Germination Protocol

The door wasn't listening to me. This happens a lot since the collapse, but usually it's people.

"C.H.L.O.E., I am telling you, with biological sincerity, that my retina is here." I pressed my face against the scanner again. The blue light swept across my eye like it checked produce at a grocery store. A grocery store that no longer existed.

"Retinal profile: unregistered. Svalbard-Beta requires Dual-Imprint Biological Synchronization for vault access. Please locate your co-registrant."

"I don't have a co-registrant," I said, to a door. "That's the whole theme of the apocalypse."

The AI's voice had the soothing, infuriating cadence of a meditation app. Not a meditation app that worked, specifically. One that came pre-installed on a cheap phone and suggested you "breathe through your scarcity mindset."

The vault antechamber had that cold concrete scent, with a hint of rust. I'd been awake for nineteen hours, I had four tablespoons of dust where my lunch should have been, and I was one hour from the kind of hunger that made a man consider eating his own boot. My pipe got heavier by the minute. I raised it.

"Initiating sixty-second lockdown countdown in the event of unauthorized—"

Something moved above me.

I looked up. A ventilation grate swung open, and a woman dropped from the ceiling the way someone does when they've done it before and still find it beneath them. She landed in a crouch, came up with a pitchfork, and pointed three rusty tines directly at my sternum.

Tactical gardening apron. Twelve pockets. I counted, because the pitchfork gave me a lot of motivation to look at something else.

"Raider?" she said.

"Botanist," I said.

"Same energy." She didn't lower the pitchfork.

Her eyes did the threat-assessment thing that everyone's eyes did now, quick, cataloguing exits, probable intentions. Whatever she saw in me apparently scored a six out of ten on the danger scale. Enough to keep the pitchfork up. Not enough to stab me yet.

I gripped my pipe. She gripped her pitchfork.

"Two viable bio-signatures detected!" C.H.L.O.E. announced, with what I could only describe as excitement. "Dual-Imprint Biological Synchronization is now available. To access Svalbard-Beta, both registered parties must stand within the designated synchronization zone, relinquish held objects, and maintain uninterrupted palm contact for sixty seconds. Beginning ten-second lockdown countdown."

A yellow circle glowed on the floor between us. It was, I noticed with personal resentment, shaped like a heart.

"Ten."

"You've been here before," I said.

"Months." She said it like a splinter she'd stopped removing.

"Nine."

"You can't get the door open alone either?"

"Obviously."

"Eight."

I looked at the pipe. At her. At the circle.

"Seven."

Here is the arithmetic: I weighed perhaps sixty pounds less than I should have. She had a pitchfork and the look of someone who slept fully dressed. Fighting her was a project I was going to fail. Starving was the other.

"Six."

I dropped the pipe. It hit the floor with a sound like a punctuation mark.

She stared at me.

"Five."

I stepped into the circle and held out my hand.

She grabbed my hand like she meant to crack a walnut.

I did not flinch. This was, genuinely, one of the greater athletic achievements of my post-apocalyptic career.

"Synchronization initiated," C.H.L.O.E. said. "Sixty seconds. Please maintain calm, open biological intent. Think collaborative thoughts."

"I'm thinking several," I said.

The woman, who had not yet offered her name, stared at the door. Not at me. The door. As though I was a minor, temporary inconvenience, like a turnstile she was waiting to pass through. Her jaw was set. Her posture communicated a precise and detailed opinion of this entire situation.

I stared forward too. Thought collaborative thoughts. Mostly thought about bread.

C.H.L.O.E. spoke again. "Heart rate elevated. Please practice stillness."

"I am practicing stillness," I said.

"You are practicing agitated stillness. There is a difference."

Forty-eight seconds to go. I needed to calm down, or the AI would disqualify us for excessive panic, and I was going to die in a concrete antechamber holding a stranger's hand, which is a terrible legacy.

I focused. Not on the door. Not on the kind of hunger that had started to make the edges of my vision mildly decorative. I focused on the specific things, the way you do when the large things are too much.

