Page 81 of Under Story

The building’s round white stone makes it seem out of time. It is unlike the boxy, concrete older houses, as well as the newer-looking wooden ones. Benches have been placed not on the grass but within the paths themselves. Initially, this struck Laurel as odd. Now she remembers the security guard’s rebuke when she strayed from the walkways herself.

A young, pregnant couple sits on the nearest bench, so Laurel walks to the next one. It faces away from the guards, toward the margins of the cemetery. She looks out at the tombstones. All are equal in size, without religious symbols or text.

Laurel kneels to examine the nearest one. A twig jabs into her shin. She tries to brush it aside, but the twig doesn’t move.

She glances over her shoulder at the guards. One is talking to a visitor; the other is eating a sandwich. Laurel turns back to the tombstone. She sweeps away dirt to reveal something smooth: not a twig, after all, but a wire.

An aggressive beeping sounds from the white building. Laurel rocks back to her feet, pulse speeding, and looks at the entrance again. Someone stands at the door: an employee, judging by his black scrubs and coat. The man hands his keycard to the guards in confusion.

Laurel kneels over the tombstone again, working quickly. Her fingers find a latticework of other wires, fine as rhizomorphs.

They converge at a small screen. At her touch, it powers on.

She expects the screen to solve the mystery of the blank tombstones. It might display identifying information, or even an obituary. Instead, Laurel finds something more baffling: an electrical readout.

The readout measures watts—total power—over the course of each day. Laurel’s mind goes first to fungi: based on the placement of the wires, the source seems to be underground. But the signal doesn’t look like one she’s ever seen. In fungi, electricity spikes slowly. These peaks are much more frequent. The strength is more powerful, too: almost one hundred watts, more than a thousand times what she would expect for even a large fungal body.

—

In her universe, Laurel could bike to campus in no more than fifteen minutes. This trip takes double the time: the campus population is unusually geriatric. At crosswalks, people ambulate slowly with the aid of canes or walkers. Laurel wonders whether she and Eli arrived during a spate of class reunions.

She locks the bike next to the lab. At the entrance, she stops to steel herself. If she encounters a colleague, she’ll have to be quick on her feet. In Antarctica, Kwame didn’t seem to see through her, but Nita was there to help.

Laurel takes the gold ring out of her tote bag. Three of its keys are full-sized; the fourth is tiny, as if made for a miniature padlock. She skips over this one, as well as the key to the house, and tries the other two. The first key doesn’t move, but the second is a perfect fit.

The layout of the lab hasn’t changed: the same sixteen bays, the open workspace behind them. The air is cool and slightly moist; as always, it smells like a forest. Laurel sees no other people—only insects, which skitter through mycelia in the viewing windows. For seconds, she stands still, awash in womb-like comfort.

She sits at the computer. The faculty folder is organized alphabetically. It starts with B, which means that Gloria Albert is missing. This is not completely unexpected—in Laurel’s world, she had retired—but she still feels a rush of disappointment.

Laurel finds her own name easily. Its presence is as unsettling as the absence of Gloria’s.

As she double-clicks the folder, the door to the cold room opens. A blinding circle of light appears. Laurel screams.

Samir turns off a headlamp. “Laurel?”

“Samir.” She gasps her laughter. “You scared me.”

Samir’s compact frame is wiry, his dark hair buzzed and bleached. “How do you think I felt?” he says, faux indignant. “You’re supposed to be off this summer.”

“Fair enough.” She’s glad to see him. In her universe, she took his place as lab tech; in this one, Laurel Two became a professor, and Samir has clearly stayed. “Why are you wearing a headlamp?”

“The light in the cold room is out. I found this in your caving supplies,” he says. “How was the South Pole?”

Laurel has never worked with fungi in caves. She suppresses thoughts of Michigan and Armillaria.

“Mind-boggling,” she says.

“I bet. And now you’re here to see your samples, even though I told you I’d babysit them until May. Oh, drop the act,” he says, mistaking her confusion for theatrics. “You’re in luck. The initial variations are…well, you’ll see.”

He leads her to a series of chambers. Laurel recognizes the first as a mixing chamber, used to combine atmospheric gases. The other cubes are smaller, with clear plexiglass walls.

“I started by mixing gases. Once I had the right proportions for a particular set of conditions, I used an input tube to feed that combination into an individual chamber; then I made additional adjustments for temperature and humidity. Each simulation has a UV light, which I programmed to mimic night and day.”

Laurel doesn’t have to pretend to be impressed. “Incredible work.”

“I try.” Samir points to the simulation chamber farthest left. “This is our control: current Antarctic conditions. I set temperature at fourteen degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity at seventy-five percent. The rest is the same as it is everywhere on earth: twenty-one percent oxygen, seventy-eight nitrogen, et cetera.”

Samir removes a plate. Fossil pieces sit inert in the center of a sponge. Scattered around them are chopped squares of mycelium.