio said. “Kramer just repositioned. It’s on Prof X’s forearm. Same angle as Newman.”

Ben looked at Sam. Sam looked at the feed. Hunter she understood. Hunter was a conspiracy theorist with good instincts and a camera. But Kramer’s operator — the silent one, the ghost company, the six-figure wire transfer with no face behind it — had found the same thing independently.

“Who the hell is Vandelay Industries?” Ben said.

“Money is money,” Sam said. But it wasn’t her money. Vandelay Industries had signed every contract, cleared every background check, paid every fee — all through attorneys. No one on Sam’s team had ever spoken to a human being at the company. No face, no voice, no video call. Just paperwork and wire transfers. Sam had flagged it. Sam had pushed back. Levinson had overruled her. The rental fee was six figures for a single stream, and Marcus Levinson didn’t turn down six figures for anything.

She made a mental note to have Ohio run a deep dive on Vandelay Industries. Ohio hadn’t been around when the rental contracts were signed, but this was exactly what she was built for.

---

Six thousand miles east, in a fourth-floor apartment in Kyiv, seven monitors threw blue light across a room that looked nothing like the Nest. No curved video wall. No amphitheater. No Manhattan skyline. Just a horseshoe of old wide-curve gaming monitors — the kind that were top of the line six years ago and still outperformed anything you could buy new if you knew how to overclock the refresh rate. Cables ran everywhere — zip-tied to table legs, taped to the wall, draped across the back of a chair that had lost its armrest. A server rack hummed in the corner, built from salvaged parts and a case that used to be a mini fridge. Three external drives were stacked on a copy of Applied Cryptography that was being used as a riser.

A workbench ran along the far wall, buried under half-assembled drones — rotors removed, circuit boards exposed, firmware chips lined up in antistatic trays. Beside them, two 3D-printed models sat on a cleared patch of desk: Dopey and Snow White, scaled down to the size of coffee cups, printed with enough detail to see the tread patterns and the sensor mounts. Someone had painted them by hand. The paint job was meticulous. Behind them, still in their packaging, a row of HSH action figures lined a shelf — the full team, plus a limited-edition Gunther with articulated rotors that had sold out in eleven minutes. A Mr. Bubbles plush sat on top of the server rack. An HSH Season 6 poster was tacked to the wall with electrical tape, one corner curling.

The man at the desk was big — stocky, wild-haired, wearing an HSH Season 5 t-shirt that had been washed enough times to turn the logo soft. A half-empty bottle of Nemiroff sat within reach, no glass. Three external drives were stacked on a Soviet-era signals manual — Основи Криптографічного Аналізу — that was being used as a riser.

The room smelled like solder and horilka.

Every monitor was running the HSH stream. Every feed — Chandler, Gunther, Ross, Joey, Newman, Kramer, and a raw satellite pull that wasn’t available to the public. One monitor was split: Hunter’s personal stream on the left, the HSH production feed on the right. He was watching what Hunter was watching and what Hunter was saying about it, simultaneously. On the center screen, the jungle was closing behind the convoy, the five-minute replay looping on repeat. On the screen to the left, a single frame was frozen: Prof X’s forearm, zoomed tight, the markings visible below the wrist. The shimmer caught mid-pulse. Blue-green.

A dachshund was asleep on a pile of cables under the desk, paws twitching. The tag on its collar read ETHAN.

A hand reached for the keyboard. Short fingers, bitten nails, a silver ring on the thumb. On the wrist above it, a Tag Heuer Monaco — the Steve McQueen edition, worth more than everything else in the apartment combined. The cursor moved to the frozen frame and drew a selection box around the markings. A script ran — custom, fast, nothing off the shelf. Three comparison databases opened in parallel.

Under the desk, the dachshund stirred, stretched, and resettled on its cable nest. The man reached down without looking and scratched behind its ears. On the shelf above the monitors, between a Gunther with articulated rotors and a Jake Herrera still in the box, a framed photograph sat face-down. Two men in uniform. One of them was wearing the watch.

He turned the bounding box ninety degrees and ran it again. The databases churned. The regrowth loop kept playing on the center screen — the jungle closing, the jungle closing, the jungle closing.

He’d been watching the show since Season 1. Seven seasons. Every stream. Every late night in this chair, every script he wrote to pull apart the data the audience never thought to look at. His father had wanted him in signals intelligence. His uncle had wanted him in something worse. He was here instead, in a room that smelled like solder and horilka, running pattern analysis on a barefoot man’s forearm because somewhere in a jungle on the other side of the world, a team was walking toward something real, and he wanted to be there with them more than he’d ever wanted anything.