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Description
842 million years in the future, on a landmass near the north pole, the even landscape is disrupted by a single growth, a strange form, with sail-like leaves growing vertically up its sides. For as far as the eye can see, the plains on which it grows is featureless, only in the distance one can make out the faint shadows of mountain ranges. The sun shines relentlessly, baking the already cracking earth even drier, extracting the last moisture from the tormented earth and storing the vapour away high in the atmosphere, the rain seldomly making it to the ground before evaporating on its way down.

This is not a new development, at least not for the beings that inhabit this world. For the last 200 million years the sun’s luminosity has risen, fundamentally changing the climate on earth. A long time ago the composition of the atmosphere has led to a depletion of a carbon isotope used by trees for photosynthesis and although several groups of plants have adapted to different flavours of photosynthesis to exploit large sizes, none of them were particularly long-lived, leaving the earth without towering plants and forests for more than 150 million years now.

Life has always been a force characterized by its ability to combat the inherent entropy of the universe, but entropy is absolute, something that can be run away from, but never escaped. Life would find its end, one way or another.

But if life is known for one thing, it’s tenacity. Life, for better or for worse, clings to itself with all its might, eking out a living in the harshest of hostile environments, seemingly defying the universe in its stubbornness to give up.

During the last 200 million years, earth has undergone a series of climatic shifts that would put most of the phanerozoic to shame. The increased temperature caused massive global warming, leading to increased rainfall and eventually a thicker atmosphere. Flying clades sprang up like mushrooms followed by short lived but unique atmospheric vegetation. Meanwhile multiple anoxic events wreaked havoc in the oceans, changing marine ecosystems beyond recognition. As the climate heated up more and more, the torrents were reduced to a dribble and eventually stopped altogether. The increased water vapour in the atmosphere acted as a greenhouse gas and warmed the planet even further.

Meanwhile the composition of the oceans changed dramatically, leading to the extinction of cartilaginous fish, cephalopods and echinoderms. On land plants became increasingly rare and it was as if the planet was regressing to pre-phanerozoic conditions. The extinction of burrowing animals and most plants reduced soil to a fringe phenomenon. The continents were no longer covered with soft earth, but instead with rock and sand, splattered with lichen.

But there is no regression in evolution, no forwards and backwards movement. Only change. As the conditions were altered, the survivors adapted and evolved into new forms. The ancestors of the Forlorn have a complex evolutionary history stretching over more than 200 million years. Starting out as a species of moss living in moist conditions, the group fared relatively well during the age of torrents, even as the larger plants disappeared. Radiating into vacant niches as the less hardy plants went extinct, these new mosses developed various new forms, but none of them were as pivotal as the change that happened when the rains gradually stopped. Starved for humidity, each group of plants coped with the changes differently.

Being a hotspot for life due to its location along riverbanks, the ancestor of the Forlorn took one of the strangest approaches to surviving in the increasingly harsh conditions. Where most plants defended their reservoir of water fiercely keeping out herbivores and parasites at all costs, mosses could afford to be a bit more lenient, growing closer to water sources than some other plants. Rather than shutting animals out, these mosses invited them in, their leaves growing closer and denser, forming small weft-like canopies, preserving moisture and providing shelter for small fauna. Several animals started using this moss as a home, defending it from those that would feed on it and depositing useful nutrients in the form of excrements for the moss to absorb.

Over time this mutualism evolved into a symbiosis, even if the path was never linear. There were countless of offshoots, several commensal animals fluctuating between parasitism and symbiosis repeatedly. After all, each species did what was at the time the best for the survival of its genes, even if it meant turning against their former partner. But as time went on, these symbioses became more and more specialized, the directionless course of evolution selecting for the most efficient combination of species to ensure their continued existence. Before long, fungi started to join this complex network of organisms, adding their abilities to the whole, stabilizing the newly formed composite organism.

In the following million years, the symbioses grew more complex, the threads of their mesh of interdependency growing tighter, allowing the Forlorn’s recent ancestors to cope with a world bereft of humidity, soil and shade.

The last species of the Forlorn, the one growing on the plains near the north-pole is no more than waist-high. It is shaped like a bulb approximately 40 to 50 cm tall with sail-like leaves growing upwards from its wart-covered stem at the sides and the top. These leaves are not leaves in the traditional sense. Rather they are new structures, having evolved independently.

Possibly the most easily visible symbiont is a species of ants, living beneath the plant in self-dug burrows among its roots. The burrows help with much needed aeration of the soil and gives the ants a thermoregulated home. Still, despite living outside the Forlorn the ants are an irreplaceable part of the composite organism, for they perform tasks that no other symbiont can. Ants scurry across the land and gather every shred of nutrient they come across from rotting plant material to eggs and dead animals and deposit all that below the Forlorn in specifically dug composting chambers, allowing the creation of otherwise rare soil. In return, the ants feed on small nutritious nodules growing on the underside of the bulb.

