I made it three blocks before the streetlights went out.

Not the usual flickering-out-of-a-burnt-bulb kind of darkness. All of them. Every light in Sector 7's main thoroughfare, dying in sequence like a row of dominoes falling toward a center I could not see.

Then the smell hit me—peat and iron and something sweet that no corporate report had ever described.

The Blackvine was here. Not at Hartley anymore. Here. In the streets of New LA, where the rain fell black and the buildings leaned toward each other like exhausted drunks and the poor people kept living because that is what poor people do.

I stood on the corner and listened. The hum was everywhere—in the walls, in the ground, in the air itself. The Blackvine was not a plant anymore. It was infrastructure. It was the new nervous system of a city that had no idea it had been colonized.

My optical implant crackled. For a fraction of a second—just a fraction, like a dream within a dream—light returned.

And I saw it.

Black stems, thick as pythons, wrapping around buildings and streetlights and the bodies of people who had fallen asleep on their doorsteps. Not killing them. Wrapping them. Holding them. Growing into them, slowly, carefully, the way a parent might tuck a child into bed.

The light went out again.

I stood there in the absolute dark, my hands on my knees, and I understood what Arthur-7 had been telling me all along. The Blackvine was not being farmed. It was farming us.

And I was not a survivor. I was a scout.

I opened my mouth to scream, but the scream had nowhere to go. The air was too thick, too full of the Blackvine's quiet breathing. It swallowed sound the way it swallowed everything else.

So I walked. I did not know where I was going. I only knew that I had to tell someone, anyone, what was happening.

But the people I passed—what were they? Were they still human? Or were they already nodes in a network they could not perceive, tending a garden they could not see, feeding a vine they could not feel?

I will write this account down. I have learned to type by memory, and the keys have their own landscape, familiar as the lines on my palms. Someone will read this. Someone will understand.

Or someone will not.

Either way, the Blackvine does not care. It is patient. It has been growing for longer than any of us know, and it will continue growing long after we are gone.

Because that is what plants do. They grow. They consume. They turn everything that was alive into something that feeds them.

And we are all, eventually, fertilizer.