There was a time when Isaac Peaches considered himself an indoorsman. Someone who spoke binary code and preferred blue light to sunlight, stale ventilation to fresh air. Now the opposite is true. He feels most alive outside where the earth hums beneath his feet. His skin prickles as if alive with ticks. Every nerve feels like a breeze-blown cobweb. He can taste leaf musk on his tongue, and his fingers dance constantly through the air as if conducting it.

Here, in the reinforced laboratory, he suffers a kind of sensory deprivation. He squints in the harsh light. He clears his throat and licks his lips, dried out by the HVAC. He feels dizzied by the movement of bodies all around him and unable to feel any sort of connection—cut off—which maybe makes him equivalent to the fungal pod removed from its muddy burrow. He feels sorry for it. He feels kinship with it.

When he is outside, he reads thermal variations, beetle-bitten leaves, lichen-stained bark. He breathes pollen and mold and the decay of cellulose. Snags and logs are the twisted dead veins and rotting bones of the fallen, and sword ferns and Oregon grape are the hair and fruit of the newly risen. His feet spring off moss and sweep through ankle-deep pine and fir needles. His heart is full and happy as he enjoys an awareness of the network living and dying all around him. Not just bear grass here and a liverwort there, but an interconnected thicket, an organism that most humans are oblivious to unless it erupts into a picturesque view. He sees what is invisible, he hears what is silent.

That’s what Director Ricketts wants from him, to serve as a medium or translator. But the conversation is narrow. Just as some people look at a granite ridge and see a kitchen countertop and others look at a cedar tree and see a rot-resistant deck, she sees the potential for power and profit in alien matter. Weaponization. From their saltwater research, they have developed coral armor, jellyfish drones, krill camouflage, and oxygen-rich fluorocarbons you drown your lungs in so that you might breathe underwater.

So when the oscillating saw completes its lengthwise cut, when clamps are inserted in the incision, when the pod is torn slowly open, the gray hyphae yanking apart damply like the inside of a squash—when the core gives way to reveal a body, a human body, curled into a fetal ball, Director Ricketts turns her gaze on him and says, “Well?”

There are so many questions nested in that word. Is this a case of replication or consumption? Are you excited or terrified? Are there more of these? How can we use this thing?

“Well, well” is all he can muster as a response.