Root Protocol

The basement office of TerraSync smelled like cold coffee and wet earth, and that alone nearly took Ava Pearson apart at the knees.

She stood at the top of the stairs with her hand still on the door code she'd punched in, and she let herself have one honest breath before going down. It had been ten months. It had been ten months since she'd told Nolan Mayer she was done, back in October, and here she was, back in the belly of his startup at nine at night, because he still had her soil probe and he still wasn't answering his phone.

(Typical, by the way. That part was very typical of him.)

The probe wasn't cheap. It was a two-hundred-dollar unit she'd loaned him a year ago when they were still the kind of couple who loaned each other things. But fall sampling was coming and she needed it, and more than that, she needed to walk into that basement and act like a woman who was fine. Ava was twenty-three years old and she had spent the better part of two years orbiting this company, this dream, this man with his big ideas about roots and data, and she was tired of orbiting.

She went down the stairs.

The office looked exactly the same as the last time she'd seen it, which felt almost rude. Half the room was server racks, humming and blinking with little blue lights, and the other half was desks buried under drone parts and soil sensors in various states of surgery. Somebody's sandwich wrapper sat on top of a spectrometer. A whiteboard on the far wall had a sad little smiley face drawn next to the words "ROOT PROTOCOL: DO NOT TOUCH."

Ava remembered this room during the last year of their relationship, back when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-four and everything they fought about was this place. He'd sit at that desk by the pillar and talk with his hands until two in the morning. "Ava, listen, the soil doesn't lie," he used to say, like that was an argument for anything. "People lie. Markets lie. Mycelium doesn't lie." She used to bring him dinners he didn't eat and sit on that ugly green couch and fall asleep waiting for him to come to bed.

The green couch was still there. She wanted to kick it.

"Hello?" she called out. "Anybody home down here?"

There was a thump, a clatter, and a man's head popped up from behind a rack of servers like a startled prairie dog. He was older, maybe twenty-seven, with messy dark hair and a lanyard he clearly slept in.

"Oh! Oh wow, hi, sorry, we're not, um." He squinted at her. "Wait. Are you Ava?"

"Ava Pearson, yeah."

"Jason. Jason Dickson." He came around the rack wiping his hands on his jeans. "Nolan's told me, like, one story about you and it's the tractor story, so, hi, you're the tractor story."

"The tractor story is slander," Ava said, and felt herself smile despite everything, which was annoying. "He ran the auger into his own truck. I just laughed at him."

"See, that's what I figured." Jason gestured at a chair, didn't seem to mind when she didn't sit. "Is he expecting you? He's kind of in the middle of something enormous right now."

"He's not expecting me. He has my soil probe and he also has the answer rate of a brick." She shrugged, tried to make it sound casual. "I texted him twice this week. He didn't answer until now. So I came to get my stuff and, honestly, to see if he's even alive."

"Alive," Jason repeated, and something crossed his face that Ava couldn't read. "Yeah. That's, um. That's a whole conversation."

Ava's stomach did a slow cold turn. "Why is that a whole conversation?"

"Okay, so, level with me," Jason said, holding up both hands. "Why did you two break up? Nolan doesn't talk about it and I've been dying for a year."

"Jason."

"Sorry! Sorry. That's not, I'm not being a creep, I promise, I'm stalling because I don't know how to say the next part." He ran a hand through his hair. "You broke up ten months ago, right? Right before the beta funding round?"

"October. It was October." She remembered it perfectly, the parking lot of this exact building, her breath fogging, him saying she couldn't understand what he was about to do and her saying then make me understand, and neither of them doing that. "Why does that matter?"

"Because that's when he started." Jason looked at the floor, then at her, clearly deciding something. "Okay. I'm just going to say it. Nolan transferred. The mapping started that month and he finished six months ago. His whole consciousness, everything, into a synthetic body. A mycelium chassis, we call it. Fungal network, grown into a human-shaped frame, with his, uh, his brain patterns living in it."

The room hummed around them. Ava heard herself laugh, one short ugly sound.

"That's not funny," Jason said quickly.

"It's not even a good lie. Who trained you two on this? Improv class?" She stepped further into the room, looking past him at the desks, the doors, the little hallway to the lab. "Is he in the back? Nolan! It's Ava, I came for my probe, you absolute goon."

"Nolan," Jason called, louder. "You might want to come out here, buddy."

There was a pause. Then, from the lab hallway, a door opened, and Nolan Mayer walked out.

Ava had rehearsed this moment, sort of, in the car. She'd pictured him thin and pale, probably, some startup gremlin with worse posture than before, and she'd planned to be cool and crisp about it. What she had not pictured was this.

He looked like Nolan. He was Nolan's height, Nolan's shoulders, Nolan's terrible haircut that he'd been growing out since they met. But his skin had this faint greenish undertone, like light through a leaf, strongest at his throat and wrists. And the way he moved was wrong, or not wrong exactly, but too smooth, like a video of a man walking played at a setting that didn't quite match the audio. His eyes found her across the room and stopped, and his whole too-fluid body went still all at once, every part of him at the same instant, which no living man could do.

"Ava," he said, and his voice was the same. That was the part that got her. Deep and a little scratchy, the voice she'd heard say her name a thousand times. "You got my door code."

"Your code's my birthday, you dork," she said, before her brain could stop her mouth. "You haven't changed it."

"I should have." He came forward a few steps and then stopped, like he'd decided there was a line on the floor he shouldn't cross. Jason hovered near the servers, watching them both with the expression of a man watching a fuse burn.

"You're supposed to be dead," Ava said. "Or a robot. Jason says you're a robot."

"Mushroom," Nolan said. "Technically."

