“Shit damn, that hurts!” I was dangling from the rigid vine, my jumpsuit covered with a white frosting from a patch of wart lichen. I reset my feet and continued the climb, my muscles fueled more by anger than a desire to save the damn squid. I was sick of being afraid, sick of being in pain, sick of being stuck in a never-ending, cryogenic nightmare of existence … sick of—

“Made it!” Giddy with adrenaline, I sat down on a tree limb so incredibly wide I could have driven three eighteen-wheeler trucks on it side by side had it not been supporting another forest of redwoods. There were six of them in a row—giant fingers that traced deep long slow sways, each movement independent of the next, as if purging a prolonged immersed breath. These silo-wide trunks were rooted upon a solitary limb that followed a twenty-degree incline before disappearing into an oasis of green. And that was just one limb!

How best to describe the canopy? Easier, I think to describe me. I was Jack, transported by a beanstalk into the land of the giants—a human bug that had wandered into a cloud forest that seemed to defy gravity. Before me loomed a towering metropolis of bark, its gothic redwood spires disappearing into the heavens, its tree trunk columns fused together at different levels by a never-ending network of branches, some of which twisted like taffy while others arched in magnificent curves that would have shamed any roller coaster. These avenues of gray forged a labyrinth skeleton—a seemingly endless maze that was cloaked in greenery that hung in five-story sheets—curtains of leaf as thick as my wrist, segregating countless domains of unbridled nature waiting to be discovered.

Pulling aside one sheath, I exposed a backyard of huckleberry bushes that were growing wild out of a crater-size hollowed stump. For five minutes I fed off a single purple berry cluster that was as large as a grapefruit and as sweet as a ripe mango. I stopped when the pan flute summoned me from my meal.

The sound seemed weaker, more desperate. I moved toward it, forging a path across a rainforest of alien gigantism. Butterflies as large as dinner plates attempted to light on me, the color of their wings changing with each fanning flap as I pushed my way through hanging gardens of epiphytes—plants growing atop plants, forged from fern mats that served as habitats for aquatic crustaceans known as copepods. Layers of rainwater-drenched soil had accumulated over eons in the redwoods’ crotches, supporting blueberry bushes and strawberry thickets and assorted fruit trees that had grown hundreds of feet tall.