The Roots Run Deep

by MadMikeMarsbergen

1

It all started with a flicker.

Kel's computers were the very best; he'd built them himself, from parts not to be seen on the market for many months, sometimes years. Being a tester at UrSprung—the largest technology company in the world—had its perks, one of which was getting early access to future tech. Understandably, they often had bugs in need of squashing. So a flicker of the screen wasn't something to write home about.

Following his normal routine for such matters, Kel powered down the rig, unplugged it, flipped it on its side and started unscrewing the tower. He wanted to see if there were any physical imperfections: whether something had fried, or even fallen off. Sometimes tech was rushed to testers faster than the glue could dry, and things could crap out. He'd seen it happen before. Kel slid out one of the tower's side panels expecting to see just that.

But the parts looked pristine except for a few hitherto unheard-of things.

"The hell...?"

A purple-petalled flower had blossomed out of a small crack in the metallic-blue motherboard, its long stem rooted deep out of sight. So deep it's impossible, Kel thought to himself, knowing the motherboard was ultra-thin depth-wise, and yet the stem made it seem as if there were inches upon inches of growing room, maybe even more. And oozing out from where the stem grew was a thick silver liquid, which he didn't dare touch. Curious of the flower, though, he put thumb and forefinger around the stem and gently plucked it from its home, pulling and pulling like that never-ending hanky used by clichéd clowns everywhere. The thought might have made him laugh if the situation hadn't been so bizarre.

When he finally managed to remove the flower—roots and all—and set it down on his dusty floor, the stem was three feet long. At one end, the flower's white roots were bunched-up and attempting to escape from a clump of what first appeared to be dirt. Kel sniffed it and recoiled; it smelled like fried circuits. He crumbled the "dirt" between his fingers and watched shiny, light-catching little shards fall to the floor, crackling, popping, disintegrating with the stench of sulphur. At the other end, the purple petals turned grey, then white, then—

"Ah!" Kel threw himself backwards as the flower went up into white-blue flames. The stem snapped left and right, twisting and twirling itself like a snake in the process of dying. He debated stomping the fire out, but it ended on its own accord seconds later.

"What the hell just happened?" he asked himself as he stared at the blackened ash, still formed in the shape of the flower and its stem.

That's when Kel's phone rang.

2

"Hello?" Kel said tentatively into the phone; he hadn't recognized the number.

"Kelvin Isaac Walters." The man's voice on the other end of the line sounded dry, low.

"Who is this?"

No response—just the man's heavy breathing.

"Hello? Who's there?" Kel started mentally counting to ten, prepared to hang up the phone when he reached ten.

He got to nine when the breathing stopped and the man said: "The roots run deep."

And the line went dead.

3

Kel never told anyone about the cryptic phone call, nor did he mention the flower mysteriously growing out of the experimental motherboard. To all observing eyes in his everyday life, everything was normal with him. When asked by Mr. Vachsind, his boss, how the prototype components were operating, he'd simply say, "Some visual artifacts here and there, but nothing major."

But behind the closed doors of his apartment a very different situation could be found. The phone calls became more frequent—every time, that same gravel-voiced man would say Kel's full name, breathe heavily into the phone for almost thirty seconds before repeating the phrase "the roots run deep," and promptly hanging up. Paranoid someone was watching him, Kel had taken to taping newspaper over the insides of all his windows.

But still the phone calls kept coming.

So he unplugged his phone.

And still it rang.

4

Now he stepped out of his apartment, phone cradled in his arms. He'd dump it somewhere far away, or maybe he'd smash the hell out of it—he hadn't yet decided the plan, he merely wanted to be rid of the infernal thing.

Down the stairs, doors opening as he passed them. People poked their heads out. He could feel their eyes boring into the back of his head, maybe thinking rude things about his sanity, perhaps pondering where he was going and why he had a bulky phone in his arms. He didn't care. One thought occupied Kel's mind, pushing out all the others: Ditch the damn phone. Ditch it. Ditch it. Get rid of it.

He stepped out into the February chill and realized he'd forgotten his coat. Too late. Got to keep going. Get it done. Ditch the phone. Shivering, Kel kept moving.

The city was alive that night, as it was every night. Swarms of people marched through the streets. Buildings blinked as workers left or arrived. Bombarding passersby with ultra-fluorescent advertisements about Quick Fix Mortgage scams, products from eSex Pill Surplus++, No-Bottom Loans, DigiOrgy4U, MeFirst, PushTilItHurts, and the latest from UrSprung Technology. Too much to take. Always trying to sell. A world of selfishness and mass-consumption.

