Another room is empty except for what looks like an open gate or door standing at the center of its concrete floor. The frame is made of black coral. It was harvested from a trench in the Pacific. What appear to be carvings are etched on it. There is a shimmering quality to the air within, like the vaguely rainbowed translucence of a bubble. Researchers once went into this room to study the gate, to send drones and even people with chains around their waists through it. They don’t anymore. The entrance to the room has been welded shut.

One chamber goes below the island, circulating the tide into a series of salt-water tanks. In them are unknown life-forms harvested from the ocean by on-site remotely operated underwater vehicles: A glowing whale. A kind of krill that behaves like a single organism, coming together and solidifying into the shape of whoever stands before it. A shark that opens its mouth and unleashes black tentacles with teeth nested in them.

In a subbasement lab rests the fungal pod unearthed from the grove in the Olympics and transported here. In the center of a room that looks a little like an operating theater, the gray cylinder lies on a stainless-steel table. The air lock fizzes open—with a blast of UV light—as more than twenty people in hazmat suits file into the room. More wait behind a windowed wall, observing. Lights blaze down. Tools lie on trays. Photographs are snapped. Samples are sliced off. Sensors are jammed into it and taped onto it. Ultrasound probes scan the length of it but can’t beam through the entirety of the thick chitinous husk.

“Strange as this may sound,” one of the scientists says, “we might have a heartbeat.”

Someone else says, “Are you sure?” They both study a rolling monitor, and after a long wait, a spike registers. “There!”

But no one can be certain what the slow spiked rhythm, which comes once every two minutes, actually indicates. Damaged plants and fungi send off electrical signals like wounded human tissue does. An organic alarm.

Isaac Peaches and Director Ricketts stand behind the window, observing. Her arms are crossed except when she leans forward to punch the intercom and ask questions or direct instructions. “Cut it open,” she says, and the team members nod.

An oscillating saw with a blade the size of a sword swings down from the ceiling on an articulated metal arm. It bites into the hard husk and eats through a good ten inches of woody material before finding the softer gray tissue beneath.