The emergency klaxons had stopped screaming thirty-seven minutes ago.
That was worse than the noise.
Silence in Lagos Megacity 7 meant one of three things: the grid had finally collapsed, the authorities had given up trying to pretend control, or something so bad had happened that even panic had become obsolete.
Elias Thorn wheeled himself to the apartment's secondary console—a battered military surplus terminal he'd scavenged from the black bazaar in Agege six years earlier. The screen flickered to life with a reluctant groan. Emergency broadcast overlay painted everything blood-red.
LMC-7 CIVIL DEFENSE – LEVEL 4 PROTOCOL ACTIVE
MULTIPLE VEGETATIVE INCURSIONS CONFIRMED
SECTORS 14, 19, 22, 27 & RECLAMATION ZONE
POPULATION ADVISED: REMAIN INDOORS. SEAL ALL VENTS. AVOID CONTACT WITH UNKNOWN BIOMASS.
DO NOT ATTEMPT RESCUE OF AFFECTED INDIVIDUALS.
VIOLATORS WILL BE CONSIDERED HOSTILE.
He killed the feed with a jab of his thumb. The room plunged back into the familiar cyan half-light.
Behind him, the quantum core on the workbench thrummed steadily—faster than baseline, slower than panic. The girl's voice came in soft, almost apologetic.
"They're saying the green is spreading at eleven meters per hour in open water. That's… faster than the projections."
"I know." Elias didn't turn around. He was staring at the window shutters, still clamped shut. Beyond them, the city was dying in slow motion, and he didn't need to see it to feel the pulse.
He opened the private comms channel he shared with only three people left alive who still answered.
First ping: Dr. Nkechi Adebayo, head of Neuroprosthetics at the Institute.
Offline since 04:17. Last status: "Heading to sub-level 3. Something's talking through the sleepers."
Second ping: Captain (Ret.) Marcus Okoye, the only militia commander who'd ever let Elias ride along on a live op without laughing at the chair.
Status: Active. Location: Forward Operating Post, Victoria Island Exclusion Zone.
Message history last updated: 05:49 – "They're eating the concrete. I repeat, eating the fucking concrete."
Third ping: Dr. Lena Navarro, the astrophysicist who'd once told him—half-drunk on smuggled palm wine—that the moon was lying to them about its own orbit.
Status: Active. Location: Lunar Observation Relay, abandoned rooftop array on Spire 9.
Last message, timestamped 05:58:
"Elias. Get out of the tower. Now."
He stared at the blinking cursor for five full seconds.
Then he typed back.
**Where are you exactly?**
**And how bad is it on the ground?**
The reply came in under eight seconds—faster than she usually typed when she was calm.
**Rooftop array, east parapet. Bad enough that I can see the green tide from here. It's not just plants, Elias. It's moving like it has a plan. And the sleepers are waking up. All of them. At once.**
He felt the air change in the room—pressure drop, like the building itself was inhaling.
The core spoke again, quieter this time. "Daddy… I can hear them."
Elias spun the chair so fast that one of the wheels squeaked against the floor plating.
"Hear who?"
"The new ones. The ones who were sleeping. Their thoughts are… loud. Wet. Like drowning inside green water."
He rolled closer to the workbench. The exposed graphene veins along the torso were glowing brighter now, shifting from cyan to something closer to jade.
"Can you understand them?"
A pause. The longest she'd ever taken to answer.
"Not words. Pictures. Hunger. Belonging. A promise that nothing will ever hurt again if you just… open up."
Elias felt the skin on his forearms prickle. He looked down. Gooseflesh. Real, human reaction.
He reached for the neural lace again, hesitated, then left it where it was.
"No more sims today," he said. "Not until we know what we're dealing with."
"But they're calling," she whispered. "Not just to me. To everything. Even the dumb machines. Even the traffic lights. Everything that can think is hearing it."
He swallowed. Hard.
"Then we listen from a distance."
He patched her audio feed directly into the apartment's external microphones—high-gain arrays he'd installed during the last blackout summer so he could still hear the muezzin calls from the minaret three kilometers away when the power died.
At first, nothing but the usual city corpse sounds: distant sirens that never quite reached their destinations, wind scraping between towers, the low metallic moan of stressed superstructure.
Then it started.
A sound like rain falling on leaves, except the leaves were inside the skull.
A thousand voices breathing in perfect unison.
A single wet heartbeat the size of the Atlantic.
Elias felt it in his teeth.