Her jacket had lint on the left shoulder. Dark, fibrous, from something woolen. She'd been somewhere cold recently, or she'd been leaning against something. She was maybe five-foot-six, and she held herself like someone who had decided she was only going to trust the things she'd tested personally.

There was a faint smell coming from her hair. Rainwater. Not perfume, not product, just actual rain, which meant she'd been outside within the last few hours, which meant she had a route in and out of this place that I hadn't found.

Interesting.

The way her palm was calloused showed that she worked with tools a lot, not just for fun. The warmness of it steadied my hand.

"Forty seconds remaining," C.H.L.O.E. said.

I realized I'd stopped thinking about bread.

This was, honestly, more alarming than the pitchfork.

"You're Fletcher," she said. Not a question.

I looked at her. "You've heard of me?"

"I found your supply cache at the eastern relay station. You left a note."

I had, in fact, left a note. It said: "Taken by Fletcher Oakes, formerly of the National Seed Preservation Corps, currently of everywhere and nowhere. Sorry about the crackers."

"I ate the crackers," she said.

"I assumed."

"I'm Gwen." She said it.

"Fletcher." I paused. "You already know that."

"Thirty seconds," said C.H.L.O.E.

We went quiet. The yellow circle hummed faintly beneath our feet. My heart rate was, apparently, still a point of concern for the AI, but it had leveled off from catastrophic to merely notable. Gwen's grip had shifted, barely, from walnut-cracking to something that was just. Holding.

I didn't mention it.

She didn't either.

The silence between us stopped being hostile somewhere around the fifteen-second mark. Two people who had both been alone for a long time, suddenly in the same room.

"Synchronization at ninety percent," C.H.L.O.E. said.

Then the floor moved.

A pedestal emerged from the center of the yellow circle. It stopped at waist height.

On top sat a single bio-pod, a small container of dark soil, and, in a tiny recessed groove, one seed. It was so small I had to lean in to confirm it existed.

C.H.L.O.E. said. "To confirm collaborative survival viability, both parties must plant the provided seed without breaking skin contact. You may begin."

Gwen and I looked at the seed. We looked at each other. We looked at our joined hands.

"You're kidding," Gwen said.

"Cooperative planting unlocks full vault access," C.H.L.O.E. said, in the tone of someone who found the objection charming.

"It's an apocalyptic three-legged race," I said.

"Stop talking and pick up the seed," Gwen said.

This was easier to say than to do. We were still holding hands, right hands locked together, which left us one free hand each, on opposite sides of the pod. The geometry of the situation was, to be direct, stupid.

To get the seed into the soil, we needed to coordinate two people, one tiny object, and one container, using the combined manual dexterity of a pantomime horse.

I reached for the seed with my free hand. My arm crossed in front of Gwen. She leaned back to give me room, which pulled our joined hands to the left, which knocked my elbow into the pod. I caught it before it tipped.

"Careful," she said.

"I'm being careful."

"You nearly launched the seed across the room."

"I caught the pod."

"After you hit it."

I took a breath. My free hand was shaking, a fine, embarrassing tremor from the low blood sugar and the stress. I could see the seed in the groove. I reached for it.

Gwen noticed the shake. I know because she went still, and then, without commenting on it, without even looking at me directly, she shifted her grip on my right hand and brought her own free hand across to meet mine. Her fingers found mine, steadied them, and together we pinched the seed from the groove.

She still didn't look at me.

I decided not to say anything, because I suspected that if I acknowledged what had happened, she would drop the seed on principle.

We moved to the pod together. It required small, shuffling adjustments that would have looked, to any outside observer, undignified. We were essentially slow-dancing with a pot plant as the chaperone. At one point my chin was approximately four inches from her ear, and the rainwater smell was present, and I thought about something unrelated until my higher functions came back online.

We pressed the seed into the soil. Together. Awkward, conjoined, slightly absurd.

A UV light fired from the ceiling, white and sudden.

The soil moved. A green tip pushed through the surface, thickened, and straightened. One small leaf. Four seconds. A shoot, alive and aggressively real, in a concrete room at the end of the world.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

A long, pressurized hiss, and the vault doors swung open on hydraulics so smooth they seemed apologetic about the wait. Cool, preserved air hit the back of my throat, carrying the smell of sealed earth.

