Chapter Two: The Root Memory

The internet was useless now.

Every theory had its prophet. Every symptom, its hashtag. "Green Fever." "The Petal Plague." "Gaia's Reckoning." "The Chlorovirus." No two scientists could agree on its mechanism; no government could contain it.

And every time Elara opened her inbox, it was more panic in pixels.

Is it airborne?
Is this genetic warfare?
Is my son still my son? He’s asking to be buried in the garden.
What are we becoming?

She stopped answering after the third week. The questions had outpaced the answers. Even the data had started lying.

Because the transformation didn’t obey scientific timelines. It wasn’t linear. Some people bloomed in days. Others lingered for months, suspended between flesh and frond. Some reverted for a time�"buds falling off like dead skin�"only to reawaken in a sudden, irreversible surge of growth.

And then there were the Rootless.

---

Rootless was a term coined by accident�"originally meant to describe subjects who resisted the transformation entirely. No green hue. No floral eruptions. Just an ever-worsening fatigue and mental fog, followed by death. Not sudden, not painful. Just… fading.

As if their bodies rejected the bloom and shut down instead.

“Some people can’t connect,” Havel had told her during one of their late-night data sessions. “Like a tree that can’t find water.”

“Or like a signal that can’t find its frequency.”

“Do you really think that’s what this is? A signal?”

Elara stared at the brain scans of Subject 47. The blooming man.

Neural architecture unlike anything they’d seen. Not deteriorating�"reorganizing. Patterns similar to mycelial webs. A kind of decentralized cognition. Dream logic hardwired into biology.

“I think we’re witnessing something older than humanity,” she said. “And it’s not speaking. It’s remembering.”

“Remembering what?”

“What we were. Before we thought we were apart from it all.”

---

Three more containment breaches occurred that week.

Not violent. Just slow leaks.

Subjects wandered off into the woods. Security footage showed them walking calmly, barefoot, sometimes hand-in-hand, always toward trees. When approached, they would smile. Not resist. Just vanish into the green.

Dogs wouldn’t follow them.

Drones lost signal.

One camera showed a man kneeling in a meadow, vines bursting from his back like wings. He didn’t scream. He looked relieved.

Some called them losses.

Others�"emergents.

---

Kaia stopped sleeping on a bed.

She’d begun curling up on a patch of moss near the back porch. It grew impossibly fast, despite Elara’s efforts to prune it, remove it, quarantine it. She even tried chemicals, once. Kaia’s skin blistered for a week. The moss returned overnight.

“It’s choosing where it wants to grow,” Kaia said one morning, sunlight spilling across her shoulders like a benediction.

“Don’t talk like that.”

“You think you’re watching a disease, but you’re studying a metamorphosis.”

“That’s not what science�"”

“Then maybe science needs to evolve.”

Elara rubbed her temples. She hadn’t slept more than four hours a night. Even when she closed her eyes, the green stayed behind her eyelids. Diagrams. Fractal patterns. Roots. Always roots.

“Your cells aren’t human anymore.”

“They’re not not human.”

Kaia looked at her, eyes ringed with ivy-laced veins.

“You think this is the end of something. I think it’s the beginning.”

---

They had attempted a surgical removal at one point�"early stages, a woman with a small cluster of white blossoms blooming from her ribcage. She’d begged for the procedure.

It was a disaster.

The roots bled like arteries. The moment they were cut, the woman seized, not from blood loss�"but from something deeper. As if her system collapsed without the network she had grown into. She died on the table. Not from surgery.

From disconnection.

Autopsy revealed no cause of death.

The tissues looked healthy.

The flowers remained open.

---

That night, Elara wandered into the forest behind the containment zone.

Not far. Just far enough.

She brought her tablet, took samples, photographed spores on the underside of new leaves. The trees were unusually silent�"no birds, no wind.

But the air... it was humming.

She felt it in her jaw. In her teeth.

Not a sound. A resonance.

She turned in place, looking for movement. Found none.

Then she touched the trunk of a young ash tree. Smooth. Cool. Alive.

Something surged in her fingertips.

Images. Not memories�"impressions.

A network. Vast. Tangled. Pulsing with information older than language.

A spiral of green. A scream made of pollen. A doorway of bark, opening into thought.

She yanked her hand back, breath ragged.

Nothing had changed.

Except her.

---

Back in the lab, she ran her own blood.

Three times.

Same result.

Elevated photosynthetic proteins.

Trace amounts of chloroplast DNA.

Green blood.

“No,” she whispered.

“Not me.”

She stared at the microscope, at the tiny, swaying cells under the glass�"flickering with impossible life.

“I didn’t breathe it. I wore gloves. I wore my�"”

But it wasn’t air. It wasn’t contact.

It was proximity.

Verdant Syndrome was never meant to spread like a contagion.

It wasn’t passing through bodies.

It was calling them back.

And some, like Elara, were beginning to answer.

Author's Note

In The Root Memory, I wanted to explore how transformation challenges not just our biology, but our belief systems. What happens when science can no longer parse the truth? When a phenomenon isn’t a threat to destroy us—but an invitation to become something else? Elara's journey isn’t only about saving her sister—it’s about confronting the myth of human separation from the natural world. And as the lines blur, so does the certainty of what it means to remain ourselves.

This chapter is dedicated to those who still listen when the forest grows quiet—who understand that not every silence is empty.

– Oghogho Akpeli

Reviews

[Joss Jeffrey]

Your work is absolutely remarkable, and I will love to help to bring it to life through story art and animation and also i can help you to reach a broader audience. Do you have any other social media account when we can connect? you can find me on this Telegram: @Yaroslava_6ixyes or discord: @yaroslava70