Chapter 4: Synthetic Shamanism

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

Tayari Baines didn’t pray the way her grandmother did.

She prayed through code. Through roots. Through water samples and whispered audio frequencies pulled from the soil beneath abandoned lots. Where others saw weeds, she saw memory. And where others saw rot, she saw recursion.

To the outside world, Tayari was just another underfunded urban ecologist running a plant restoration lab outside Dayton. But to the Root Union, a quiet circle of healers, coders, and ancestral scientists, she was something more.

She was the one who could hear the breath of plants.

On the morning the violet moss began to hum, Tayari was already kneeling in the mud behind the old trolley yard, feeding microbial patterns into a handheld sampler. The moss had spread overnight, forming a perfect spiral around an iron drain long forgotten by city plans.

But it wasn’t the shape that made her freeze.

It was the tone.

A low, harmonic frequency — almost like a hum, but layered, textured, shifting.

“Not algae,” she whispered, activating her signal reader. “This is… speech.”

The machine struggled to stabilize. The waveform bent unnaturally, forming glyphic loops she’d only seen once before — in an old Root Union file labeled Cerulia, anomaly 3.17.

She reached for her encrypted tablet and pinged the network.

[VOICEPULSE DETECTED. LIFEPATH UNLOCKED.]

[LOCATION TAG: STATION OF THE UNSPOKEN.]

Her breath hitched. Station of the Unspoken. She knew that name. The others whispered it during ceremony but never said it aloud during waking hours.

She knelt again and pressed her gloved hand to the moss.

The ground exhaled.

And then, from the roots, a phrase not spoken by human mouth:

“We remember you, Tayari.”

Later, back in her lab, she played the tone through the resonator. As it echoed through the room, her greenhouse trembled. The coded water responded first — rising into fractal shapes. Then the soil grew warm. The vines along the ceiling turned toward the sound like snakes to a flute.

One of them bloomed — not in green, but in violet.

And in its center: a single glyph.

The same one marked on the blade Dr. Anaya Toussaint had uncovered weeks ago.

Tayari didn’t know who Anaya was yet. But the glyph did. And it had begun seeking those who could hear it.

“We are the shapers of memory,” she said aloud. “And memory is alive.”

Somewhere beyond the city grid, the moss spiral pulsed again — quietly feeding signal into the earth, calling to anyone still awake enough to feel it.