Hugging the phone, slowly melting snowflakes freckling his black hair, Kel took turns at random. At some point he reached an area entirely alien to him. A barren expanse. Up ahead, a bridge crossed above, connecting two roads he didn't know. This would do. He slipped and slid as he continued forward, seeking shelter from the wind under the bridge.

The phone rang.

He didn't answer it. Entered the tunnel beneath the bridge instead.

The phone kept ringing.

Kel didn't want to hear that voice again. The way it said his name. The way it said those words: "the roots run deep." It creeped him out. But the phone kept ringing. And then he had an idea.

Kel picked up the handset of the unplugged phone. Held it far away from his ear.

The ringing stopped.

No voice spoke into his ear. If it did, he couldn't hear it over the howl of the wind.

He grinned, laughed, couldn't believe how simple it had been. He'd just needed to leave the handset off its cradle. So stupid! All of this could've been avoided if he'd done just that one simple, stupid thing.

THE ROOTS RUN DEEP, the voice boomed in Kel's skull. THE ROOTS RUN DEEP, KELVIN. THE ROOTS RUN DEEP, ISAAC. THE ROOTS RUN DEEP, WALTERS. THE ROOTS RUN DEEP.

"Enough!" Kel screamed, his voice bouncing back at him from the tunnel walls, sounding wild and unwell. He threw the phone, heard it clatter against the cement and went to his knees, fingers digging into his scalp. He felt dizzy and lightheaded. His vision grew black around the edges.

Kel's stomach lurched. He gagged in reflex. A dull, throbbing pain started in his nose. Wiping his hand at it, he saw wet blood on his knuckles—it looked black in the limited light. There was something lodged in his nose. He knew it. Just knew it. Felt it. It wanted to come out. But it didn't know how. He'd have to get it out. He dug his finger in one nostril, felt something but knew one finger wouldn't do it. He jammed another finger from his other hand into the other nostril, got it in deep. There was something soft in there, velvety. Stroking it as blood ran down his wrists in rivulets, Kel eased whatever was in his nose towards one of the exits. Then, with his other finger, he worked it down the nostril, slowly but surely, until the end of it was poking out his nose. Felt like a clump of pointy things. He took his other finger out of his nose and pulled on the clump, tugging and tugging, feeling whatever was in there slide out, greasy, slimy, sticky, he just wanted it out. He screamed as something cut him inside his nostril. Sweat poured down from his temples and hairline. One last tug would do it, and—

Kel blacked out, cold and still in the chill of the February night. Snowflakes fell on him. Beside his bloody hands was a purple flower and its thorny, three-foot-long stem. It looked beautiful and dangerous for just a second, before it burst into flames, twisting left and right, then turned to a puddle of quickly solidifying green goo.

The phone rang in the tunnel.

No one was around to answer it.

5

Kel woke to the sound of furious knocking at his door. He sat up in the darkness, made even darker because he'd taken to painting the newspaper on his windows black. He waited for his night vision to strengthen before getting out of bed. Stumbling and still half-asleep, he headed out of the bedroom and into the main space of the apartment. The only light in there came from a crack beneath the door—the same door being knocked upon.

The light in the crack was unbroken.

Finding this strange, Kel lowered himself to the floor, head tilted, and peered beneath the door. No feet. Nobody there. And yet something was knocking, hammering harder now.

Not expecting to see anyone, Kel stood up and put his eye to the peephole and saw no one—just the wall, yellow from the light in the hall.

A note slid underneath the door.

6

KELVIN ISAAC WALTERS.

THE ROOTS RUN DEEP.

CHECK YOUR FARM.

7

Kel crumpled the note into a tight ball and threw it. Check his farm? That could only mean one thing: his server farm. And if any bastards had sabotaged it, there'd be hell to pay. He flipped on the light and rushed through the apartment, turning on all the lights with quick jerks of his hand. He stepped into the server room, saw the rows glowing blue in the darkness, and hit the light switch.

Everything appeared fine from where he stood. Slowly, he walked down the line, glancing left and right at each row of servers. His farm stored more than just his own personal data; it was one of many hubs for the entire city. If these babies went kaboom, a lot of people would be very, very angry. Many people didn't make hard backups of their files, and if they did they weren't regular about it. Instead they relied on Kel and others like him, relied on the farm to store their items of import seemingly forever, so they could recall it whenever they wanted, regardless of the system they were using to access it.

Kel took pride in his farm.

All appeared well, and he was prepared to turn the lights off and head back to sleep, when he noticed something off with one of the servers in the far corner. A green leaf hung out of the ventilation slit. Kel's heart practically leapt out of his mouth, and he forced open the cabinet, hoping it was a fluke, merely a stray leaf from some houseplant he— Oh, who was he kidding?

"Shit. Oh shit." Kel sat back on the floor and stared in disbelief. The whole cabinet had been gutted. No hardware at all. Inside, where the server's components should have been, was a web of flowers and stems and roots, crisscrossing every which way, completely overgrown.

