Awaiting us was a Manhattan-size cluster of synthetically engineered redwoods, each tree its own high-rise community. The trunk of the tree loomed before us a mind-boggling quarter mile in circumference.

At the base of the tree was a garden of giant carnivorous pitcher plants. One variety was adorned with velvety gold and magenta leaves folded into slippery chutes designed to send any enticed invader plunging into a pitfall trap—a twelve-foot-deep gullet filled with digestive enzymes. Fuchsia-colored flypaper traps belched toxic aromas and butterwort leaves covered in stalked glands secreted a sticky milklike mucilage. Dancing around the vine-covered surface of the trunk was a jungle of blood-red Venus flytraps, their hinged leaves adorned with six-inch fangs.

Surrounding the carnivorous garden, running beneath the pier that served as a docking station for the Hunter-Transports was the lake—a placid looking waterway hosting forty-foot lily pads. Floating along the surface like miniature green islands, these growths camouflaged twisted tubular channels—digestive systems, according to ABE. As we galloped by I saw several of the lily pads twitching with what appeared to be the half-eaten remains of a seven-foot horn-rimmed toad.

And then we were through the garden of snapping plants and climbing straight up the sheer vertical tree trunk, the webbing at my back all that was keeping me from tumbling off the spider-woman’s abdomen. A hundred feet … three hundred feet and my stomach tensed in fear, my mind muting ABE’s unnerving altitude calculations as I whispered the mantra, “Don’t look down … don’t look down—”

Passing seven hundred feet I looked up and saw the undercarriage of a bridge that blotted out the sun—the first in a series of lower limbs, this one looking as wide and as long as the Golden Gate. Its expanse reached out a mile or more to connect with another redwood. And above it were a dozen more limbs that rose thousands of feet, each a living Mecca of genetic engineering that supported an unimaginable alien world concocted by the freakish intelligence of a machine that knew no boundaries.

In a state of near panic, I reached out to ABE, desperate to know if thought communication with this new creature was possible.

THERE IS A DIFFERENT SENSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRESENT AMONG THESE SPIDER BEINGS. THEY ACT COLLECTIVELY, THEREFORE ANY MESSAGE DELIVERED WILL BE RECEIVED BY THEIR ENTIRE NEST.

I don’t care. Ask them where I’m being taken.

“Oh, shit!” I squeezed my arms tightly around Transhuman Monique’s stomach as the creature inverted to climb up and around the gargantuan tree limb.

QUERY ANSWERED: ROBERT EISENBRAUN HAS BEEN SUMMONED BY THE CREATOR.