At The Root Of All Things

We fought with weapons made from what the soil gave us.

Hulls hollowed and filled with stellar fire. Roots sharpened to points to pierce vacuum suits. The others we kept whole, already knowing the color of ending.

The schism happened like all disasters: unnoticed, then all at once.

All over whether souls could be transplanted like seedlings, moved from dying vessels into new earth. Some believed the self was a taproot, others insisted consciousness was mycelial.

When the battle came to the hydroponics bays, we fought among potatoes growing under artificial suns. The old guard defending the doctrine. The reformists insisting death was just another harvest: we could be replanted elsewhere, in other gardens, under other stars.

I remember the Captain falling between the rutabaga trellises, her last breath tasting of recycled atmosphere and turned soil. She'd shown me how to bridge the divide.

In her final moment she whispered: what if we're both wrong? What if the soul is the act of growing itself, neither root nor network but the reaching toward light?

The battle ended when someone cut the station's gravity.

In weightlessness, the distinction between up and down dissolved. We saw each other suspended, neither rooted nor severed, free of the ground that had defined us.

Now we tend gardens on both sides of the schism. We plant what we must. We harvest what grows. And sometimes, we wonder if the soil itself was always the answer, waiting for us to understand separation was the only thing that was never real.