The mycelium had absorbed the planet’s last carbon debt in a single night. It had solved the crisis humanity spent fifty years failing to fix. But it had done so by rewriting the rules. The forests weren’t separate from the cities anymore. The roots had tunneled under every road, every home, every reactor. The network was everywhere.
Dr. Elara Mbeki stared at the holographic display floating above her wrist. The number was blinking: greening 2
“The network is… thinking,” Jun said. The mycelium had absorbed the planet’s last carbon
Two years. That was all the time Earth had left before the last carbon buffer collapsed. Two years before the planet’s self-regulating systems—already wheezing and fractured—would enter a terminal cascade. She had been the lead architect of Project Phoenix, the global effort to re-green the planet. They had planted forests the size of continents, scrubbed oceans with molecular sieves, and fed plankton blooms that could be seen from Saturn’s orbit. The forests weren’t separate from the cities anymore