Day 1,160

Organic cities were perfect in theory - imagine concrete that couldn't crack, that shifted slightly instead or even literally breathed in order to balance out temperature shifts. Imagine a road that heals its own potholes, scabbing them over with thicker tarmac and becoming stronger as time goes by. Imagine a city that grows larger every year, new buildings sprouting in the summer and the disused dying every winter.

In theory there was no downside, however, in reality the city adapted beyond all human control until it resembled a slate-clad behemoth whose eyes were ten thousand CCTV cameras and whose mouth was every doorway, tunnel and bus stop. Worse still was the stench of pus that lingered wherever the city was fixing itself - the miraculous self-healing properties we'd all been so sold on failed to mention just  how organic they'd made it.

When the first few corpse were found, slowly dissolving in the park's lake,the entire project was declared a failure and the emergency shut down procedure was implemented. The ground around it wasn't just razed, it was bombed until a crater surrounded it while the world prayed its roots weren't deeper still.

By the time its seedlings were spotted hundreds of miles away, we knew we were too late.