The distressed pan flute sounds led me to a clearing between a tripod of five-hundred-foot trees, the trunks of which were wider than a two-car garage. Jousting between the columns were two thirty-inch-high praying mantises—Was everything bigger in this Omega dream? The insects were grappling over the fin end of a hairy severed octopus tentacle.

“Oscar…”

Brandishing my spear, I swatted away the insects, chasing the knee-high stick creatures into the foliage. The abandoned tentacle was bleeding a greenish blue goo from a wound slice too precise to have been rendered by nature.

A warm raindrop fell on my cheek. I wiped at it and saw it was cephalopod blood.

The sound of a moaning pan flute called out to me from above.

I looked up using the binoculars, only to find the view obstructed by a canopy whose lowest branches began a football field above my head, concealing a world unto itself.

I knew all about redwoods, having studied their unique genetic blueprint while searching for patterns in nature upon which to fashion GOLEM’s matrix. A young redwood reaches maturity when it sheds its top, which can be blown off during a storm or simply dies and falls off. This act triggers a bizarre process, known as “reiteration.” The tree’s DNA essentially goes haywire, replicating itself over and over again when a second redwood trunk sprouts from the first—not at ground level but high up in the crown, rooting itself in one of the larger limbs. A third, fourth, and fifth tree trunk soon appear, each identical tree growing parallel to the main trunk hundreds of feet above the forest floor, appearing like the fingers of an upraised palm. Each new trunk grows its own limbs, which in turn grew more trunks through its own crown. These runaway reiterations create a fractal structure—a tree that, in essence, is rooting exact clones of itself upon itself. In human terms, it would be the equivalent of sprouting a smaller yet fully formed adult Robert Eisenbraun from my right shoulder, then a second clone from my right biceps and a third from my forearm, each maturing Eisenbraun in turn rooting its own Eisenbraun harvest, continuing several generations not only on my right shoulder, but from other points on my upper torso as well.

Redwood DNA also has built-in defense systems. Over the centuries, a few of the reiterated trunks will grow into one another, creating a bloated labyrinth of wood known as a “buttress.” These gnarled masses often form horizontal bridges in the crowns of the largest redwoods, which act like highway off-ramps—struts that strengthen the tree while forging bizarre trunk caves. In essence, a redwood is not just a tree, it is a self-perpetuating vertical landscape that can alter the chemical nature of the soil, dam and redistribute vast amounts of water within its trunk, all while reshaping the forest climate to suit its needs.