He had unscrewed the cap on the specimen jar and knocked it back into his mouth, nearly gagging on the marshy flavor. He could feel it surging in his throat like a live toad as he swallowed it down. He tried to avoid the vines that snaked across the floor, dashing from one side of the room to the other, but in the end there was nowhere to go. They tangled around his legs and then his torso and finally found his mouth, nose, and ears and probed their way inside him. He remembers suffocating on foul pollen. He remembers hearing grubs and worms twisting in the ground. He remembers his vision going kaleidoscopic with ultraviolet light. He sucked in carbon dioxide and gasped out oxygen. He tasted the sour rot of mildew on his tongue. He became an experiment in his own lab. He spoke to the dirt and the dirt spoke back.

He was certain his symbio prototype—a genome splicer—would negotiate the bridge between flora and fauna. And it did. But his sense of self gave way to a collective intelligence, the phenology. He was and wasn’t Isaac anymore—he was something else, something bigger and extrasensory.

He would remain in his cell less than a day. The door was locked, and the facility was guarded heavily, but the rear wall was not reinforced or alarmed. And why would it be? It was one foot thick and some twenty feet belowground. He could hear the roots on the other side of it—the long, strong roots of a Douglas fir more than a hundred years old—and later that night he put his hand flat against the concrete and called them inside.

First one crack reached across the wall, then another, then another—making a crinkling noise, like a fistful of cellophane. The fissures continued to multiply and widen until all at once they spilled forth a rush of dirt with fat roots snaking through them. Isaac held out his arms in welcome, and the roots wrapped around him and pulled him into the loamy passage they had dug.

His hand broke through the crust of topsoil, then his arm and head followed as he pulled himself up and crawled into the night air and let out a choking, incredulous laugh. But the laugh was cut short by a familiar voice saying, “I always knew you were special.”

He started at the sight of Director Ricketts. She was alone. Her mouth was arranged in a smile and her hands were clasped at her breast. She rarely blinked, and the whites of her eyes gleamed in the moonlight. “Now we can be special together.”