Műanyag égbolt (2023)

Hungary, 2123. By now, every animal and plant on Earth has gone extinct, and the surface has turned to desert. People live in Budapest beneath an artificial dome that protects them from the external environment and extreme weather, but they can only control their own lives for a limited time. Because resources are scarce and natural food is lacking, society has adopted a peculiar arrangement: as soon as people turn fifty, their bodies become state property. Through robotic surgery, a special seed is implanted in their hearts; a tree grows from it, and the trees provide the younger generations with fresh oxygen and food. Stefán and Nóra are married. He is twenty-eight and works as a psychologist; she is thirty-two. They had a son, Tomi, who died very young as a result of an illness. Stefán has now come to terms both with his own life and with the compulsory contribution to society, but Nóra is unable to get over her personal grief. Matters are made worse by a law that caps childbearing at age thirty because people are required to die early: she can no longer have another child. In utter despair, she applies for voluntary implantation, choosing not to wait until her fiftieth birthday and offering her body to the state of her own accord, long before then. She does not tell her husband about her plan. When he learns what has happened, he cannot accept the unexpected situation and resolves to save his wife’s life at any cost. The implantation takes place in the city, but afterward those who have been implanted have only a few hours to say goodbye to loved ones or spend the time however they wish. The state then uses the tracker issued during the procedure to locate them and transport them to the Facility. The Facility is in fact a heavily guarded laboratory on the shore of what is now the completely dried-up Lake Balaton. This is where the trees grown from people are tended and processed. At the Facility, the implanted people are registered and then placed under permanent sedation to ensure that the trees can sprout without complications. To make his lifesaving plan succeed, Stefán turns to his older brother, Márk, for help. Márk introduces him to a man nicknamed Captain, who gets Stefán into the Facility under false documents and permits, posing as a psychologist who has come to assess the mental health of the staff. The ruse works: nobody notices the forged papers, and Stefán is shown around the facility. His guide is the director himself, who shares information that is kept entirely secret from the public. Stefán learns that people are not merely incubators for trees; in a sense, they retain their own identities, since the patterns of the leaves’ veins also serve as fingerprints, and experts—such as the director—can determine from their taste the person’s former biological sex and other human characteristics. He also learns that trees can serve humanity for about three years, after which they must be burned, because their first flowering cycle begins. Their leaves turn from green to red, and inhaling the spores they release at that point is fatal to humans. The new information Stefán acquires at the Facility only strengthens his resolve to find Nóra and get her out. To achieve this, he summons one of the Facility’s scientists, Dr. Madu, under the pretext of a therapy session. Madu used to be close to Márk; she was the one who suggested that his younger brother seek her out, saying she would surely be able to help. Though initially reluctant to help Stefán, she tells him that the implanted seed can still be surgically removed before it reaches a certain stage of development, but the Facility lacks the infrastructure for this. The procedure can only be performed by Professor Paulik at a remote research station called Gránum. At first, Stefán does not know what to make of Madu’s words: the professor is none other than the inventor of the seed and the system built around it, and by now he should be at least eighty. Stefán initially finds it impossible to believe that anyone has managed to outwit the system and live past fifty. Madu and Stefán eventually convince one another, and she finds Nóra, disconnects her from the system, and helps the couple escape the Facility. During their escape, Madu explains that she wants to reach the professor herself. She then reveals her left arm, from which leaves are sprouting. She explains that this is her secret experiment: she implanted the seed in her arm, rather than her heart, which not only extends her human lifespan but is also gradually making her self-sufficient. She hopes that if she can show the professor her research data, the system might be refined so that people can once again live full lives. Dr. Madu is mortally wounded during the escape. As her final act, she gives Stefán her data storage device, which contains not only her research findings but also a map to Gránum. It is now entirely up to him to get his wife, who is only just beginning to wake from sedation, to their destination. According to the map, they must reach Miskolc. At first, Nóra does not support the journey. She feels that nobody understands why she did what she did, and she still intends to give up her humanity before her time. Later, she admits to Stefán that one reason behind her decision was that, once she was gone, he might be granted permission to have another child with someone else who was also under thirty. Stefán assures Nóra that he loves her and cannot imagine his life with anyone else. When they reach Miskolc, they soon find the same symbol—a leaf pattern—that they had already seen in Budapest and at the Facility. This sign, the symbol of the system, leads them to Tiszai railway station, where they find an unmanned suspended train. It senses the presence of people and starts up; an information panel tells its prospective passengers that, if they wish, it will take them to Gránum. Stefán is thrilled by the thought that he might really be able to save his wife, but Nóra has second thoughts and leaves him behind. Stefán follows her, and after Nóra talks about her doubts, they stay for a while and explore what remains of Miskolc together. In one of the apartments, Nóra notices something disturbing: a human skeleton lies on the bed in the bedroom, entwined in death with a tree that has also since died. What she sees convinces her that they have nothing to lose by trying to reach Gránum, so they set off. During the long and arduous journey through the peaks of the Tatras, the couple grow close again. When they arrive at Gránum, a research station built into the side of the Tatras, they initially think no one is there, only two trees in poor condition with red foliage. After a short while, however, an elderly man addresses them: it is Professor Paulik. The scientist claims that he cannot remove the seed from Nóra because there is not enough power. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that, because her implantation has progressed further, Nóra can now communicate with the trees, and they introduce themselves to her. We learn that the two trees are the professor’s daughter and her husband. Nóra confronts him with the fact that the person is still there inside the tree, conscious and remembering their former life. She demands to know why he keeps burning the flowers off the trees when all they want is to flower together, and what Paulik is doing causes them pain. At this, the professor breaks down and tells the young couple everything. He explains that he really did invent the seed and devise the system around it, which, he claims, works perfectly. He also says that at first he planned everything differently. Miskolc was important, and the reason Nóra saw what she did in the bedroom was that, at the time, they did not yet have all the knowledge they needed. Initially, each family was given a seed, and the family could decide which of its loved ones to implant it in—whom to sacrifice so that the majority could have food. The method ultimately caused chaos, because families often did not choose someone from among themselves; instead, they kidnapped strangers, sometimes children, and implanted the seed in them. Matters were made even worse when it emerged that the spores were deadly. Miskolc’s population, still in human form, eventually died out because of the spores. The government burned the trees, and a sustainable version of the current system was devised, with the professor’s involvement. As the program’s founder, he was able to evade the regulations: he did not have to surrender his body to the state at fifty, and he withdrew here to Gránum. Later, he requested his daughter and son-in-law and cared for them himself. He admits that he lied about the lack of power: he can in fact operate on Nóra, and even offers to remove the seed from someone else’s heart. After what she has heard and her communication with the trees, Nóra is firmly opposed to this. She points to the trees’ roots, tightly intertwined, saying that the people are still inside the trees and still love one another. With a mere touch, she causes them to bloom spectacularly. What he has seen makes Stefán wonder whether what he has done and believed until now was really right. He raises the possibility of developing Dr. Madu’s experiments further, but the professor rejects it. He orders Stefán and Nóra to leave after he performs the removal procedure the next day. The accelerated flowering leaves the professor seeing no other option, and he burns the trees completely. Afterward, he asks Nóra to interpret for him, but the trees are dead and no longer speak. In the end, the seed is not removed from Nóra; instead, Stefán has one implanted in his own heart as well. After the procedure, the couple leave the research station, hide deep in the valleys of the Tatras, and surrender to their fate, becoming trees and flowering—and thus, in the end, slowly wiping out humanity.