Mycela's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Mycela wakes to a sound the wall has never made before. She lays her palm against the mycelium and feels it stutter. One of the six remaining sites is transmitting, but the signal breaks apart in her hand. Fragments arrive out of order. Some threads pulse hot, then cold, then hot again. She has archived thousands of hours of clean data. This is not clean data. This is something trying to speak through interference. She pulls the transmitting thread free and lays it across her worktable. The pulses spell nothing she recognizes. She sets the old sand compass beside it, the one that finds objects underground. Its needle spins, stops, spins again. Whatever is broadcasting is not fixed in one place. It is moving, or it is arriving from more than one place at once. She leaves the house and walks to the stone circle at the second site. The runes around the standing stones glow faintly. Rabbits scatter as she steps onto the flat center stones. She kneels and presses both hands to the ground. The signal is louder here, but no clearer. It is not corrupted by distance. It is corrupted at the source. She hears footsteps on stone. The Chaos Chronomancer stands between two of the tall rune stones, holding a pocketwatch that pulses green. "Corrupted," they say, tasting the word. "Not corrupted. Overwritten. Site three is receiving from variation four hundred and thirteen. Bleed-through. I have watched it happen thirty-one times in other places." Mycela does not stand. "Can I hold it?" "Hold it, no. Copy it, yes. For eleven more minutes. Then the seam closes and the site goes dark like the fourth." They do not say this cruelly. They report it. "Weave fast, or weave nothing." She runs. Back at the house she cuts the transmitting thread into six lengths and feeds each into a separate channel of the wall. The archive resists. The threads carry two signals braided together, and the wall wants only one. She stops trying to separate them. She weaves both. The wall accepts the doubled data and swells outward, cells splitting to hold what should not fit. She works until her hands cramp. She works past the eleven minutes. When the last thread settles, the transmission cuts. The third site goes silent. Five remain. She sits on the floor and listens to the wall. It hums differently now. Inside the archive, the corrupted braid pulses beside the clean records, refusing to sort itself. She has preserved something, but she does not know what. She thinks of the Chronomancer's word. Overwritten. She has saved a message from a place that was rewriting one of her sites in real time, and now that place knows where her archive is.