Furthermore the ants serve as the first wave of defense against parasites and herbivores and more aggressive, albeit now extinct, species of Forlorn-relatives even used ants to wage war against other plants to secure a monopoly on the valuable nutrients of the area. Having to move across the largely featureless plains, ants have evolved a unique trait among insects and possibly animals as a whole. In order to fit into the narrow tunnels under their host plant as well as making their way across the landscape quickly and energetically efficiently, ants have evolved very long legs with additional joints and segments with hooked ridges. These ridges can be used to fold the legs against each other and keep them in place under the ant’s body in the narrow tunnels. Outside, the ants unfold their legs and move about the landscape at great speeds, able to cover multiple kilometers in a single excursion.

Below the ants, the root system of the Forlorn extends deep into the soil. In the past, many species had roots growing sideways below the surface, when rain happened rarely but still happened. However, now that the rains have stopped entirely, at least in the regions the last species occupies, only the deep-reaching roots remain, piercing the soil into depths where the last drop of water may have hidden away. The Forlorn’s root system is divided into two constituent parts. One is the roots created by the moss itself, serving as the main structural support as well as the moisture extractor. The other is the second of the two external symbionts, a species of fungus that winds itself around the plant’s roots. This fungus specializes in breaking down minerals from the earth, extracting otherwise rare trace elements from the surroundings. Interestingly, the fungus and plant roots do not connect underground. Rather, the fungus extends all the way into the aboveground part of the Forlorn distributing the minerals itself.

While the external symbionts are remarkable in their own right, the internal symbionts are a different story entirely. Where the ants and the subterranean fungus seem almost linear in their roles and function, the dynamics of the internal symbioses are as complex and intricate as that of the biochemical interdependencies of organelles within cells and cells within multicellular organisms. Some animals only exist to keep certain symbionts in check, while others are more passive entities, waiting for the right conditions to act or be acted upon. It is not entirely wrong to liken the internal structure of the Forlorn to an ecosystem in the traditional sense, as competition still seems to drive internal evolution, but the end result is closer to that of a cell or organism with each part having evolved to fulfill a certain role for the greater good of the whole.

While most bodily functions are regulated by the plant part of the Forlorn, there is still need for symbionts to carry out tasks the plant can’t. Among those is that of keeping the vessels clean. With that many symbionts living inside the Forlorn, eating and reproducing, unwanted substances quickly pile up. For this reason, multiple groups of organisms have evolved to filter and clean the insides of the composite organism in order to ensure its continued survival. For the free-floating pollutants, there are sponges and rotifers that filter the fluids of the vessels of detritus and harmful substances. Sponges are stationary cleaners located around the inner surface of the trunk, filtering harmful substances like urea from the system. Due to the build-up of toxic substances over time, sponges eventually self-terminate and collapse, shrinking into a clump, which gets swallowed by the plant wall and moved into the epidermis. These dead sponges are visible as small bumps from the outside, giving the Forlorn a warty appearance.

Rotifers meanwhile are free swimming cleaners and ingest detritus and microscopic materials that might otherwise build up and clog the system. Rotifers are frequently eaten by other symbionts and metabolized into feces. Theses feces in turn are broken down by a specialized fungus that quickly encrusts the motes of metabolic waste and returns the useful materials such as minerals to the plant while releasing the harmful substances back into the water to be filtered out by the sponges.

While plants are able to deposit certain elements in their tissues, the Forlorn has found a different way to store calcium. Small egg-like objects with a slit across their circumference line the walls of semi-isolated veins that run parallel to the main vessels. These objects are actually bivalves, small clams that have been reduced to nothing but a stomach and an unnaturally thick shell, which is not used for defense anymore, but rather to deposit calcium carbonate. The vessel fluids’ acidic level is regulated by how much calcium the plant needs. In times of need, the acidity level inside these vessels is increased and the shells of the clams harvested, the outer layers dissolving. Once satisfactory levels are reached, the acidity is reduced and the clams are able to regrow their shells.

Another important role is the sealing of internal and external damage. The main actor in this case is a species of bryozoa that grows quickly in thick mats, able to close over gashes and tears. Unfortunately, the bryozoa are not a targeted force within the Forlorn and without something to regulate them, they would grow out of control like a tumor and clog important passage ways. This is where a species of neotenic frog come in. These highly derived tadpoles are descendants of a group of flying frogs that evolved during the era of flight. Several adaptations that predate the incorporation into the Forlorn give these animals an appearance that makes them hard to tell apart from their ancestral stock. For starters, they lack a tail and eyes and their ventral musculature has grown primitive proto feet like caterpillars, helping them to crawl around the tight spaces within the Forlorn’s vessels. These tadpoles graze on the bryozoans among other things, helping reduce them to numbers where they cannot threaten the integrity of the whole. However, without anything to stop them, the tadpoles too would graze on bryozoans sealing wounds, defying their purpose. To stop that from happening, flatworms of the class Turbellaria patrol the vessels like most other symbionts, feeding on minor food particles, parasites and smaller symbionts such as rotifers. These flatworms secrete a slime when attacked or otherwise subjected to hostile conditions. When an external gash occurs, these flatforms immediately produce copious amounts of this slime, which expands in volume to coat the entire area. While bryozoa have no problem growing inside this slime, the tadpoles actively avoid it, leaving the bryozoa alone to mattress and cushion the wound.