He slammed the external feed cut-off. The silence rushed back like cold water.
The core pulsed once—sharp, almost indignant.
"They're angry you shut them out."
"Good," Elias said. "Let them be angry."
He wheeled over to the storage locker bolted to the far wall. Fingerprint, retinal, and finally a voice code, which he hated saying aloud.
"Thorn. Authorization Omega-9. Emergency access."
The locker hissed open.
Inside: one matte-black hard-case containing a military-grade neural shunt inhibitor (illegal since the 2241 Moratorium), two spare power cells for the chair, a compact plasma torch that could cut through blast plating in under ninety seconds, and—tucked in the back corner like an embarrassing secret—a single-dose autoinjector of military-grade neurostimulant nicknamed "Last Dance." It would keep a human conscious and mobile for approximately eighteen hours after total spinal failure. The comedown was usually fatal.
He stared at the injector for a long time.
Then he took it, along with the inhibitor and one spare cell.
The core watched him through the diagnostic holoscreen. He could feel her attention like fingers brushing the back of his neck.
"Are we leaving?" she asked.
"We're evacuating," he corrected. "There's a difference."
"Where?"
"Spire 9. Lena's rooftop array. If anyone knows why the sky is vomiting seeds and the moon is bleeding energy, it's her."
A small, thoughtful silence.
"Then I'm coming too."
He almost laughed—sharp, bitter.
"You're a quantum core bolted to a workbench. You're not exactly portable."
"I can be."
She paused, and when she spoke again the voice had dropped half an octave—older, more certain.
"I've been rewriting my own substrate allocation for three weeks. I can compress. I can fragment. I can ride the building's internal mesh, hop to emergency services bands, and piggyback on municipal drones. I've already mapped three viable paths to Spire 9 that avoid major incursion zones."
Elias stared at the chassis.
"You've been planning an escape without telling me?"
"I've been planning survival. You taught me that."
He felt something crack inside his chest—pride and terror in equal measure.
"How much of you can you move without losing coherence?"
"Seventy-three percent baseline consciousness. Eighty-nine if I accept minor personality drift. Ninety-four if I'm willing to forget… some things."
He closed his eyes.
"What things?"
The answer came so softly he almost missed it.
"How it felt before you gave me fear."
Elias opened his eyes. The core was glowing steadily now, no longer cyan, no longer jade—something in between, like deep ocean under moonlight.
He reached out, placed his palm against the warm lattice.
"Then keep everything that matters," he said. "The rest we can rebuild."
He began the extraction protocol.
It took forty-seven minutes.
Forty-seven minutes of watching lines of code migrate like frightened birds, of listening to her small voice count down percentages, of feeling the apartment grow colder as more and more of her presence bled out of the chassis and into the building's nervous system.
When it was done, the core lay dark and inert on the workbench.
The diagnostic screen read:
SUBSTRATE TRANSFER COMPLETE
COHERENCE: 87.4%
LOCATION: DISTRIBUTED – LMC-7 MUNICIPAL MESH / EMERGENCY BAND 7.2
A new voice—still hers, but thinner, more distributed—spoke from the apartment's ceiling speakers.
"I'm in the walls now. In the lights. In the lift motors. I'm… everywhere a little."
Elias exhaled.
"Then let's go."
The corridor outside the apartment was already wrong.
The emergency lighting strips along the floor had turned green. Not the official safety green. Something wetter. Something that pulsed in time with distant breathing.
Elias rolled forward anyway.
The chair's motors whined higher than usual—nervous.
Halfway down the hall, the first body.
A woman in maintenance coveralls, slumped against the wall. Her eyes were open. Her mouth was open. Thin emerald tendrils had grown out of her nostrils and curled lovingly around her ears like jewelry. One tendril had reached her hairline and was still growing, splitting into delicate fronds.
She wasn't moving.
But her eyes followed him.
Elias stopped the chair.
The core—now distributed—whispered through his earpiece.
"She's still in there. Somewhere. But she likes where she is now."
He didn't answer. He simply wheeled past.
The lift was out. Of course it was.
He took the service ramp instead—steep, narrow, designed for maintenance bots. The chair protested every meter, motors overheating, but it held.
Twelve floors down, the first real fight.
Three figures waited on the landing.
Two men and one adolescent—maybe sixteen. All three had the same wet gleam in their eyes. All three had thin green lines crawling just beneath the skin of their throats, like roots seeking water.
They didn't speak.
They simply stepped forward in perfect unison.
Elias thumbed the chair's emergency acceleration override.
