Shoal Creek remembers.
Its memory is limestone-deep,
older than the city,
older than the word city.
But now, the city breathes different air.
Vines drape balconies.
Cypress knees rise through pavement cracks.
Bats roost in the eaves of old condos now thick with ivy.
And on the vertical skins of high-rises,
ecosystems hum with chlorophyll and chirp.
It was Riley’s world now.
Guano harvester.
Climber of walls.
Tender of the wild that once fled from buildings — now returned to them.
Each night, she ascended Austin’s reborn towers,
Echo at her shoulder —
a bat she once rescued, now her companion and guide.
He chirped not just to her,
but to something else.
Because Riley had begun to notice it:
certain nights, the air would ripple.
Echo would hover, still mid-flight,
and the garden-laced city would feel translucent —
as if another world pressed its face against ours
for just a breath.
The Bandwidth.
She learned the name from a whisper
beneath The Independent,
Austin’s tallest tower and latest harvest site.
A voice — not spoken, but felt —
inside the green-lit atrium where ferns grew out of escalator wells.
"Human civilization exists on a narrow band of perception,"
it said,
"but we are not alone here."
It wasn’t aliens.
Not in the way sci-fi imagined.
It was parallel presence —
sentient species sharing the same space,
but rarely the same frequency.
Sometimes, a garden brought you closer.
Sometimes, a bat’s chirp unlocked a window.
Echo was a key.
As Riley scaled the Jenga Tower’s outer mesh,
Echo let out a note
that refracted through glass
and struck a seam in the air.
And for a moment,
Riley saw them:
figures of mist and mycelium,
tending gardens that overlapped with hers,
harvesting not guano, but memory
from spores drifting through moonlight.
One of them turned.
Not surprised —
as if they'd been waiting.
“Shoal is a threshold,” it said.
Riley blinked.
The city snapped back into focus.
Echo zipped past her, unfazed.
The moment had passed —
but it had marked her.
She collected her samples,
fed the garden-compost array,
and sent readings back to ReLeaf HQ.
But her mind wandered to Orange,
the man who stayed when history forgot.
Perhaps he too had heard the bandwidth hum.
The limestone remembers.
The bats know the harmonics.
And now Riley, too, tunes in.
Not every night.
Just sometimes.
When the sunset hits just right,
and the green buildings sing.
Notes from the Bandwidth
- Shoal Creek is a frequency node — one of many.
- Echo is not just a bat, but a signal amplifier.
- Guano is not just fertilizer, but memory condensate.
- ReLeaf cooperatives unknowingly steward the tuning forks of planetary consciousness.
- Civilization is not a timeline.
It is a bandwidth.
And when it synchronizes with others — even for a heartbeat —
new worlds bloom.