Absolutely, Bryce. Here’s the next chapter, more grounded but still trippy and meaningful, with a clearer focus on the mushroom intelligence network and its relationship to everything humming underneath:
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Chapter 7: Mycelial Protocol
By 7:07 a.m., the sun had shrugged itself loose from the clouds like someone trying to remember a dream. The jackhammer had paused again—union break, divine mercy, or maybe the machine just got self-conscious. Either way, silence returned, the kind that hums if you listen sideways.
I was back in the sub-basement, under Central Library, where the air tasted faintly of printer ink and juniper. My phone had no signal, not even phantom bars. Down here, reality was analog and fungal.
That’s when I saw the conduit.
It looked like a simple HVAC vent, but someone—or something—had threaded fungal hyphae through the grating like embroidery. Delicate strands formed a mesh, pulsing faintly, a slow Morse of moisture and memory. I crouched down. The smell hit me: petrichor, ozone, and coffee grounds that had made peace with death.
My fingers brushed the edge, and I felt it: the network.
Not metaphor. Not metaphor yet. The mycelium had colonized the library’s foundation, weaving through stone and soil, data cables and copper lines. The Floravores weren’t just plants. They were terminals. Interface nodes. Sprouting routers with chlorophyll repeaters.
This wasn’t compost jazz—it was infrastructure.
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I found an old maintenance log, tucked behind a busted water heater, written in pencil on a tortilla wrapper. It said:
“If you hear the roots humming, don’t answer. Unless it’s Thursday.”
Next to it, a diagram: concentric circles, radiating outward from beneath the library. At the center, one word, scrawled in all caps:
COREMOTHER.
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That night, I brought a sample home: a small cluster of what looked like Turkey Tail and some ghostly mycorrhiza wrapped around a USB dongle. I set it on my workbench under a grow light. No rituals, no incense—just curiosity, a microscope, and a half-drunk Topo Chico.
Hours passed. The spores released themselves gently, like they’d been waiting for permission. On the slide, the hyphae aligned into fractal branches, then curled into something shockingly familiar: glyphs. Red and blue again, and a new one—a sharp green curve, like a sideways question mark with teeth.
I blinked.
The mushroom blinked back.
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I started noticing patterns. Certain glyphs formed near certain plant species. The ones around the basil communicated faster, almost erratic. Near rosemary, the glyphs slowed, methodical, like they were buffering a memory. I ran audio tests—white noise, binaural beats, even Floravores Vol. IX on cassette. The fungi responded. The glyphs pulsed in sync with the jazz.
That’s when I realized: this wasn’t communication.
It was voting.
A collective intelligence, fungal democracy conducted through glyphs. Decisions made in time-lapse and silence. They weren’t trying to speak to us. They were speaking about us.
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A contact at Watershed Protection forwarded me a classified memo. No subject line. Just a single sentence:
“Floravores are exceeding protocol thresholds—prepare to archive urban intention.”
Archive urban intention?
What did that even mean?
I biked to Shoal Creek. Stopped beneath the same Live Oak. Dug my hands into the soil and felt it—the low thrum of decisions being made.
The city wasn’t just growing mushrooms.
The mushrooms were growing the city.
One glyph at a time.
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Back at home, I found the cassette again. “Floravores, Vol. IX.” I hadn’t pressed play yet. I didn’t have to. I already knew what was on it.
It wasn’t music.
It was instructions.
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Want to explore the origin of the COREMOTHER next? Or zoom out to show how the city’s bureaucracy is secretly protecting—or misusing—this network?