Original subtitles

A months' full burn from Pax River.

And it was straight to the bunker.

Protocol, they said.

But the planet was half dead already.

Hundreds of punchers, trackers, grunts and thieves.

The desperate and the down.

All looking for a cut.

Same old story.

The price of fresh pulled, old growth sap had spiked again.

Even with a war on, the old Yatari woodnuts were still buying by the barrel.

So, crews were going further out, offering more, grabbing what they could.

Who knows what they saw in me.

I'm not the kind to amount to much.

Maybe that was the point.

The first run was Deepwood.

Hazard clean.

Double credit.

Yeah.

I took the job.

Ever step on a new planet?

Breathe new air.

You'd think it does something.

Cracks open your mind, rewires your hardware.

We were in it for the money, yeah.

But you don't touch the edge just for credit.

A new indent, a new reason.

A new friend.

But a planet can't keep a promise.

It's just another rock.

The forest, though.

The forest.

The trees weren't just trees, you know.

Not like the bunker tablets.

They had an order.

A presence.

They breathed, like they was alive.

Watching us.

Knew what we were going to do.

So why didn't they stop us?

Unlike the punch burns in my crew, I'd read the brief.

Poisoned crats, nimble dodgers, a dozen ways to die and even more to kill.

Maybe knowing was judgement enough.

But when the time came, we tied our tappers up and we soaked the ancient stride.

A few weeks in, a hunger spread through camp.

Not rations, though those got short enough.

No.

There's a different kind of hunger one you only get off-planet.

Out of rim.

The closer to the edge you get, the more you want to taste it.

You can't blame a man for madness, can you?

It's in our nature, I think.

To try things, explore.

The sane don't build spaceships.

They don't get to see what we see.

But maybe that's the problem.

Never should have looked up in the first place.

They left at night, one by one, bound for Deepwood.

Few came back.

The ones that did less sane than before.

Ain't nothing like it, they'd say.

Not a word to describe.

Didn't matter. Soon the hunger had me too.

Had to taste the madness for myself.

Don't know how long I walked.

Hours, maybe, days.

The trees, they talked to me.

Whispered secrets, invited me to stop and sip.

But none of them were right.

I kept walking till I saw it.

Her.

The sap touched my lips.

The world went black.

I wasn't there anymore.

I wasn't me.

But I was somewhere.

Something.

A seed in the hand of a stranger.

A spark of life for a dead moon.

I stretched my roots across continents, across lifetimes, until a barren rock became a paradise.

Until the humans had forgotten that a debt was owed.

Or they worshipped their own gods.

I watched and grew.

I climbed their tallest towers

and ensnared what they held dear.

And while they rested on my achievement,

I took back what was rightfully mine.

Their fires burned hot on my skin and their bombs tore my body limb from limb.

But in their haste to destroy me,

the humans destroyed themselves.

A months' full burn back to Pax River.

I take a drop every day.

Thousands of lifetimes, thousands to come.

Don't know when we'll get home.

But I'll be rich when I get there.

When I get there.