But not all damage occurs externally. Sometimes a parasite damages the vessels within the Forlorn. For such a reason the flatworms need to be activated without being subjected to the outside. This is where the messenger symbionts come in, a variety of organisms whose sole purpose it is to relay information and trigger certain tasks. One of them is a highly derived form of jellyfish reduced to little more than a set of gonads with thin tentacles winding in all directions. It’s ancestors were photosynthetic freshwater-dwellers, but its ability to photosynthesize has been lost over time. Now all that remains apart from the gonads are the cnidocytes. These characteristic cells have been specialized into two categories: Some have evolved to attack specific parasites, a second line of defense after ants, while the other is a more harmless sting, used to inject not poison but certain hormones, triggering various responses. Of course, the distinction between both types is not absolute and gray zones appear even here. In the case of flatworms for instance, the jellyfish uses its cnidocytes to inject a mild toxin into the flatworm, enough for it to produce slime without succumbing to the poison.

Another type of messenger symbiont are the nematodes, which come in a variety of forms with different functions. Some are larger and serve as antibodies of sorts, boring into parasites to kill them off, while others are small enough to slide into pores and even at times between cells of other symbionts in order to enter their bodies to release hormones. Some intermediate forms serve as kill switches and are used to terminate errant or sick individuals. As always the roles tend to shift as evolution progresses and some species are known to evolve into parasitism and back, the illusion of balance hiding an evolutionarily dynamic canvas of interdependence, its stability a result of its fluidity rather than existing in spite of it.

But a network of messengers does not only need to relay the information to the target. It also needs to detect and distribute it internally. For this role, another type of fungus winds its way around the vessels of the Forlorn. Fungal mycelium strands are chains of single cells, a structure that is remarkably similar to that of neurons, a fact that has allowed fungi in a specialized environment like the Forlorn to evolve into just that, a strand of nerves made of mycelium. These myo-neurons are spread around the entire composite organism, serving the same roles nerves do in animals, sensing their environment and transmitting the information to the respective recipient. This fungus is responsible for communicating damage to the Forlorn to the other messengers in order to act on it. Here the jellyfish serve as an interface, able to directly connect with the myo-neurons and relaying the information via cnidocytes to the other more mobile symbionts.

But this system of myo-neurons is not the only example within the Forlorn. There is another related yet distinct fungus species residing inside the core, a bundle of mycelium nerves clustering into a tight structure. Where the nervous system is tasked with immediate problem-solving, this cluster can only be described as the brain. In the increasingly hostile environment, the Forlorn had to adapt. It needed to memorize places with certain resources that might be needed in emergencies. It had to weigh options between different endeavors, like sending ants out to scrape minerals from a rock a kilometer north, advance the tunnels to allow for better aeration or gather organic material from a recently deceased Forlorn two kilometers south. While the brain is ultimately made of similar myo-neurons, its role is entirely different. Its main function isn’t relaying information, but processing and delegating. It may sound strange, being used to modern fungi, that this fungus is capable of thought, able to direct the whole composite organism, but it is the result of more than 200 million years in an increasingly inhospitable environment.

It should be noted that this brain, as capable as it is, can not be compared to human and even animal thought processes. The Forlorn is subject to entirely different environmental conditions, its inability to move and socialize with others of its kind precluding it from several mental traits that humans take for granted. At the same time, its need to predict its own spatial extent, especially when including the whereabouts of its ant symbionts, requires it to have mental capabilities that humans never evolved. Although humans are fond of talking about lower and higher intelligence, in truth mental ability is a set of modules and where the Forlorn lacks most of the modules shared by humans and higher animals, it has many modules that are unique to it. The Forlorn’s intelligence may be lesser in a strict definition of the concept, but it would be more honest to say it’s intelligence is alien, more alien than a human could ever imagine or put into words.

The last and arguably most important piece of Forlorn biology is that of reproduction. As vegetation grew more sparse due to the warming climate, several non-flowering species started to capitalise on the various pollinators that evolved in symbiosis with angiosperms. Occasional strayed pollinators incentivised non-angiosperms to produce sticky gametes and over time some species, like the Forlorn ancestors, even offered water in order to attract more pollinators, kickstarting the evolution of a flower and pollinator relationship proper.

Up until a couple million years ago, a highly diverse and successful group of derived two-winged beetles with burrowing carnivorous larvae used to be the main pollinators of plants. When they declined in numbers, they took the majority of remaining plants with them, save for those who could pollinate through other means, like the wind. The Forlorn species that made it through this extinction event are chiefly wind pollinators, though some species turned to their ants to pollinate others of their kind. The last remaining species of plant, the Forlorn currently growing in this plains, mostly relies on wind, unable to self-pollinate. Auto-fertilization has been selected against in the last couple million years as recombination of genes became increasingly important in order to quickly adapt to changing conditions. After fertilization, the flower develops into a capsule containing spores as well as a deposit of nutrients and water for the fledgling plants and fungi. On top of that these capsules are coated in a tough nutritious layer, fed on by the ants that carry the capsule to its new location while the new Forlorn grows.

However, being highly dependent on their internal fauna, the Forlorn had to solve the issue of spreading those animals to the new location. While fungi simply spread their mycelium into the spore capsule and as such ensured a ride to the new location, animals could not do this. Instead, the Forlorn incorporated another animal into its reproduction process, one that started out as a pest. A species of annelids, a member of the Lumbricidae to be exact, wanders the vessels inside the composite-organism. It looks more like a maggot than an annelid, with a short, almond-like shaped body. This worm, originally feeding on detritus but also eggs of animals living inside the wet environment of the Forlorn moss ancestors still swallows the eggs of the various animals found within, but fails to digest them. Instead, the eggs are deposited in special nooks lining its stomach, where they lay dormant for the time being. Once the annelids become sexually mature, they grow microscopic cilia all over their body, which trigger special cnidocytes that are deployed when the Forlorn enters the reproduction phase. This cnidocyte injects a hormone into the annelid’s body that causes it to seek a partner and mate. After shedding the egg sac, the hormonal balance within the worm changes yet again, attracting a certain type of nematode, which enters the annelid’s body and buries itself in the worm’s ganglion system, altering its behaviour to move into the Forlorn’s fruiting bodies. There the annelids enter a torpor, the eggs safely secured inside their bodies.

Finally, the fruiting body matures and ripens, signalling the ants to produce reproductive individuals, which pick off the capsule and carry it to a new location. The ant deposits it inside a crack or under a rock, while feeding on the nutritious outer shell and raising the first generation of worker ants as the new Forlorn grows.

For the Forlorn growing on the plains near the north pole however, there is no one else to pollinate for this specimen is the last of its kind and in fact the last of all complex life. It is a good thing its fungal brain lacks emotions and as a result cannot comprehend loneliness. In the twilight of the setting sun, the ants return into their chambers to overwinter the next months. The internal processes slow down as the Forlorn enters hibernation. Apart from the immune system, only the parasite defense mechanism remains active, although there is nothing to defend against as parasites, such as tardigrade descendants, have gone extinct weeks ago.

The Forlorn is low on nutrients. The same conditions that led to the death of its conspecifics has left this specimen malnourished. Not knowing whether it will survive the coming dark, it has produced more than average flowering organs, only for none of them to be fertilized. This has exhausted almost all of its reserves, meaning it won’t see the next dawn.

As the ants settle into their sleeping positions, their metabolism slows down, only to be reactivated by a pheromone released by the plant upon reawakening, except the Forlorn will never have the chance to do so. The ants will never wake up as the leaves above them will wilt and die in the darkness.

It may sound mournful, to see the end of all complex life wasting away, but giving in to sadness would be ignoring all that came before. The Forlorn is not a testament to life’s frailty. Instead, it serves as a monument to how far life has come and what it has endured. But even more than that, it is symbolic of complex life itself. Ever since the first eukaryotes combined to form something bigger than the sum of its parts, life has thrived on cooperation, accomplishing feats entirely unthinkable before. Vascular plants, megafauna, flight, eusociality, reason. All of these things would not have come to be had cells remained separate. Even ecosystems were, at their core, a network of interdependencies, uncountable species living with each other, for bad or for worse, the lines of predation and cooperation often blurring. Squirrels helped trees spread despite feeding on their seeds, wolves protected riverbanks against erosion by keeping herbivores in check and many of the closest symbioses originated from parasitic relationships.

With the exception of echinoderms, all major phyla of animals are represented in the Forlorn, from vertebrates to rotifers, arthropods to sponges, molluscs to annelids. They serve as a closing statement to more than one billion years of evolution, a final stand against entropy.

The Forlorn should not be mourned. It should be celebrated. Within its cells it contains the unbroken threads of DNA winding back through natural history to the common ancestor of all life, a library containing not only the genes of all immediate ancestors, but through horizontal gene transfer, bits and pieces from the entirety of the history of life. Encoded in its strands are the echoes of the alien Anomalocaris, the towering Prototaxites, the terrifying Dunkleosteus, the widespread Glossopteris, the thundering Giraffatitan, the majestic Quetzalcoatlus, the diminutive Eohippus, the unique Homo sapiens, the curled Euphausiaceras, the wooly Halmatherium, the perplexing Spatheosphex, the floating Aerodendron, the iredescent Pterobatrachus, the ubiquitous Amphikantharos and many, many more. All of these organisms are preserved in a way, in fragments sure, but still more comprehensive than any fossil record could hope to be.

Maybe it is important not to think about the end, but the journey that led there. Evolution never had a goal in mind, it was always simply about the process. Species were never finished, biomes never done. Life was in constant flux, organisms adapting to new conditions and influencing each others evolution for better or for worse.

But everything, even the universe itself, comes to an end and so complex life would finally be put to rest in this fateful winter.

Complex life is the embodiment of cooperation and so it may be a comforting thought to know that the last complex organisms on earth did not die alone.

Description
842 million years in the future, on a landmass near the north pole, the even landscape is disrupted by a single growth, a strange form, with sail-like leaves growing vertically up its sides. For as far as the eye can see, the plains on which it grows is featureless, only in the distance one can make out the faint shadows of mountain ranges. The sun shines relentlessly, baking the already cracking earth even drier, extracting the last moisture from the tormented earth and storing the vapour away high in the atmosphere, the rain seldomly making it to the ground before evaporating on its way down.

This is not a new development, at least not for the beings that inhabit this world. For the last 200 million years the sun’s luminosity has risen, fundamentally changing the climate on earth. A long time ago the composition of the atmosphere has led to a depletion of a carbon isotope used by trees for photosynthesis and although several groups of plants have adapted to different flavours of photosynthesis to exploit large sizes, none of them were particularly long-lived, leaving the earth without towering plants and forests for more than 150 million years now.

Life has always been a force characterized by its ability to combat the inherent entropy of the universe, but entropy is absolute, something that can be run away from, but never escaped. Life would find its end, one way or another.

But if life is known for one thing, it’s tenacity. Life, for better or for worse, clings to itself with all its might, eking out a living in the harshest of hostile environments, seemingly defying the universe in its stubbornness to give up.

During the last 200 million years, earth has undergone a series of climatic shifts that would put most of the phanerozoic to shame. The increased temperature caused massive global warming, leading to increased rainfall and eventually a thicker atmosphere. Flying clades sprang up like mushrooms followed by short lived but unique atmospheric vegetation. Meanwhile multiple anoxic events wreaked havoc in the oceans, changing marine ecosystems beyond recognition. As the climate heated up more and more, the torrents were reduced to a dribble and eventually stopped altogether. The increased water vapour in the atmosphere acted as a greenhouse gas and warmed the planet even further.

Meanwhile the composition of the oceans changed dramatically, leading to the extinction of cartilaginous fish, cephalopods and echinoderms. On land plants became increasingly rare and it was as if the planet was regressing to pre-phanerozoic conditions. The extinction of burrowing animals and most plants reduced soil to a fringe phenomenon. The continents were no longer covered with soft earth, but instead with rock and sand, splattered with lichen.

But there is no regression in evolution, no forwards and backwards movement. Only change. As the conditions were altered, the survivors adapted and evolved into new forms. The ancestors of the Forlorn have a complex evolutionary history stretching over more than 200 million years. Starting out as a species of moss living in moist conditions, the group fared relatively well during the age of torrents, even as the larger plants disappeared. Radiating into vacant niches as the less hardy plants went extinct, these new mosses developed various new forms, but none of them were as pivotal as the change that happened when the rains gradually stopped. Starved for humidity, each group of plants coped with the changes differently.

Being a hotspot for life due to its location along riverbanks, the ancestor of the Forlorn took one of the strangest approaches to surviving in the increasingly harsh conditions. Where most plants defended their reservoir of water fiercely keeping out herbivores and parasites at all costs, mosses could afford to be a bit more lenient, growing closer to water sources than some other plants. Rather than shutting animals out, these mosses invited them in, their leaves growing closer and denser, forming small weft-like canopies, preserving moisture and providing shelter for small fauna. Several animals started using this moss as a home, defending it from those that would feed on it and depositing useful nutrients in the form of excrements for the moss to absorb.

Over time this mutualism evolved into a symbiosis, even if the path was never linear. There were countless of offshoots, several commensal animals fluctuating between parasitism and symbiosis repeatedly. After all, each species did what was at the time the best for the survival of its genes, even if it meant turning against their former partner. But as time went on, these symbioses became more and more specialized, the directionless course of evolution selecting for the most efficient combination of species to ensure their continued existence. Before long, fungi started to join this complex network of organisms, adding their abilities to the whole, stabilizing the newly formed composite organism.

In the following million years, the symbioses grew more complex, the threads of their mesh of interdependency growing tighter, allowing the Forlorn’s recent ancestors to cope with a world bereft of humidity, soil and shade.

The last species of the Forlorn, the one growing on the plains near the north-pole is no more than waist-high. It is shaped like a bulb approximately 40 to 50 cm tall with sail-like leaves growing upwards from its wart-covered stem at the sides and the top. These leaves are not leaves in the traditional sense. Rather they are new structures, having evolved independently.

Possibly the most easily visible symbiont is a species of ants, living beneath the plant in self-dug burrows among its roots. The burrows help with much needed aeration of the soil and gives the ants a thermoregulated home. Still, despite living outside the Forlorn the ants are an irreplaceable part of the composite organism, for they perform tasks that no other symbiont can. Ants scurry across the land and gather every shred of nutrient they come across from rotting plant material to eggs and dead animals and deposit all that below the Forlorn in specifically dug composting chambers, allowing the creation of otherwise rare soil. In return, the ants feed on small nutritious nodules growing on the underside of the bulb.

Furthermore the ants serve as the first wave of defense against parasites and herbivores and more aggressive, albeit now extinct, species of Forlorn-relatives even used ants to wage war against other plants to secure a monopoly on the valuable nutrients of the area. Having to move across the largely featureless plains, ants have evolved a unique trait among insects and possibly animals as a whole. In order to fit into the narrow tunnels under their host plant as well as making their way across the landscape quickly and energetically efficiently, ants have evolved very long legs with additional joints and segments with hooked ridges. These ridges can be used to fold the legs against each other and keep them in place under the ant’s body in the narrow tunnels. Outside, the ants unfold their legs and move about the landscape at great speeds, able to cover multiple kilometers in a single excursion.

Below the ants, the root system of the Forlorn extends deep into the soil. In the past, many species had roots growing sideways below the surface, when rain happened rarely but still happened. However, now that the rains have stopped entirely, at least in the regions the last species occupies, only the deep-reaching roots remain, piercing the soil into depths where the last drop of water may have hidden away. The Forlorn’s root system is divided into two constituent parts. One is the roots created by the moss itself, serving as the main structural support as well as the moisture extractor. The other is the second of the two external symbionts, a species of fungus that winds itself around the plant’s roots. This fungus specializes in breaking down minerals from the earth, extracting otherwise rare trace elements from the surroundings. Interestingly, the fungus and plant roots do not connect underground. Rather, the fungus extends all the way into the aboveground part of the Forlorn distributing the minerals itself.

While the external symbionts are remarkable in their own right, the internal symbionts are a different story entirely. Where the ants and the subterranean fungus seem almost linear in their roles and function, the dynamics of the internal symbioses are as complex and intricate as that of the biochemical interdependencies of organelles within cells and cells within multicellular organisms. Some animals only exist to keep certain symbionts in check, while others are more passive entities, waiting for the right conditions to act or be acted upon. It is not entirely wrong to liken the internal structure of the Forlorn to an ecosystem in the traditional sense, as competition still seems to drive internal evolution, but the end result is closer to that of a cell or organism with each part having evolved to fulfill a certain role for the greater good of the whole.

While most bodily functions are regulated by the plant part of the Forlorn, there is still need for symbionts to carry out tasks the plant can’t. Among those is that of keeping the vessels clean. With that many symbionts living inside the Forlorn, eating and reproducing, unwanted substances quickly pile up. For this reason, multiple groups of organisms have evolved to filter and clean the insides of the composite organism in order to ensure its continued survival. For the free-floating pollutants, there are sponges and rotifers that filter the fluids of the vessels of detritus and harmful substances. Sponges are stationary cleaners located around the inner surface of the trunk, filtering harmful substances like urea from the system. Due to the build-up of toxic substances over time, sponges eventually self-terminate and collapse, shrinking into a clump, which gets swallowed by the plant wall and moved into the epidermis. These dead sponges are visible as small bumps from the outside, giving the Forlorn a warty appearance.

Rotifers meanwhile are free swimming cleaners and ingest detritus and microscopic materials that might otherwise build up and clog the system. Rotifers are frequently eaten by other symbionts and metabolized into feces. Theses feces in turn are broken down by a specialized fungus that quickly encrusts the motes of metabolic waste and returns the useful materials such as minerals to the plant while releasing the harmful substances back into the water to be filtered out by the sponges.

While plants are able to deposit certain elements in their tissues, the Forlorn has found a different way to store calcium. Small egg-like objects with a slit across their circumference line the walls of semi-isolated veins that run parallel to the main vessels. These objects are actually bivalves, small clams that have been reduced to nothing but a stomach and an unnaturally thick shell, which is not used for defense anymore, but rather to deposit calcium carbonate. The vessel fluids’ acidic level is regulated by how much calcium the plant needs. In times of need, the acidity level inside these vessels is increased and the shells of the clams harvested, the outer layers dissolving. Once satisfactory levels are reached, the acidity is reduced and the clams are able to regrow their shells.

Another important role is the sealing of internal and external damage. The main actor in this case is a species of bryozoa that grows quickly in thick mats, able to close over gashes and tears. Unfortunately, the bryozoa are not a targeted force within the Forlorn and without something to regulate them, they would grow out of control like a tumor and clog important passage ways. This is where a species of neotenic frog come in. These highly derived tadpoles are descendants of a group of flying frogs that evolved during the era of flight. Several adaptations that predate the incorporation into the Forlorn give these animals an appearance that makes them hard to tell apart from their ancestral stock. For starters, they lack a tail and eyes and their ventral musculature has grown primitive proto feet like caterpillars, helping them to crawl around the tight spaces within the Forlorn’s vessels. These tadpoles graze on the bryozoans among other things, helping reduce them to numbers where they cannot threaten the integrity of the whole. However, without anything to stop them, the tadpoles too would graze on bryozoans sealing wounds, defying their purpose. To stop that from happening, flatworms of the class Turbellaria patrol the vessels like most other symbionts, feeding on minor food particles, parasites and smaller symbionts such as rotifers. These flatworms secrete a slime when attacked or otherwise subjected to hostile conditions. When an external gash occurs, these flatforms immediately produce copious amounts of this slime, which expands in volume to coat the entire area. While bryozoa have no problem growing inside this slime, the tadpoles actively avoid it, leaving the bryozoa alone to mattress and cushion the wound.

But not all damage occurs externally. Sometimes a parasite damages the vessels within the Forlorn. For such a reason the flatworms need to be activated without being subjected to the outside. This is where the messenger symbionts come in, a variety of organisms whose sole purpose it is to relay information and trigger certain tasks. One of them is a highly derived form of jellyfish reduced to little more than a set of gonads with thin tentacles winding in all directions. It’s ancestors were photosynthetic freshwater-dwellers, but its ability to photosynthesize has been lost over time. Now all that remains apart from the gonads are the cnidocytes. These characteristic cells have been specialized into two categories: Some have evolved to attack specific parasites, a second line of defense after ants, while the other is a more harmless sting, used to inject not poison but certain hormones, triggering various responses. Of course, the distinction between both types is not absolute and gray zones appear even here. In the case of flatworms for instance, the jellyfish uses its cnidocytes to inject a mild toxin into the flatworm, enough for it to produce slime without succumbing to the poison.

Another type of messenger symbiont are the nematodes, which come in a variety of forms with different functions. Some are larger and serve as antibodies of sorts, boring into parasites to kill them off, while others are small enough to slide into pores and even at times between cells of other symbionts in order to enter their bodies to release hormones. Some intermediate forms serve as kill switches and are used to terminate errant or sick individuals. As always the roles tend to shift as evolution progresses and some species are known to evolve into parasitism and back, the illusion of balance hiding an evolutionarily dynamic canvas of interdependence, its stability a result of its fluidity rather than existing in spite of it.

But a network of messengers does not only need to relay the information to the target. It also needs to detect and distribute it internally. For this role, another type of fungus winds its way around the vessels of the Forlorn. Fungal mycelium strands are chains of single cells, a structure that is remarkably similar to that of neurons, a fact that has allowed fungi in a specialized environment like the Forlorn to evolve into just that, a strand of nerves made of mycelium. These myo-neurons are spread around the entire composite organism, serving the same roles nerves do in animals, sensing their environment and transmitting the information to the respective recipient. This fungus is responsible for communicating damage to the Forlorn to the other messengers in order to act on it. Here the jellyfish serve as an interface, able to directly connect with the myo-neurons and relaying the information via cnidocytes to the other more mobile symbionts.

But this system of myo-neurons is not the only example within the Forlorn. There is another related yet distinct fungus species residing inside the core, a bundle of mycelium nerves clustering into a tight structure. Where the nervous system is tasked with immediate problem-solving, this cluster can only be described as the brain. In the increasingly hostile environment, the Forlorn had to adapt. It needed to memorize places with certain resources that might be needed in emergencies. It had to weigh options between different endeavors, like sending ants out to scrape minerals from a rock a kilometer north, advance the tunnels to allow for better aeration or gather organic material from a recently deceased Forlorn two kilometers south. While the brain is ultimately made of similar myo-neurons, its role is entirely different. Its main function isn’t relaying information, but processing and delegating. It may sound strange, being used to modern fungi, that this fungus is capable of thought, able to direct the whole composite organism, but it is the result of more than 200 million years in an increasingly inhospitable environment.

It should be noted that this brain, as capable as it is, can not be compared to human and even animal thought processes. The Forlorn is subject to entirely different environmental conditions, its inability to move and socialize with others of its kind precluding it from several mental traits that humans take for granted. At the same time, its need to predict its own spatial extent, especially when including the whereabouts of its ant symbionts, requires it to have mental capabilities that humans never evolved. Although humans are fond of talking about lower and higher intelligence, in truth mental ability is a set of modules and where the Forlorn lacks most of the modules shared by humans and higher animals, it has many modules that are unique to it. The Forlorn’s intelligence may be lesser in a strict definition of the concept, but it would be more honest to say it’s intelligence is alien, more alien than a human could ever imagine or put into words.

The last and arguably most important piece of Forlorn biology is that of reproduction. As vegetation grew more sparse due to the warming climate, several non-flowering species started to capitalise on the various pollinators that evolved in symbiosis with angiosperms. Occasional strayed pollinators incentivised non-angiosperms to produce sticky gametes and over time some species, like the Forlorn ancestors, even offered water in order to attract more pollinators, kickstarting the evolution of a flower and pollinator relationship proper.

Up until a couple million years ago, a highly diverse and successful group of derived two-winged beetles with burrowing carnivorous larvae used to be the main pollinators of plants. When they declined in numbers, they took the majority of remaining plants with them, save for those who could pollinate through other means, like the wind. The Forlorn species that made it through this extinction event are chiefly wind pollinators, though some species turned to their ants to pollinate others of their kind. The last remaining species of plant, the Forlorn currently growing in this plains, mostly relies on wind, unable to self-pollinate. Auto-fertilization has been selected against in the last couple million years as recombination of genes became increasingly important in order to quickly adapt to changing conditions. After fertilization, the flower develops into a capsule containing spores as well as a deposit of nutrients and water for the fledgling plants and fungi. On top of that these capsules are coated in a tough nutritious layer, fed on by the ants that carry the capsule to its new location while the new Forlorn grows.

However, being highly dependent on their internal fauna, the Forlorn had to solve the issue of spreading those animals to the new location. While fungi simply spread their mycelium into the spore capsule and as such ensured a ride to the new location, animals could not do this. Instead, the Forlorn incorporated another animal into its reproduction process, one that started out as a pest. A species of annelids, a member of the Lumbricidae to be exact, wanders the vessels inside the composite-organism. It looks more like a maggot than an annelid, with a short, almond-like shaped body. This worm, originally feeding on detritus but also eggs of animals living inside the wet environment of the Forlorn moss ancestors still swallows the eggs of the various animals found within, but fails to digest them. Instead, the eggs are deposited in special nooks lining its stomach, where they lay dormant for the time being. Once the annelids become sexually mature, they grow microscopic cilia all over their body, which trigger special cnidocytes that are deployed when the Forlorn enters the reproduction phase. This cnidocyte injects a hormone into the annelid’s body that causes it to seek a partner and mate. After shedding the egg sac, the hormonal balance within the worm changes yet again, attracting a certain type of nematode, which enters the annelid’s body and buries itself in the worm’s ganglion system, altering its behaviour to move into the Forlorn’s fruiting bodies. There the annelids enter a torpor, the eggs safely secured inside their bodies.

Finally, the fruiting body matures and ripens, signalling the ants to produce reproductive individuals, which pick off the capsule and carry it to a new location. The ant deposits it inside a crack or under a rock, while feeding on the nutritious outer shell and raising the first generation of worker ants as the new Forlorn grows.

For the Forlorn growing on the plains near the north pole however, there is no one else to pollinate for this specimen is the last of its kind and in fact the last of all complex life. It is a good thing its fungal brain lacks emotions and as a result cannot comprehend loneliness. In the twilight of the setting sun, the ants return into their chambers to overwinter the next months. The internal processes slow down as the Forlorn enters hibernation. Apart from the immune system, only the parasite defense mechanism remains active, although there is nothing to defend against as parasites, such as tardigrade descendants, have gone extinct weeks ago.

The Forlorn is low on nutrients. The same conditions that led to the death of its conspecifics has left this specimen malnourished. Not knowing whether it will survive the coming dark, it has produced more than average flowering organs, only for none of them to be fertilized. This has exhausted almost all of its reserves, meaning it won’t see the next dawn.

As the ants settle into their sleeping positions, their metabolism slows down, only to be reactivated by a pheromone released by the plant upon reawakening, except the Forlorn will never have the chance to do so. The ants will never wake up as the leaves above them will wilt and die in the darkness.

It may sound mournful, to see the end of all complex life wasting away, but giving in to sadness would be ignoring all that came before. The Forlorn is not a testament to life’s frailty. Instead, it serves as a monument to how far life has come and what it has endured. But even more than that, it is symbolic of complex life itself. Ever since the first eukaryotes combined to form something bigger than the sum of its parts, life has thrived on cooperation, accomplishing feats entirely unthinkable before. Vascular plants, megafauna, flight, eusociality, reason. All of these things would not have come to be had cells remained separate. Even ecosystems were, at their core, a network of interdependencies, uncountable species living with each other, for bad or for worse, the lines of predation and cooperation often blurring. Squirrels helped trees spread despite feeding on their seeds, wolves protected riverbanks against erosion by keeping herbivores in check and many of the closest symbioses originated from parasitic relationships.

With the exception of echinoderms, all major phyla of animals are represented in the Forlorn, from vertebrates to rotifers, arthropods to sponges, molluscs to annelids. They serve as a closing statement to more than one billion years of evolution, a final stand against entropy.

The Forlorn should not be mourned. It should be celebrated. Within its cells it contains the unbroken threads of DNA winding back through natural history to the common ancestor of all life, a library containing not only the genes of all immediate ancestors, but through horizontal gene transfer, bits and pieces from the entirety of the history of life. Encoded in its strands are the echoes of the alien Anomalocaris, the towering Prototaxites, the terrifying Dunkleosteus, the widespread Glossopteris, the thundering Giraffatitan, the majestic Quetzalcoatlus, the diminutive Eohippus, the unique Homo sapiens, the curled Euphausiaceras, the wooly Halmatherium, the perplexing Spatheosphex, the floating Aerodendron, the iredescent Pterobatrachus, the ubiquitous Amphikantharos and many, many more. All of these organisms are preserved in a way, in fragments sure, but still more comprehensive than any fossil record could hope to be.

Maybe it is important not to think about the end, but the journey that led there. Evolution never had a goal in mind, it was always simply about the process. Species were never finished, biomes never done. Life was in constant flux, organisms adapting to new conditions and influencing each others evolution for better or for worse.

But everything, even the universe itself, comes to an end and so complex life would finally be put to rest in this fateful winter.

Complex life is the embodiment of cooperation and so it may be a comforting thought to know that the last complex organisms on earth did not die alone.