Hls: mycelium - The Meeting

The lights clicked off.
The white glow of the screen forced my eyes to readjust—pulled between the dark surroundings and the over-bright display.

“Guys, before we continue with the agenda, Allan has an idea he wants to share.”

Young engineer Allan pulled up a presentation slide showing a chemical compound structure beneath a bold heading: chtC.

“I give you Chthonin-Carboxylase, or chtC for short.
I ran the simulations, and the output shows it can absorb atmospheric carbon at a slow, consistent rate—practically forever.”

A few murmurs rose in the room.

“And here’s the kicker—it excretes amorphous black carbon into the soil, thereby enriching it. Do you know what this means?”

Everyone stared at Allan, unsure if their thinking matched his.

“It means you fix the carbon once, and it keeps enriching the soil. The system perpetuates itself.
A farmer could buy it to enrich his land—and he’d only ever need to buy it once.”

The ventilation hummed faintly as Allan clicked through his slides.

“That’s not bad,” one of the engineers commented.

“What will it cost to produce?” another engineer asked cynically. “Won’t help if they have to trade gold for a bag of cht—what was it—C? Then you might as well put up a machine that distills thin air into carbon blocks.”

“Friends. Colleagues,” Allan said, waving them into quiet. “It has three chemical steps, using compounds you can get from composting farms and a waste product from plastic production.
Don’t you see?” Allan lit up. “Turning plastic from the bane of the Earth into its savior—that’s how we sell this thing.”

He stood there, breath short, fingers gripping the clicker like it was a detonator.

One engineer raised his hand. “Imagine it starts spreading on its own—like a Terrablack Creeper.”

The engineers chuckled, but no one looked entirely reassured.

“Good presentation, Allan. We’ll pitch the idea to the board.”