The quant-truck rumbled beneath them, a low vibration threading through the steel walls, the container's ribcage. Kevin sat against the far corner, flicking through dead-end feeds on the BBS. He muttered, half to himself, half to m00m.
"Every chiphead in the world's a potential snitch… we're just cargo on borrowed time."
m00m didn't answer. His face on the container wall pulsed gently, eyes closed in a way that wasn't human sleep, but something else, an idle state. Faint ripples of blue shimmered across the walls pulsing in the rhythm of a lullaby.
Goldstar, exhausted, pulled her jacket tighter and slid down against the humming floor. Her eyelids fluttered shut as she slipped asleep…
Gwarmar.
It stretched forever: oceans glimmering like liquid glass, forests whispering with bioluminescent spores, naturally occurring tapioca craters hovering fifty feet above the surface like floating moons, and towering monolithic triangular sustenance deposits, g00ritos, jutting their giant edible shards from the ground. The very ground pulsed with a network of mycelial threads, carrying language and feeling through the soil itself. Everything alive was connected.
The m00ms:
Not shipping containers, not awkward shapes of steel. Here they were fluid and free, intelligence humming in every globule of their being. They spread flat into the soil, commuting through the network, then leapt like dolphins from the ocean, shimmering goo blobs arcing high to snatch the pearls of floating tapioca orbs before crashing joyfully back into the ground.
Harmony. Simplicity. A species vast and powerful, yet playful.
One of them, smaller than some, gentler than most, drifted through his patch of mycelium, spending lots of his time counting the passage of enormous snails gliding across the top soil. He counted them one by one, their slimy trails sketching maps only he understood. His joy was simple: escargot crossing under Gwarmillion sunsets, and the boba-like tapioca spheres that burst sweet between his membranes gracing his tonseculars.
At the center of this world lay the g00wiy Baths: an endless, bubbling oasis glowing bright blue, rich with minerals and microbes unseen anywhere else in the universe. This sacred pool boiled continuously atop the galaxy's largest known limestone deposit, a cosmic cenote. It was the cradle of their kind. One glob rising to the surface every hour, for millions of years, giving birth to new m00ms that would soon join the topsoil. A sacred rhythm, the planet's goo-filled heartbeat.
But shadows streaked the skies. Metallic shapes intruding where none belonged. Probes from elsewhere. Human machines. Their arrival gashing the harmony. Forests burned. The mycelial connection shivered. The first soft tremors of possible future extinction rippled outward.
The dream warped, colors dripping, skies bleeding like a damp oil painting. Goldstar felt her chest tighten. A prophecy whispered across the spores: they will come for the Baths.
Her eyes snapped open.
The container walls acked around her. m00m's glow receded, his eyes blinking open too, as if startled from the same dream...
Goldstar pressed a palm to her chest, breath shaky.
"…weird dream."
Kevin looked up from his corner. "What, how the hell can you take a nap right now. I'm way too stressed for that. Any minute now and my info is doxxed. I promise you."
She shook her head, but in a "NO" motion for Kev, but also to shake off the dream. "That was weird. It didn't feel like mine."
m00m said nothing. But his eyes glimmered, faint and knowing, as though the dream still pulsed and played out inside him.