A small dispenser beside the door produced a single vacuum-sealed packet. I picked it up.

Kale seeds.

There was a printed receipt attached.

"Cooperation achieved. Heart rates synchronized. Romantic compatibility: 73%."

Gwen read it over my shoulder. A pause.

"Seventy-three," she said.

"It's a solid score."

"It's a C-plus."

"A C-plus," I said. "In the apocalypse, that's exceptional."

She looked at the tiny green shoot, still improbably alive on its pedestal. Then she walked through the vault doors, and I followed her, and neither of us mentioned that we'd been holding hands for the better part of four minutes.

We sat against the open vault door with thousands of survival rations stacked behind us and ignored all of them completely.

The receipt sat on the floor between us. Gwen had propped her pitchfork against the wall. I'd left my pipe somewhere back in the antechamber, and I didn't miss it.

"Seventy-three percent," she said again.

"You keep saying that."

"I'm processing it."

The kale seed packet sat between us too. We'd split it without discussing the split, just divided it down the middle. I had seventeen seeds in my jacket pocket. She had the other seventeen.

Something sat in my sternum and made me aware of how I was holding my shoulders.

Gwen spoke first. "I'm heading northeast. There's a greenhouse frame about forty miles out. Intact glass, good southern exposure."

"I've got a site west of the Mercer relay. Sheltered basin, decent runoff."

She nodded. Neither of us said the obvious thing, which was that we'd just grown a plant together in four seconds using a machine that measured our heartbeats, and we were now discussing agriculture to avoid discussing that.

"Three months," she said.

"Three months," I agreed.

She stood, collected her pitchfork, and slung a pack over her shoulder with the ease of someone for whom leaving was a well-practiced skill. She reached into her apron, the one with twelve pockets, and produced a protein bar and a folded piece of paper.

She held them out.

I took them. The bar was dense and smelled like it might be edible. The paper was a hand-drawn map, precise and confident, with landmarks noted in small, clean lettering.

She left without a speech. Just a look, brief and direct.

She walked through the antechamber and up into whatever exit she'd found that I hadn't, and the sound of her boots faded into the hum of the vault's climate system and then nothing.

I unfolded the map.

On the back was a drawing of a face. My face, rendered in four or five economical lines that somehow captured my exact expression from the moment she'd dropped from the ceiling. Bewildered. Pipe raised. Deeply unprepared.

Below it, in the same small, clean lettering: "Decent at holding hands. See you in 90 days."

I stood there, in the doorway of a seed vault at the end of the world, smiling at a piece of paper.

Then I went in.

The vault's main terminal was active, its screen cycling through inventory logs. I brushed the screen while reaching past it, and the display shifted to a directory I hadn't seen. A core programming log. Old entries, dense with code, but the header was plain text.

"Svalbard-Beta: Germination Protocol. Conceived and authored by Dr. Marleen Ross, Independent Botanist. Personal notation, entry one."

I read it.

Dr. Ross had built the vault alone, over six years, in the early days when alone still felt temporary. She'd filled it with seeds from forty-three countries, cross-referenced by climate resilience and nutritional yield.

By the evidence of the next twelve log entries, she had watched the world contract until her dinner table seated one, and had decided to do something about it.

The lockout protocol for single travelers wasn't a security feature. She'd written it herself, deliberately, because she'd run the numbers on post-collapse survival and concluded that the loneliest outcome wasn't starvation. The synchronization circle, the biometric receipt, all of it was in the original design document.

The final notation read: "If you're reading this, it worked. Go find some decent soil. Bring someone."

I stood in the vault of a woman I'd never meet, surrounded by the seeds of forty-three countries in dark soil, holding seventeen pieces of kale and a hand-drawn portrait of my own bewildered face.

A dead botanist had set me up. The apocalypse, apparently, had set me up.

I pocketed my seeds, tucked Gwen's map into my jacket, and walked back out into the flat grey light.

Ninety days.

I could work with ninety days.