The Wrong Delivery

The seed arrived in a padded envelope addressed to Dr. M. Solano, Biosim Facility 7, and Mara almost threw it away.

She got the wrong deliveries sometimes — vendor samples, misrouted specimens, once a live beetle in a sealed vial that she had spent an uncomfortable afternoon returning. She set the envelope aside during her morning calibration run, then forgot it until the afternoon shift ended and she was the last one left in the lab.

She opened it over the sink, which was habit. Inside the padding was a single seed the size of a thumbnail: pale green, slightly translucent, with a ridge along one side that caught the light like a bead of water. Nothing about it looked wrong. Nothing about it looked right either. She had catalogued 4,200 species across twelve simulation environments and she did not recognise the morphology.

She photographed it, ran it through the identification suite, and waited.

The suite returned a match after eleven seconds: *Magnolia sieboldii*, Siebold's magnolia. Extinct in wild populations since 2049. Last confirmed living specimen destroyed in the Munich Biosim fire. Conservation status: Recovered — Simulation Only.

Simulation only meant there were no physical seeds. There were no physical seeds because the last physical seeds had been destroyed.

Mara looked at the thing in her palm for a long time.

"You shouldn't exist," she told it.

The seed did not respond. She had not expected it to. But she kept it in her pocket on the walk home, which was not protocol, and she did not log the delivery, which was also not protocol, and she lay awake until three in the morning thinking about what exactly one was supposed to do with something that should not exist.