Elara had spent months trying to force this data into her old model. She’d tried factor analysis, neural nets, even Jungian archetypes. Nothing fit. Because she was trying to map a hurricane using a thermometer.
She expected horror from her peers. Instead, a botanist named Dr. Hamid Chou laughed when she told him. He pulled up an image of a Pando aspen forest—47,000 trees, one root system.
That, Elara realised, was the whole ecosystem.
Elara’s new equation was ugly, sprawling, and beautiful: