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“The Great Moth Census of District 9”(A field report in three acts)
ACT I: THE BOTANIST
Dr. Eloise Tarn was the kind of woman who alphabetized her herbal tea blends and whispered apologies to moss before stepping on it. She was a Resistor, but a hopeful one, not the angry sort, not the barricade-building kind. She just wanted the data. She just needed some data.
Her (newest) life's work was post-MIMS ecological tracking, but it had stalled after the sixth failed moss registry, so she pivoted to moths. Shortly after the release of the MIMs protocol, some moths had begun to glow softly. Eloise needed to know why, and how, and how many.
The moths were perfect to study. They were sensitive, elusive, and poetic enough for the Attuned to respect, and humble enough to not trigger Basic avoidance.
She dubbed it The Great Moth Census of District 9 and convinced the Interim Environmental Council to grant her five volunteers, a converted post office, and a handwritten sign that read: "Scented Tags for a Brighter Tomorrow!"
The tags were embedded with microcapsules of memory-triggered essential oils. Each moth’s tag was coded with a botanical note tied to its capture location. Linden blossom was for parkland, crushed fern for riverside, petrichor for the community compost heap. It was going to be a triumph, she was sure.
Until the Attuned arrived.
ACT II: THE ATTUNED
Eloise called them “the lavender menace” in her field notes. They drifted in and out of the post office like soft breezes in layers of linen, smelling like meditation and old libraries. The moths, they claimed, were choosing to be tagged, or not tagged. They would hold one on a fingertip, close their eyes, and whisper:
“You are more than data. You are a dream with wings.”
Then they’d release them.
Eloise began to develop a small tremor in her right eye.
When confronted, a flaxen-haired Attuned named Pevlin (no last name, naturally) explained with great sorrow that the moths simply didn’t want to be categorized.
“They hum, you know,” Pevlin said. “A song of noncompliance.”
Things got worse when the Basics found the moth enclosures. They didn’t release them, no, the Basics would sit beside the mesh walls and hum. Low, steady, and resonant hums that made the moths dance. For hours. Until their scent-tags came loose or dissolved entirely. Sometimes the Basics would gently press their foreheads to the enclosures, humming in harmony while the moths pressed back through the mesh.
Eloise installed double seals.
The next morning, someone had filled the post office with lavender and left a note that said, “They are not yours to count.”
ACT III: THE KID
Desperate, Eloise sent a request to the Office of Cross-State Collaboration.
What she got was Finn.
He was twelve years old and possibly feral. He claimed to have named 87 squirrels in the park and could tell them apart by “the shape of their regrets.” What Finn had was an uncanny sense of smell. It was not poetic like the Attuned, and not instinctive like the Basics, He was more like a walking gas spectrometer with odd opinions.
“That one’s from the dandelion ridge. It smells like dirt and aspirin sadness.”
He began tagging moths in the field with strips of cotton soaked in scented tinctures, each one named and coded in a messy notebook that included margin notes like "Has beef with a bee," and "Might be the reincarnation of my old neighbor Mrs. Rosenkrantz."
He trained the moths to return by scenting a glove with wild mint and honey soap. They landed on him like he was a flower. By week’s end, Eloise had her first real data set of flight patterns, territory loops, and scent trail persistence. “They like moonlight and children who don’t lie,” Finn reported seriously. “And no one’s told them they can’t be helpful.”
POST-SCRIPT
The census wasn’t accurate in the traditional sense.
Some moths were tagged multiple times. Some flew west and came back east with new songs. The Basics hummed lullabies into the wind, and the Attuned kept leaving bowls of sugared violets under lamplight in thanks.
Eloise sent in her report, which was later cited in a larger paper titled “The Illumination Factor of Nonlinear Pollinator Behavior and Ambient Emotional Fields in Post-MIMS Biomes.”
Finn didn’t care. He had taught the squirrels to ride on his handlebars and started a side project of tagging snails with tiny poems. His new goal was to find the scent of laughter, and distill it into a language the moths could write in light.
As for the moths? They were never quite counted. And they still glow.
