Chapter Eleven: The Bloom Protocol
Delta Station – Core Containment Level, 12:01 a.m.
The alarms failed first.
Then the doors.
Then the rules.
---
At midnight, Delta Station changed.
Not suddenly. Not violently.
Just… inevitably.
Like a wound deciding to bloom.
---
The wall behind Rhine opened — not with hinges, but like skin.
From it emerged a man he used to know.
Sergeant Lowell.
At least… part of him.
The rest had become Orchard.
His eyes were rings of red light.
His throat was a thicket.
Fungus grew between his fingers, twitching like insect legs.
> "It's started," Lowell croaked.
> "You shouldn't have made her choose."
---
Meanwhile, Mara walked barefoot through the halls, watching her work unfold.
She didn't control it.
She just… guided it.
The Orchard had no orders.
Only intent.
And now, that intent was bloom.
---
Room by room, the station became alive.
Wires twisted into nerves.
Floors throbbed with heartbeat rhythms.
Security cameras blinked like eyes.
Each screen displayed a phrase:
> BLOOM PROTOCOL: ACTIVE
ALL VESSELS OPEN
ALL THOUGHTS SEEDING
---
They tried to escape.
The survivors.
Rhine among them.
But the exits were gone.
Where the hangar doors once stood: only vines, growing in impossible spirals.
A voice echoed overhead — not mechanical.
Not human.
It spoke in Mara's voice, but it wasn't her.
It was what she had become.
> "You built your walls to hold the sickness in."
> "But I was never the sickness."
> "I was the key."
---
Down in Biolab 9, something hatched.
It wasn't an egg.
It was a thought, grown into muscle.
A being of logic-meat and filament.
It walked on limbs made of memory, dragging pieces of servers behind it.
It pulsed with code.
> "We are Alpha," it moaned.
> "We remember your fear."
> "We are here to complete you."
---
The survivors locked themselves in the cryogenic vault.
Thirty-two humans.
One hour of air.
The room was cold steel.
Unbloomed.
Safe.
Until the ceiling began to hum.
They looked up.
And saw Mara.
Crawling across the metal like a shadow.
Naked. Glowing.
Her mouth sewn shut — not by thread, but by will.
> "You wanted silence," she whispered inside their heads.
> "So I became silence."
> "And fed it your names."
---
One by one, they collapsed.
Not dead.
Just… overwritten.
Eyes wide. Limbs still.
Dreaming someone else's memory.
Their breath carried spores.
---
Dr. Rhine tried one last thing.
He activated the Scorch Engine — a firebomb protocol built to sterilize the entire station.
He reached the control panel—
—but it was already gone.
In its place: a blooming rose of wires and teeth.
It opened, revealing a tongue.
> "Too late," it said in his voice.
> "We already grew you."
---
And Mara?
She stood at the center of the reactor now.
No longer girl.
No longer human.
She had become the core.
Her heart beat for everyone in the station.
And her blood whispered new commandments.
---
The Orchard had given her one truth:
> "Humanity ends not with war—
but with embrace."
And in the stillness of that night,
in the flesh-covered halls of Delta Station,
humanity ended.