Izzy, an obsessive young entomologist, uses AI and 3D sound models to predict termite colony behavior at UCLA. She has always needed to understand how the world works, but a life in academia has begun to alienate her from this sense of wonder. One day, walking through the school’s botanical garden, she notices a mysterious flower trapped behind a glass case. Somehow, defying logic, the flower seems to be calling to her. In a daze, she steals a small pod buried in its soil and brings it home to plant in her apartment. The next day, a sprout has already poked through the dirt. As she examines it, a tendril seems to move. What has Izzy brought into her home?
When she takes a sample from the plant to school to study, her findings are strange but inconclusive. When she goes back to the botanical garden, there is no record of the plant ever being there. That night, she returns home to find a fully grown, completely unrecognizable flower with a complex network of mycelia spanning from its roots. The more she studies it - with books, microscope, sound, ai - the more it resists her understanding.
As the flower continues to grow and mutate, decomposing the boundaries between plant and human, self and other, Izzy is forced to confront her relationship to knowledge and learn to embrace the mysterious bliss of the world beyond human understanding. A meditation on our need for meaning and control set against a dreamy sci-fi vision of ecological crisis and connection.