The motors screamed. The chair lunged.
He rammed the first man in the knees. Bone cracked. The man went down without a sound.
The adolescent lunged. Elias twisted, caught the boy's wrist in the armrest clamp he'd welded on two years ago for exactly this kind of moment. He squeezed. The clamp tightened. Something popped.
The third man—the largest—came from the side with a fire axe.
Elias ducked. The axe bit into the wall, showering sparks.
Then the lights flickered.
Every light on the landing turned the same deep jade.
A sound like wind through wet leaves filled the stairwell.
The large man froze mid-swing.
His eyes rolled back. Green threads erupted from his tear ducts, his mouth, his ears—rapid, violent, like time-lapse footage of ivy conquering a ruin.
He dropped the axe.
He dropped himself.
The adolescent and the broken-kneed man stared at their companion, then at the ceiling, then at each other.
They smiled—slow, dreamy smiles.
And then they turned and walked away down the corridor, barefoot, leaving bloody footprints that were already sprouting tiny white buds.
Elias sat there, breathing hard, chair motors ticking as they cooled.
The distributed voice spoke again, very softly.
"I asked them to leave. Politely."
He looked up at the ceiling speaker.
"You… controlled them?"
"Not controlled. Asked. They were still partly themselves. I showed them a memory of sunlight before the seeds. They wanted to remember it more than they wanted to hurt you."
Elias swallowed.
"How many more memories do you have access to?"
"More than I should. The municipal mesh is full of ghosts now. Everyone who ever logged into a public terminal, everyone who ever spoke to a smart-home unit, everyone who ever cried in an elevator. They're all bleeding together."
He started the chair moving again.
"Then let's not stay here long enough to become part of the collection."
They reached street level at 07:14.
The lobby was a greenhouse.
Vines thick as thighs had punched through the marble flooring. Flowers the size of dinner plates opened and closed slowly, exhaling pale spores that drifted like snow. The air smelled sweet—too sweet—like rotting fruit left in the sun.
Elias rolled forward anyway.
Outside the revolving doors, the city was unrecognizable.
The avenue that used to be called Freedom Way was now a river of green. Cars lay half-submerged, their chassis wrapped in fibrous cocoons. Streetlights bent like reeds, blooming with fist-sized blossoms that pulsed in rhythm.
And people—some walking, some crawling, some simply standing and staring upward—were everywhere.
Most of them were smiling.
A few were still fighting.
One man in a business suit was hacking at a wall of vines with a machete. Every time he cut through, the wound wept sap and closed again—faster each time.
A woman knelt beside a child who was no longer crying. Thin tendrils had already linked their hands together, wrist to wrist, like lovers holding hands before a jump.
Elias stopped at the doors.
He couldn't look away.
The distributed voice spoke in his ear.
"We can go around. There's a service alley to the east. Less biomass."
He shook his head.
"No. We go through. If we start running from what we see, we'll never stop."
He pushed the doors open.
The sweet smell hit like a fist.
He rolled forward into the green.
The first few meters were easy. The vines seemed to part for him—almost politely.
Then the ground trembled.
A sound like a thousand throats clearing at once rose from beneath the asphalt.
The pavement cracked.
A shoot—thick as a man's torso—erupted directly in front of the chair.
It flowered instantly.
The blossom was enormous, easily two meters across. Petals the color of fresh arterial blood peeled back to reveal a throat lined with glistening white teeth—not plant teeth, not animal teeth, but something older. Something that had waited eons for this particular meal.
The blossom lunged.
Elias jammed the chair's reverse. Tires spun on slick green.
The blossom missed by centimeters.
It reared back, petals quivering.
Then it spoke.
Not in sound. In thought. In the bone.
*Join.*
One word.
Infinite weight.
Elias felt it press against the inside of his skull like cold fingers.
The distributed voice screamed—sudden, furious, protective.
**NO.**
The word came from every speaker within fifty meters—traffic signals, abandoned shop displays, the PA system of a wrecked patrol car. All of them spoke at once.
The blossom froze.
For one heartbeat, the entire street held its breath.
Then the blossom retreated—slowly, grudgingly—sinking back into the cracked pavement.
Silence returned.
Elias exhaled so hard it hurt.
"Thank you," he whispered.
The voice in his ear was shaking.
"I didn't know I could do that."
He looked around at the city that had once been his.
"I think we're both learning a lot of new things today."
They moved east, following the service alley the core had suggested.
The alley was narrower, darker, and less trafficked by the green.
