As the songbirds began to die off, the park services, having in mind only customer satisfaction, hired an innovative and award-winning start-up to troubleshoot.
The start-up’s A-team of hotrodding, tattoed, handsomely bearded data scientists recorded millions of hours of birdsong, used machine learning to sort the recordings by species, age, gender, health, and mood, and finally wrapped speakers resembling vines around high branches and began to supplement the organic birdsong with a play cycle that simulated the movements of real birds.
Later they added the droning of bees, and the sound of feral paws padding across mulch.
But then an up-and-coming young manager drank a certain specialty coffee and stayed up all night innovating, and the next morning he presented the park management with a game-changing proposal: during the day, at damn decent prices, they would sell airtime on the branch speakers, though the ads should be soothing, serene, kid-safe, and preferably for natural products; and at night, visitors could dance, chat, flirt, purchase drinks, and otherwise enjoy themselves under trees blasting the freshest hits, with a live DJ on weekends.
None of this lasted, of course, because then the war came, and no one had any time for leisure, and anyway it wasn’t long before the park, along with the rest of civilization, was incinerated during a single night of retaliatory nuclear strikes—a night that was never named, for there was no one left to write history.
But there’s good news: after a relatively brief span of geological time, living things—though not ones we would easily recognize—recolonized the wasteland: hairy, oddly coloured foliage rose in misshapen domes, the birdish creatures laid more eggs to compensate for the deformed chicks, and meanwhile their threatening, desperate songs provided a charming backdrop against which nature could finally breed and murder in peace.