He started ripping out the plants.

Kel didn't sleep until he'd triple-checked every server's cabinet. And even then, he mostly tossed and turned.

8

The next morning at work, while sitting at his computer and staring at the screen, unable to focus on anything except his worries as to what the hell was happening to him, Kel saw a message pop up. It was from Mr. Vachsind's secretary. Mr. Vachsind wanted to see him in his office. He barely registered the seriousness of the message—"Mr. V ain't pleased, Kel! Come see him ASAP!"—got up and walked out of his little windowless cubicle in the centre of the floor's hive, passing co-workers who watched his journey with great interest.

He wasn't dwelling on what was coming, though. No, he was too busy thinking about the farm. The phone calls. The motherboard with the flower growing out of it.

He'd woken up—though it'd be fairer to say he'd simply gotten out of bed, as he'd done very little if any sleeping—and checked his server farm to see if it was still intact. He didn't know what he'd been expecting... maybe that the whole thing had been some wild, unrelenting dream. But no, it had been very real, for he'd stepped into the server room and seen—and felt—a sweltering greenhouse. Where the servers had been the previous night, now it was dense jungle, with thick vines hanging from the ceiling and full-bloom plants tangled everywhere like a primitive bundle of cables. Bugs flew around. Bees pollinated. He'd lost all hope at that point. He opened a cabinet here and there and found only plants outgrowing their makeshift gardens.

He'd gone to work in a haze much like the one in which he now walked. Opening the first door to Mr. Vachsind's office, Kel barely registered the concerned look of the man's secretary. He heard in one ear as he passed her, "Mr. V will see you now," but didn't acknowledge it. Just walked in and closed the second door behind him.

"Have a seat, Mr. Walters," Mr. Vachsind said, indicating the empty chair in front of the desk he was sitting behind. He was a big man, doughy would be the word, Kel supposed. It seemed he'd gotten doughier over the holidays.

"What are you upset about, Mr. Vachsind?" Kel asked, only now comprehending that his boss was apparently angry with him.

"People around the office have been noticing changes in you, Mr. Walters. You look unwell. Shadows under your eyes—which are red and bloodshot, might I add. You don't shave as regularly as you used to. Your reports are, quite simply, crap. Where's the attention to detail, Mr. Walters? You stated in your last report—you've missed three deadlines, might I add—that there were some minor bugs with the hardware. But you never expanded upon that. At UrSprung, we need details. We need them, Mr. Walters. They are essential if we are to survive."

Kel didn't know what to say. He didn't think the others paid much attention to him.

"Look outside, Mr. Walters," Mr. Vachsind said to him, raising his hand to the enormous window to his left. "What do you see?"

Looking, Kel saw what he always saw: a city gone insane with finding new things to sell, of promoting depravity, of self-induced isolation, a city where nobody trusted their fellow man because nobody wanted to get to know one another, a city of fear, of selfishness, of hate, so much hate, hate that runs so deep within the heart and soul of the individual that they don't even know, they aren't even aware of how much they hate those around them—

"The roots run deep, Kelvin."

Kel turned his head from the window. "What did you say?"

"You see what we see, because you, too, are changing," Mr. Vachsind said, and the fat around his neck began to bubble, spitting hot grease which sizzled in droplets on the desk. His head expanded, like he was being filled with air, or like there was so much pressure inside him his body would soon explode. His eyes pushed out, bulging, facing opposite directions, and his straight Roman nose went upturned and piglike, fattening with each passing second. Then Mr. Vachsind's head split open from his crown, and his face fell apart, taking his body with it, each side falling to the floor like a pile of bloody clothes.

Behind the desk, an enormous praying mantis tilted its leaf-green head, antennae twitching, mandibles clicking, saliva dripping from its jaws. The light above shone on its round eyes. The tiny black pupils searched Kel. It scraped its bladed forearms along the desk. Thin shavings of wood dropped to the floor.

"Have no fear," it chittered, pronouncing the words with some difficulty. "The roots run deep, after all."

Kel gagged as the creature's red-black wings unfurled from the middle of its thorax.

He vomited a flower on the floor, and everything went black.

9

These days it's truly a concrete jungle out there in the city. Vines rise from the split concrete, wrapping themselves around buildings. Trees seem to shoot from the ground, growing with such gusto they rival the tallest towers in size.

And the people change, too. Some of them slower than others. Some have died fighting for their individuality, to maintain their humanity.

But Kel knows resistance is futile. He's gradually changing. Today he noticed serrated spikes beginning to emerge from his arms. Soon he will be one of the many, one of the hive. The roots run deep, after all. So deep you don't even know.