Under a Sky of Branches and Leaves

amart29 (68)in #esteem • 5 years ago

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Under a Sky of Branches and Leaves

The rugged landscape of Susanoo's jungle unfolded in front of her eyes, flew low in a personal airslide, a sort of ten-metre wing, which twisted, extended and folded, depending on wind conditions, all automatically guided by an AI algorithm, which was instructed by the neural interface of the standing pilot on a platform in the middle of both wings, held in place by safety harnesses.

Veronica descended and flew over the tops of trees more than seventy metres high in the dense jungle. In its tops, hundreds of nests of oropendolas, hung like strange slopes, adorning its branches. In the middle of the slope of a hill he could see suspended from a gigantic ceiba several fragments of the shattered wings of another slider like his.

-I think I found it, please send a recovery team - she said in her communicator, at the same time that through the interface of her goggles she transmitted the coordinates of her find-. I'm going to try to descend over the hill, I think there's a clear where I can go down.

After saying this, he flew up to the top of the small hill and between the trees there was an almost perfectly circular space where the trees had been cut down, perhaps a few decades earlier. The wings of the hovercraft collapsed and descended with the help of two jets located under the pilot's platform and rested on two skates protruding under the same platform.

Veronica freed herself from the harness and got off the platform. At the foot of the hill she could see the remains of the slider, at her feet the pale silhouette of a robot was lying on the layer of vegetation that covered the wet ground.

He approached the stationary automaton and shook it lightly.

-ANIBAL, wake up, -she said shaking it, without receiving any answer -. Well, I think there is no way, - she said to herself out loud.

She stood up and looked up, a sensation of awe made her tremble. Above her head almost the whole sky was hidden by the foliage of the trees, only a few beams of light were projected vertically, like long, narrow pillars coming down from the sky of branches and leaves to the ground.

The gigantic ceibas and mahoganies, whose height was higher than usual, helped by the lesser gravity of the planet, swayed slightly by the breeze that blew over them, generating a spectral sound, below, at ground level there reigned an overwhelming heat that nowhere else on the planet could be perceived.

He could hear the disturbing litany of the song of the oropendolas on his head, and the shrieking of some primates that had to hide in the trees.

-Damn this frightens, -she said to herself -. Damn it, why am I talking to myself?

She sat next to the fallen robot and looked up again, she could see some parts of the slider hanging on the branches.

-Old man you fell, it must have been a great blow- she said, speaking uselessly to the inactive robot -. When the rescue guys come they will extract your memory and you will tell us what happened, don't worry that you'll be fine, maybe they'll give you a new recognition, for scaring off those hunters.

A few minutes later in the same clearing where Veronica had descended, a transporter from the parks department, stopped and a trio of rescue robots, they descended the slope with a sliding unit, through the path that Veronica had left in her path, to recover ANIBAL, who had fallen after having made five hunters flee who collected nests of oropendolas, for the black markets where their eggs were sold as a culinary rarity.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, September 2019

Under a Sky of Branches and Leaves

Under a Sky of Branches and Leaves

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