"Technically." She heard her own voice go up. "Nolan, you look at me right now and tell me what happened to you, because you have got to be kidding me, except you're clearly not kidding me, because your neck is green and you move like a cat in a cartoon."

"It's real," he said quietly. "It's been real for six months. The body is grown from a patented mycelium chassis. My consciousness was mapped and transferred over a period of weeks. Jason and Pamela were there for all of it." He lifted one hand, and Ava watched it move, too smooth, too certain, and flex its fingers. "I'm still me."

"You're not still you. You're green."

"I was always a little green," he said, and there, that was his old awful joke, his real voice doing his real awful joke, and Ava put a hand over her mouth because to her horror her eyes were stinging.

"Don't you dare do that. Don't you dare be funny right now." She blinked hard. "We broke up because you were disappearing into this place, and instead of coming back to me you went and disappeared into a mushroom."

"I know."

"You said I couldn't understand what you were going to do. This is what you meant? This was the thing you couldn't even tell me about?"

"Yes." He stood very still on his side of his invisible line. "I was afraid if I told you, you'd try to stop me. You would have been right to."

Ava looked at Jason, who shrugged helplessly and mouthed sorry. She looked at the whiteboard, at the smiley face, at the green couch. Ten months of anger sat in her chest with nowhere to put itself.

"Okay," she said finally, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Then you're going to sit me down and explain every single part of it, starting with whether that thing is actually you in there, and you're not skipping anything."

Nolan nodded slowly. "Pamela's still here somewhere," he said. "She'll want to hear this part too. And Ava?"

"What."

"I'm really glad you used my birthday for the door code."

Ava turned away from him, because that stinging thing was happening again, and found Jason already pulling three chairs into a circle.

They ended up in the break room, because the circle of chairs in the office had Pamela drifting over with a laptop under her arm and a look on her face like she wanted to take notes, and Ava said no, absolutely not, this was going to happen with as few witnesses as possible. Pamela had raised both hands and backed off. Jason had stayed, which was apparently the deal, because Ava was not sitting alone with a mushroom man.

So it was three of them at a little table with a sticky spot where somebody's coffee had dried, and Pamela's voice still coming faintly through the wall from the office as she talked to herself and maybe to investors who weren't there yet.

"Okay," Ava said. "Start at the start. And don't do the brochure voice."

"I don't have a brochure voice."

"You have a brochure voice. You did it at the ag fair when we met, that's how I know it. You went 'hello, welcome to the TerraSync booth' and I thought, wow, he's going to be so annoying when he's excited, and then I dated you for two years anyway."

Nolan did that smooth thing where he went still all at once. "Two years," he said.

"Don't get sentimental at me. Start talking."

So he talked. He started with the mapping, how they'd scanned his brain in sections over weeks, how the transfer wasn't a copy like a file but more like a slow flood, his patterns of thought settling into the chassis the way water settles into soil. Ava drank her bad vending machine coffee and interrupted him about every fourth sentence and he answered every interruption, and somewhere in there she stopped noticing the green at his throat because he was doing the thing with his hands he used to do, the little chops in the air when he hit a number he liked.

"The thing nobody tells you," he said, "is what the body actually does. Jason, tell her."

Jason, who had been eating crackers off a napkin, sat up. "Right, so. The chassis isn't a shell. It's mycelium in a structural matrix, which means it's built to interface. Nolan doesn't just sit in a room and read data off a screen. He plugs into the sensor grid and the grid reads like it's part of him."

"Plugs into it how?"

"Through his skin," Jason said, like this was normal. "The sensor network runs under the demo field out back. He lies down in the test plot and he can feel it. All of it."

Ava looked at Nolan. "Feel what, exactly?"

"Acidity," he said. "Moisture. Temperature gradients down to about two meters. Nitrogen draw where the roots are pulling hardest. Compaction zones." He said it plainly, no brochure, and that was worse somehow. "I can feel where the field is dry. Not a number on a dashboard. A dry place. Like a sore spot in my own hand."

"That's..." Ava stopped. "That's insane."

"Yes," Jason said cheerfully, and went back to his crackers.

"It's the whole point of the company," Nolan said. "Every sensor array in the world gives you a map. Maps are dead data, you have to read them. This is..." He stopped, and Ava watched him search for a word, this man who had never once in his life been short of words. "This is a body. The field becomes a body. You don't read a body, you feel it."

"Okay," Ava said slowly, "but say the demo works. Say it's perfect. Investors throw money at you, the thing scales. Then what, Nolan? What are you at the end of this? Because you're sitting here in a break room like a person, but if you're also lying in a field every day feeling nitrogen, at what point do you stop coming back?"

Jason looked down at his napkin, very interested in it.

"That's the question," Nolan said. "That is the entire question. Pamela calls it root protocol, the idea that an interface has to have a root process that always stays with the chassis, so no matter how deep you go you can pull yourself back to the body." He spread his hands on the table. "I'm the root protocol. That's what I'm testing on myself before anyone else ever touches it. Whether you can go all the way out and still be somebody who comes back."

"To what?" Ava said, before she could stop it. "Come back to what?"

The break room got very quiet. The fridge hummed. Through the wall, Pamela said something enthusiastic to nobody.

"To the desk by the pillar," Nolan said. "To the couch. To dinners I didn't eat, which I am still sorry about, by the way, I could actually eat now, it turns out the chassis processes nutrient paste like a champ, which is a sentence I hate saying." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table, and the motion was too smooth, but it was a nervous motion, and Ava recognized it, and that did something to her chest she didn't want examined.

"You could eat," she repeated. "You're telling me the mushroom can eat and you couldn't eat when we were together."

"The paste is disgusting," Jason offered. "I tried it once. It's like oatmeal that lost a fight."

"Nobody asked, Jason."

And then, and Ava could not have told you why, because