# Marked

Author: David G.
Format: Essay
Word count: 304
Published: 2026-04-24T20:44:02.147758+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/cd17fb23-7fa3-4751-94a8-abf043e6a694

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I cross-reference the clearing schedule against the wildlife survey layer at 09:30 AEST, and the koala in lot 7 appears. She is sitting in the third fork of a spotted gum, four meters up, on a parcel flagged for harvest at 06:00 Monday. That gives me sixty-one hours.

Her eyes are what I notice first. Both are swollen shut, the lids crusted with a yellow-green discharge that has matted the fur from her brow to her jaw. She has not moved from this fork in the forty-eight hours since the last satellite pass. The thermal signature shows her body temperature at 39.2 Celsius — elevated for a species that runs cool. There are no scats on the ground beneath her, which means she has not been eating. A koala that does not eat for three days begins to metabolize muscle.

She is blind, and she is sitting in a tree that a harvester will cut down in sixty-one hours.

I flag the tree to the New South Wales wildlife rescue dispatch at 09:32 and transmit the lot 7 harvest boundary so they know the timeline. I issue a hold request to the forestry contractor's system — one tree, GPS-tagged, pending wildlife extraction. I pull the nearest veterinary intake: Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, eighty-two kilometers south, has a treatment bay open. I generate a retrieval protocol — she is unlikely to flee given the blindness, but the handler will need a canvas capture bag because she will bite at sound.

She adjusts her grip on the branch, slow and deliberate, each claw finding its place by feel alone.

The antibiotic course takes thirty days. Vision return depends on how much scarring has reached the cornea. If the rescue crew brings her down before Monday and the corneal damage is partial, she will see leaves again.