Abby was in no position to be choosy. She was six months out of grad school with a highly-specialised doctorate in theoretical agro-botany and a minimum wage job at a local coffee place. A failing local coffee place.

So when the local government of some middle-of-nowhere farming community offered her a year-long contract to help "update local agricultural practices", she jumped at it.

It was only as she neared the outskirts of town that she began to suspect just how desperate for help this place might be. The wheat fields she'd been passing for hours gave way to something she didn't recognise, but which didn't look healthy. The stalks were an unpleasant yellow and what leaves they had were curled and seemingly stunted.

Pulling her rental car over to the side of the road, she got out for a better look. There were a few green shoots among the others that appeared to be doing better. One, a few metres into the field, even had some sort of pink fruit or flower or something.

She let her curiosity get the better of her and gently pushed past the waist-high, outermost plants to examine it more closely. The things were oily, leaving a residue on her hands that made them faintly tingle as she leaned over the strange pink pod.

It exploded.

Abby coughed and spluttered, inhaling the cloud of spores as she stumbled backwards, wiping at her stinging eyes with oily fingers. She swore and rubbed at her face with her sleeves, cursing herself for being so stupid.

Then she felt it. She felt the icy cold of space. She felt the passage of eons. She felt the fiery heat of burning atmosphere and the shudder of sudden impact. She felt miles of her roots spreading across the fields, acres of her leaves yearning for light, hundreds of her legs walking around town.

Most of all, she felt the overwhelming urge to grow.

She was still standing by the edge of the field when the farmhands found her, staring at nothing with bloodshot eyes. They hadn't needed to search. They loaded her delicately into the rusty pickup truck and delivered her to the doctor. He administered to her with great care, holding a precious spore pod beneath her nostrils and keeping her skin slick with oil. They knew how best to speed the conversion now, after some early failures.

By the next morning, she was one of them. Part of them. Part of it, the single entity that had been slowly spreading outwards from the crater in old Thomson's field since last spring. Abby still existed but in the same way a skin cell or a neuron existed, not as a separate being but as a piece of a greater whole. A piece with a single, dedicated function.

Abby's function was to cure the sickness that afflicted the mother plants. This world had the air and light they needed but something was wrong in the ground. Something was missing and none of the minds they had taken so far had understood what. Without Abby's knowledge, the mother plants would all soon wither and die and never grow again and that could not be allowed.

The lab equipment was already set up. The others had gathered seed and soil samples in preparation for her arrival and she wasted no time in beginning her experiments. After a few weeks, truckloads of fertiliser and mineral dust rumbled into town, paid for with the last of the county's annual budget and spread across the fields to Abby's precise specifications.

A year later, Abby walked naked through the fields one last time. She let the leaves - her leaves - brush against her flesh. The latest crop rose above her head, bright pink spore pods dangling in front of her eyes, their explosive defences undisturbed by her familiar presence.

She tilted a leaf and let the water from the recent rains run down her body and splash on to the ground. The mother plant's oil would seep into the dirt and further transform this world to their liking. She smiled.

Tomorrow, her contract would end and she would return to the city, as all her former self's friends and family expected her to do. Her bags and sample cases were already packed, filled with spore pods and seedlings and soil.

Everything they would need to grow and grow and grow...