Inside Greenhouse Four, the air sat heavy, wet, and suffocatingly hot. He smelled of composted straw, sulfur fertilizer, and the yeasty, sweet rot of mature fungal caps. For four thousand three hundred and eighty days, Elsi Marr had kept this artificial jungle breathing beneath three acres of leaded glass. Overhead, two hundred high-intensity copper arc-lamps buzzed along the iron heavy beams, bathing the tiered beds in a harsh, mustard-colored glare that burned the eyes and coated the back of the throat with the metal taste of rusted copper.
Beneath that artificial sun, five hundred acres of terraced beds—stacked four levels high on rotting oak frames—produced the daily bread of thirty thousand citizens. The crop was not golden wheat or sweet orchard fruit. It was thick, rubbery gray shelf-fungi, engineered thirty years ago to feed the mining shifts, paired with stunted, pale spelt whose roots drank nutrient water pumped through lead-jacketed copper pipes. If the pumps stopped, the roots rotted in thirty-six hours. If the arc-lamps went black, the fungal loaves soured into toxic, yellow sludge before the spores could mature.
Elsi stood at the end of the central water channel, an iron spading fork clutched in her dirt-crusted palms. Her gray hair was tucked beneath a woolen kerchief caked with dry peat. Her rough canvas smock was soaked through with sweat across the shoulder blades. Around her, sixty women and boys worked in wild, clockwork silence. Their curved harvesting knives rose. Then they fell with rhythmic regularity, slicing the thick…
