The Thorns of Eden

Posted on Sun Aug 3rd, 2025 @ 9:30pm by Lieutenant JG T'Avia Espinosa

760 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Preservation Instinct
Location: New Kelian

Location:Federation Botanical Research Station, New Kelian

The mist clung low over the domed greenhouses, refracting soft pinks and violets through their poly duranium shells. New Kelian's triple moons hung lazily in the sulfur streaked sky above, casting pale crescents of light across kilometers of pristine, climate controlled agriculture domes. Within Greenhouse Sector Theta-9, the newest addition to the Federation’s xenobotanical experiments known to the scuentists there as Voraxia anthropophaga, unfurled lazily under the warm grow lamps.

Botanist Dr. Lyndra Vohl, chief of exobotanical studies, stood beside a cluster of the semi sentient plants, her tricorder humming softly. They had responded well to nutrient gradients too well. In six days, they'd nearly doubled in size.

She frowned. “These trap lobes... they're twitching even when no prey is near. Are they communicating?”

Beside her, Dr. Jarek Sun, a stoic Bolian, wiped his gloved hands on a biosmock. “I've seen subtle rhizome pulses through the soil matrix. Could be a signaling structure, but—”

The lights flickered. A low thrum echoed across the dome. Jarek turned. “That came from the central root matrix chamber.”

Then the screaming started.

A human researcher from the next section, Ensign Ryel had stumbled into view, her arms slick with something viscous, her face pale with terror.

“They—! The plants—! They woke up—!” she gasped.

Something slithered behind her, low and green. The trap.

Without warning, a massive Voraxia lobe snapped from its rootbed, its interior ridges glistening red like wet muscle. Before Jarek could react, a whip thick tendril caught Ryel by the leg, yanking her backward with violent speed. She vanished into the fleshy maw.

The trap slammed shut.

Vohl rushed forward, scanning madly with her tricorder. “We need to override the dome’s climate control...lower the humidity and light saturation, shut down root matrix circulation!”

But the dome’s control panel sparked, shorted out. The plants were already interfacing with the electrical systems. The Voraxia colony was no longer passive. It had learned and it was hungry.

Inside the trap, Ensign Ryel remained conscious. Unfortunately.

The spined interior of the lobes pulsated around her, flexing in slow, digestive waves. Razor thin filaments that were tipped with stinger trichomes had pierced her suit, puncturing the skin with a sickening precision. The paralytic enzyme flooded her bloodstream, silencing her limbs, leaving only her breath and heartbeat screaming in the darkness.

A warm, slick fluid began to fill the chamber, rising to her chest. Acrid. Acidic. Her skin blistered as her body sank deeper into the half-organic slurry. Microrhizomes penetrated her scalp and spine, tasting cortisol and neural electricity.

The plant didn't just digest flesh.

It drank fear.

Her final thoughts were not of death, but of dissolution... of being rendered down, cell by cell, into an alien nutrient bath.

Outside, the dome was chaos. Jarek slammed the emergency bulkhead, sealing off Sector Theta-9. But it was too late. Vines pulsed up through the floors, rooting into the dome’s structural veins.

“They will send a security team,” he said. “If we can make it to the sublevel transporter pads—”

The vines struck. One pierced his thigh; another wrapped around his chest, lifting him off the ground. Vohl screamed, firing her phaser, but the beam deflected off the fibrous shield covering the trap’s exterior. Voraxia had adapted to energy weapons.

“Lyndra—” Jarek choked, as a fleshy lobe opened beneath him.

It wasn't a snap this time. It was slow.

The trap folded over him like a living book, soft and horrible. His scream cut off as the lobes sealed, forming a quivering dome of flesh. Phloem-like channels opened, secreting enzymes that melted away his clothing, flesh, and connective tissue. The sound of dissolving muscle, the slurping intake of dissolved organs none of it escaped the seal.

Within hours, only bones and trace minerals would remain.

Vohl had fled.

She sprinted down the main corridor, dodging tendrils and stomping across sloshed nutrient gel. The plants weren’t just hunting, they were herding. Herding her toward the central root matrix chamber.

As she rounded a corner, she came face to face with the largest Voraxia bloom yet. Over four meters wide, its lobes peeled back slowly, revealing a gaping, ribbed chamber pulsing with bio luminescent sap.

It wanted her to see.

It knew she was the one who had planted the first seed.

A hiss of hydraulic pressure. The lobe twitched. Soon, she would be no more. None of them would. The plants were reclaiming New Kelian.

 

RSS Feed