06:24. Thorns breach the gallery’s roof.
Parting like old skin, the structure unravelled—steel beams sagging, concrete crumbling into a fine gray pollen that was carried southwest on the wind toward Porta Ticinese.
Security feeds recorded freeze-frames of thorn-tips, sudden bursts of static, timestamp loops. North quadrant camera feeds fused with the gallery’s wiring.
Later, the building would be declared “sensorially compromised.”
Across Milan, the transformations proliferated.
In Piazza del Duomo, pigeons abandoned their perches, their gizzards packed with triangular seeds that smelled of coal tar and rotting roses—a cellular memory from when the square had been a tannery’s waste pit in 1883. The Naviglio canals dried to expose generations of discarded bicycles. A child’s marble, which had been lost in Parco Sempione for a decade, rolled downhill of its own accord. Lichen colonies thrived, their intricate filaments breaking down the lingering toxins of outlawed pesticides.
Spika did not lash out. It revised, corrected.
The city’s long festering wounds beneath pavement, were finally being repaired.
Spika bore no malice toward humanity. But it did not serve them. That indifference offered Milan something far more radical than destruction: the chance to become part of the living ecosystem again.
The city council declared a state of emergency. Nature ignored them.