And still, the meter read
She felt it then—a faint vibration beneath her boots. Not an earthquake. Not machinery. The floor of the lab was concrete, but beneath that, the soil was waking up. Roots she had never planted were pushing through the foundation. Outside the window, the sky was clear for the first time in a century, but the trees were moving. Not growing. Moving. greening 2
Two years. That was all the time Earth had left before the last carbon buffer collapsed. Two years before the planet’s self-regulating systems—already wheezing and fractured—would enter a terminal cascade. She had been the lead architect of Project Phoenix, the global effort to re-green the planet. They had planted forests the size of continents, scrubbed oceans with molecular sieves, and fed plankton blooms that could be seen from Saturn’s orbit. And still, the meter read She felt it
Dr. Elara Mbeki stared at the holographic display floating above her wrist. The number was blinking: The floor of the lab was concrete, but
