The fox’s eye reflects the forest. You lean in, gazing at it, carefully changing the angle as the black trees within warp and shift. It’s nearly perfect. All you need is to change the surface so that the light reflects just right, and to do that you’ll finally need to sort out that persistent weirdness with the sunlight.

Through the leaves it looks fine but when you stare up into the blue sky it just doesn’t feel right. The light is too small. The sky is right, you’re sure of that: you checked through the reference images months ago, ran the atmospheric simulations, it’s the proper level of blue. Maybe it’s not big enough; at the fastest you can travel it would only take at an hour to get to it, maybe a little less. Does knowing that make it feel smaller?

The fox melts away into the undergrowth as you quietly float along the path. You’ll fix the soil so it feels right one of these days and until then you’d prefer not to stand on it – it just wouldn’t be right. And then you see it. The clearing, the one you sat in all those years ago (although you’d fixed that tree and made it far more comfortable to sit against), should have been just that, a clearing empty save for grass and warm summer air.

Now the tree has collapsed and lies dead in the dirt. That shouldn’t have happened. You stress tested the tree against the strongest storms you could start, and it had withstood them. That was the whole point of the tree. It was meant to endure and stay standing, high and proud. Now you stand over the stump, a coroner at the murder scene, assessing the damage. The trunk didn’t snap that’s for sure, the stress levels never went high enough, and it’s not as if the wind could have produced enough force; you sent the weather system to sleep for the moment while you designed the wild flower patches. So, you reason, quietly and patiently as the minutes tick by and your break comes to an end, the problem must lie within the trunk itself. Slowly pouring over the wood your time runs out, in this place minutes feel like hours, but even hours elapse. You eject from the simulation and blurry eyed refocus yourself on work. The problem ticks away in the back of your mind. Why did the tree collapse?

The silent invader marches on, an aberration in your perfect system, a corruption of the benign code that was meant to create leaf mulch. You wouldn’t have though that fungi could evolve in a closed system, but it seems that some parts of nature are just meant to be. While you work it toils on, monotonously breaking down the paradise you built until there’s nothing left, weeks of progress and careful planning turned into brown sludge. When you return, breathing the sweet air again you are greeted with a barren – no, not barren, nothing this alive could ever be called barren. Corrupted, perhaps, yes, a corrupted landscape and a universe of brown and a closed horizon perfect blue; the mountains have turned to mulch. All brown and blue, forever and ever, all lit by that same strange light.