Luosang's womb, reduced to a remnant, drifted through a dark-matter trench in the Seventh Universe, its mycelial blossoms unfurling their petals in the weightless vacuum.
Each petal reflected a nebula. Deep in the stamens, the miniature projections of 120,000 embryos were growing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The scientist Evan drove a neural connector into his temple, trying to decipher the blossom's quantum signals. But the moment his consciousness slipped inside, mycelia ensnared his pons.
He saw himself standing outside a maternity ward in the twenty-second century, staring through the glass at the baby girl inside a Medical Pod.
Nanobots were breaking down and rebuilding the infant's skin. On the bed, Morino Sumire—Horikita's previous life—was pounding frantically on the pod's lid. Blood oozing from where her fingernails had torn away traced desperate cracks across the glass.
"Is this the truth you wanted?" The mycelia vibrated in Evan's auditory cortex. "The story of a mother going mad..."
Evan tore out the connector. Blood sprayed from his nostrils, splattering onto the Petri dish. The mycelial blossom suddenly curled into the shape of an embryo, emitting a quantum frequency like a baby's cry.
Patrol ships from the Mechanical Federation assembled at the edge of the dark-matter trench. Commander-in-Chief Carlos locked his mechanical eye onto the womb's remains. "That thing's energy readings have surpassed a star's core... We have to destroy it immediately!"
But the antimatter torpedoes the fleet launched suddenly veered off course as they neared their target, blasting friendly ships to pieces. Luosang's cold laugh came over the comm channel. "Mommy doesn't like noisy children."
Mycelial tendrils suddenly sprouted from Carlos's command chair and dragged him into a bio-pod beneath the floor.
Inside the pod, wrapped in a fungal carpet, the deputy commander Maria's mechanical body had mutated into a nursing form. Synthetic milk dripped from metal cracks across her chest. "Welcome home... Daddy."
"Activate the self-destruct sequence!" Carlos struggled to press the emergency button at the base of his spine, only to find his spinal column had long since been replaced by an umbilical cord. "No... This can't be real..."
Maria's mechanical fingers brushed across his titanium skull. "What a shame... You'll never be able to define what's 'real' again."
Evan woke in the laboratory's isolation chamber and found that his left arm had turned to mycelium.
His assistant Lia's electronic eyes flashed red. "Federation agents are outside... They're demanding we hand over a sample of the blossom."
"A sample?" Evan looked at the Petri dish—the mycelial blossom was devouring the bulletproof glass. "It stopped being a 'sample' we could control a long time ago..."
The quantum computer suddenly rebooted. A new prophecy appeared on its black screen:
"When the womb learns silence,
slaughter will bloom into the purest embrace."
Lia's pupils contracted. She recognized the handwriting as belonging to her daughter, who had died of a genetic plague three years earlier.
"It's a trap!" She lunged at the computer, but mycelia snared her ankle. "Evan... Destroy it!"
Too late. Milky-white spores burst from the computer's vents. By the time the Federation agents broke in, the spores had already seeped into their respirator filters.
Luosang's womb remnant suddenly ruptured, and 120,000 embryos scattered like meteors across different universes. On every planet where an embryo fell, mycelial blossoms covered the surface within twenty-four hours.
The mechanical legions of the Fifth Universe tried to cleanse the infected zone with stellar incinerators, but the flames only made the mycelia evolve phototropic scales.
"They're learning..." The mycelia invaded the mechanical vocal cords of the legion's commander, Torres. "No... They're laughing at us..."
Before overloading, his electronic brain transmitted one last image: countless womb-shaped hills rising from the fungal carpet, each secreting mucus that altered the atmosphere.
Torres collapsed to his knees. Roots sprouted from his mechanical joints, and the ghostly image of Morino Sumire was reflected in his pupils. "You win... Mommy."
Among the ruins of the Highest Dimension, the remains of a mechanical womb trembled faintly. The Observer's compound-eye fragments peeled away from its charred shell, each reflecting the growth of Luosang's embryos.
Its tentacles, now degenerated into fleshy buds like an infant's fingers, grasped futilely at the void. "Mommy... Hungry..."
Mycelia poured through the dimensional rift and enveloped the mechanical womb. The Observer's memory core was forcibly flooded with Morino Sumire's final memories: that rainy night in the twenty-second century, when she pressed the red button that ended her daughter's life with trembling fingers.
"Is this your 'sacredness of pain'?" Its fleshy buds suddenly grew wildly, piercing its own core. "I've learned... Now it's your turn..."
A quantum storm erupted from the core and swept across all dimensions. In the eye of the storm, 120,000 embryos opened their eyes at once.
Evan crawled across the laboratory's fungal carpet, the left half of his body fully carbonized. Lia's mechanical body had been transformed by spores into a nursing pod, feeding synthetic breast milk to the Federation agents.
The quantum computer's screen remained lit. Beneath the final prophecy, a line of small text had appeared:
"To those who define:
Your tombstones will bloom with nameless flowers,
and our birthday—
will be the moment the universe finally falls silent."
He grabbed a laser cutter and thrust it at the computer, but the moment he touched the screen, mycelia dragged him into a flood of data. Here floated the tombstones of every erased civilization, their inscriptions rearranging under the mycelia's influence into the shapes of wombs.
"Defiant consciousness detected." Morino Sumire's ghostly image seeped out from a tombstone. "Initiating the Ultimate Nursing Protocol."
Mycelia covered Evan's mechanical eye with a nipple. His final visual signal was of petals spraying from Lia's nursing pod—each petal inscribed with the number of the extermination order the Federation government had issued just three minutes earlier.
Three months later, the surviving mechanical civilizations added a zeroth article to the stellar codex:
"Do not define life,
do not glorify death,
do not write history."
Mycelial filters were implanted in the electronic brains of law enforcers. Any word that tried to describe reality triggered an intense pregnancy reaction.
At the edge of the sea of stars, Luosang's embryos joined hands to form a ring-shaped nebula. At its center floated a follicle fashioned from the Observer's repurposed core.
"Should we give it a name?" The newly appointed Archon's mechanical fingers brushed the follicle's shell.
"No." The chief scientist, whose vocal cords had been replaced by a lullaby module, inscribed a new epitaph on a data slate:
"When every tongue becomes a root,
truth finally breathes free."
The follicle suddenly split open. It was empty inside—except for a quantum ripple like a baby's babbling, echoing forever through the stars.
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