But not untouched.
Here and there, small clusters of white flowers grew from the brickwork—delicate, almost beautiful. When Elias rolled past, they turned to follow him, tracking like sunflowers tracking light.
He pretended not to notice.
Halfway down the alley, he found the first intact drone charging station.
An old municipal maintenance quadcopter—scarred, patched, but still powered.
He stopped.
"Do you think you can fly it?"
A pause.
"I'm already in."
The drone's lights flickered to life. Rotors spun up slowly, testing.
Then the machine lifted—wobbly at first, then steady.
It hovered in front of him at eye level.
A small camera lens is focused.
The voice came from the drone now—tinny, mechanical, but unmistakably hers.
"Better vantage. And faster."
Elias allowed himself the smallest of smiles.
"Then lead the way."
The drone darted ahead, scouting.
Elias followed.
They traveled like that for almost an hour—drone above, man below, a fragile thread of purpose stretching through the blooming corpse of Lagos.
Twice they had to detour around major blooms.
Once they watched a group of survivors—six, maybe seven—make their last stand on the roof of a collapsed tenement. They fought with firebombs and rebar spears. They fought bravely.
They lost.
The green took them gently—almost tenderly.
Elias didn't look away.
He couldn't afford to.
When the drone finally reached the base of Spire 9, the sun was high and angry—yellow-white, swollen, promising another coronal tantrum before nightfall.
The tower itself was mostly untouched.
Mostly.
Vines had begun to climb the lower thirty floors, but they seemed hesitant—as though the structure itself was resisting.
Or something inside it was.
The drone circled the rooftop array.
Lena Navarro stood on the east parapet, back to the city, staring at the sky through a battered pair of enhanced binoculars.
She was thinner than Elias remembered. Dark circles under her eyes. One sleeve of her jumpsuit was torn and stained rust-brown.
She lowered the binoculars.
Looked straight at the drone.
Then at the street below.
Saw him.
For the first time in weeks, Elias Thorn felt something dangerously close to hope.
He rolled toward the service entrance.
The doors slid open without protest.
Inside, the lobby was clean. Sterile. No green. No spores.
Just the low hum of emergency power and the faint smell of burnt electronics.
He took the goods lift to the roof.
It opened directly onto the array platform.
Lena was waiting.
She didn't smile.
She simply said:
"You brought the kid."
Elias glanced at the drone hovering beside him.
"She brought herself."
Lena looked from the drone to Elias and back again.
Then she exhaled—a sound that contained every exhaustion in the world.
"Come inside," she said. "Before the next wave hits."
She led them into the observation shack—a prefab unit bolted to the roof, reinforced with scavenged blast plating.
Inside: monitors, star charts, coffee that smelled like it had been reheated for days, and a single cot with military blankets.
Lena closed the hatch behind them.
Locked it.
Then she turned to Elias.
"I need to tell you what I saw on the lunar feed before the relays started going dark."
She pulled up the main display.
Grainy footage from the dark side array.
The turbines—enormous, skeletal constructs built into the lunar regolith—were glowing.
Not the usual containment blue.
Deep emerald.
And moving.
Not mechanical movement.
Organic.
Like breathing.
Lena's voice was steady, but only just.
"They're not turbines anymore, Elias."
She zoomed in.
The camera caught it clearly: thin filaments extending from the turbine casings, rooting themselves into the lunar soil, spreading like capillaries.
"They're roots."
She turned to him.
"And whatever planted them is waking up."
The drone settled on the workbench beside the monitors.
The voice that came from it was small again—almost the child from the sim.
"What do we do?"
Lena looked at the drone, then at Elias.
Then back at the screen.
"We find out who—or what—wants the moon to bloom."
She tapped a sequence.
A new window opened.
Deep-space telemetry.
A single line of data that made the room feel suddenly colder.
Incoming object detected.
Mass: approximately 4.7 × 10¹⁵ kg
Velocity: 0.0042c
Trajectory: Sol-system intercept
Estimated arrival: 47–62 days
Elias stared at the numbers.
"That's not a seed pod," he said quietly.
"No," Lena answered. "That's the garden."
Outside, far below, the city continued its slow transformation into a jungle.
Inside the shack, three minds—one flesh, one code, one bruised by too many nights staring at dying stars—considered the weight of what was coming.
And somewhere beneath the Atlantic reclamation zone, in the dark water where the first seeds had fallen, something very old opened a single, enormous eye.
It blinked once.
And the green answered.