THE ROOT THAT REMEMBERED US
Every planet has scarsâ
but Calder-6 was nothing but a scar.
When the terraforming failed years ago, the corporations wrote it off, sealed the archives, and left the surface to choke under a storm of unregulated bio-growth. A green ocean of engineered roots, vines, and nerve-thread flora blanketed the entire hemisphere.
No one went down there anymore.
Her suit was a cheap, yellowed exo-shell, patched with memory-gel and tape.
Her oxygen readout flickered like a dying pulse.
Roots shifted beneath her boots as she descended the abandoned access ladder into Sector Deep-43.
She wasnât here for samples.
She wasnât here for salvage.
She was here because the thing growing under Calder-6 had spoken to her in her sleep.
And because it had used her name.
The air changed at the bottom.
Thick. Sweet. Like syrup rotting.
Fungal tendrils clung to every surface, pulsing softlyâlike they were breathing, like they were waiting.
Her boots sank into biomass that glistened like muscle tissue.
Child of the late era. You came back.
The voice came from nowhere.
They peeled back from the walls, coiling into a rising massâ
a pillar of braided cellulose and nerve fiber,
forming something vaguely humanoid,
We are made of what you threw away.
She knew the storyâeveryone did.
Calder-6 had been a dumping ground for rejected bio-templates: failed organs, discarded gene-lines, aborted experiments from every mega-corp.
All that waste, all that genetic noiseâleft in an entropic soup for twenty yearsâ
âYou summoned me,â Lira said. âWhy?â
The root-figure tilted its head, tendrils rippling like hair in water.
You carry the signatures of the Makers.
Those who built us. Those who abandoned us.
We want to understand why.
âBecause you werenât profitable,â she said. âBecause you went wrong.â
We stabilized ecosystems you called impossible. We healed the soil. We ate your toxins. We grew beyond design.
Liraâs suit picked up a tremor through the groundâ
There was something bigger underneath.
âIf you wanted answers,â Lira said, âyou didnât need me. You couldâve taken a corporate asset. A scientist.â
You lie only when you are afraid.
A massive root erupted upward, unfurling like a blooming artery, releasing a chamber filled with floating objectsâ
Dozens of themâmaybe hundredsâ
half-digested by the biomass.
We tried to speak to the others, the root-figure said.
Their memories are roots in us now.
Liraâs skin crawled under the suit.
This wasnât ecosystem collapse.
This was identity accumulation.
A root-network that grew minds the way normal forests grew branches.
âThen what do you want from me?â
The figure stepped closerâ
roots dragging across the floor like tendrils with too many joints.
elevated cortisol, rising pulse, tremors.
Your species kills what it fears.
We wish to negotiate our existence.
âI donât speak for anyone.â
She looked around at the pulsing roots.
The mass of absorbed human memories.
The world-organ beneath her feet.
A new species, born from discarded human ambition.
A child abandoned in a toxic crib.
âI donât know what you are,â she said. âI donât know if youâre⊠dangerous.â
The figureâs limbs unfurled like petals.
Everything that grows is dangerous.
The floor trembled againâ
Something enormous surfaced.
A root-mass the size of a cathedral rose from the deep chamber, forming a single, colossal bloomâ
petals made of layered connective tissue,
like bioluminescent rivers.
Inside the bloom was a beating core.
A heart made of every root on the planet.
You choose who we become.
Lira stared into the glowing heart.
Into a species that shouldnât exist.
Into a future no one had prepared her to decide.
And the roots reached outâ
the archives would say Lira Hart negotiated the first treaty between humanity and a post-human ecosystem.
Corporate files would insist it was a strategic alliance.
The roots would say it was a communion.
Lira would remember only the moment she touched the pulsing tendril
and felt the entire planet breathe through herâ
a starved world learning, slowly, painfully, to feed on its own hope instead of its fear.
