The Mycelial Key

Jori Vek woke to the smell of wet soil and machine oil, a smell that in the Ark had become a kind of prayer. The hydroponic bays hummed in low octaves, LEDs raining artificial dawn in bands over trays of translucent seedlings. Outside the viewport, a planet with a bruised blue atmosphere rolled slowly beneath the station, its banded storms reminding Jori of an old bruise he could never fully reach. He moved with practiced tenderness, fingers rooted in the soft give of nutrient foam, gloved palms reading the tiny resistances of germinating roots like a physician reading a pulse. Each morning he listened to the seedlings the way some people listened to seas: small, urgent signals, creaks and tiny shifts that meant life was doing what it had always done. The Ark called it stewardship. The paperwork called it inventory. For Jori it was memory work. He named things the way his grandmother had named tools back in the low city: by how they saved you. 'Mira,' he called as he adjusted a light matrix. The name belonged to the bay's caretaker, a woman whose laugh lived in the vents. A maintenance drone nosed at his boot, a spherical thing with a camera like an eye that never blinked. He nicknamed it Tic and Tic flashed its lens in the small way of machines that thought friendship worth emulating. The vault was old, older than the corporations that now sponsored its routes, older than the uniforms some of the newer staff wore. Embedded in its skin were generations of grafted tech: wooden planters from an early terrestrial arc, polymer filters from a mid-century reclamation tug, a lattice of fiber optic veins that mapped seed genomes like constellations. Jori traced those veins sometimes when the nights felt too vast; his fingers knew the knots where a lineage had been saved, the loop where someone had once sacrificed a whole crop to a mold to keep a secret gene safe. He had been born mid-rotation, his childbed under a canopy of lettuce and microgreens, and so the green smelled like home. The Ark had rules about who could do what and when. The rules were supposed to keep the seeds safe from theft and hubris. This morning the rules were a thin paper between him and the board room. A red lamp blinked on his wrist band. A soft, awkward voice from the comm said, 'Alert: vault 7 integrity fluctuation. Run diagnostic?' He set down his tray. The seedlings did not look worried. The soil made no sound. Jori followed the vein of fiber optics to the vault bulkhead and touched glass cool as a coin. The display bloomed with numbers. One sequence pulsed like a heartbeat out of rhythm, a pattern Jori had seen once before and knew by the particular cold it carried. He felt, under his ribs, a small animal stir and die.