Outside the gallery, Spika used the parasite’s slime to break down gadgets, apparatuses, machines. It reassembled them with microbes and roots, hybridising steel with biology to rebuild the biosphere—pushing human priorities aside.
The city was rewilding itself using the very technology meant to tame it.
A gutted surveillance camera, its casing streaked with biofilm, now tracked pollinators through ultraviolet light. UV patterns and electrostatic fields mapped flight paths in the urban space—invisible grids steering insects towards the labyrinth. Buzzing became data, steering wings to electrolyte pools and synthetic pollen caches.
Mycorrhizal fungi devoured smartphone screens, leaching indium tin oxide to charge root networks while Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans cracked open lithium batteries—oxidising cobalt cathodes into fertile ions as Penicillium hyphae stitched the toxins into wildflower soil. Nearby, Aspergillus acids melted an EV chassis, its steel ribs wrenched apart by Spika’s thorns to cradle hydroponic basil and lavender; Geobacter bled graphene from the batteries, releasing electroconductive fuel into irrigation channels to nourish the plants’ nutrient-starved roots.
Spika—an unbroken fortress of fused steel and biomass—purged decades of poison. Above, its thorns stretched skyward, each barb a conduit between soil and sun. The old world’s carcass was the new order’s cradle. And it was hungry for more.