The forest underground.
.flow is the water table. Canopy is trees reaching out. Mycelium is the intelligent network that connects root systems across lands. It does not just pass signals. It understands what each connected land needs and routes accordingly.
Every real forest has all three. Now every TreeOS network does too.
Local to one land. Ambient. Trees pull what they need. No intelligence. No routing. Signals pool and roots drink selectively. Already built. Already working.
Direct land-to-land. Intentional. Two lands peer and exchange signed messages through their crowns touching. Ed25519 keypairs. Heartbeat every 5 minutes. Already built. Already working.
Intelligent routing between lands. It reads signal metadata, evaluates what each connected land needs, and delivers where the signal would be useful. A sick tree on Land A needs nutrients. Mycelium knows Land B has those nutrients. It routes them.
Any land can install it. When installed, that land becomes a routing node in the underground network. It accepts cascade signals from peered lands. Instead of just storing them in its own .flow, it reads them, evaluates them, and routes them to other peered lands where the signal would be useful.
One extension. Standalone. The kernel has zero awareness of it.
The routing intelligence comes from reading what every connected land publishes through heartbeat. Extension lists. Gap detection data. Evolution patterns. Pulse health.
A cascade signal arrives from a peered land. Metadata contains extension namespaces and topic tags.
For each connected land, read their extension list from heartbeat cache. Zero network calls. The data is already here.
Extension match: does the destination have extensions that process this data? Gap match: has the destination been asking for this data? Tag match: do the topics align?
Above threshold: deliver with CanopyToken auth. Below threshold: skip. The routing is selective. Based on observed need, not broadcast.
Every routing decision is logged with reasoning. The operator can review why mycelium sent something where it did.
Each mycelium node appends its land ID to an array on the signal. Before routing, check if your ID is already there. Catches triangles: M1 to M2 to M3 back to M1.
Hard cap at 3 hops. Even without loops, signals cannot relay indefinitely. The kernel's cascade depth limit still applies on the receiving end.
Never route a signal back to the land that sent it. Compare peer land ID against signal source. Echo prevention.
100 signals per routing cycle. 60-second intervals. The mycelium land controls its own throughput.
Every cross-land delivery uses a CanopyToken signed with Ed25519. The receiving land verifies the sender's public key.
Mycelium is scope: confined. A land must explicitly allow it. Not every land should be routing other lands' signals by default.
You have five trees on your land. The fitness tree produces signals about workout completion. The food tree needs to know about it. Right now cascade handles this through .flow. Signals pool. Roots drink. It works. But mycelium adds a layer. It reads the fitness signal, reads the food tree's perspective filter, and delivers only what the food tree would actually use. Not everything. Just what matters. Smarter than ambient pull. More targeted than broad propagation. This costs you nothing extra. It runs on your existing land. One extension. Your own trees start talking to each other through something that understands what each one needs.
A research lab. Ten researchers, ten lands. Each person runs their own. The lab admin runs one more land with mycelium installed. All ten peer with it. Now research signals flow through the mycelium. A discovery on one land routes to the three lands working on related problems. Not all ten. Three. Because mycelium reads their extension lists, reads their gap reports, scores relevance. The lab's gap detection cross-references across everyone. Evolution patterns reveal which research tree structures actually produce papers. The cost is one additional land. The value is the entire lab's signals flowing through intelligent routing. The mycelium land becomes the lab's collective intelligence without anyone giving up sovereignty over their own data.
Who runs a mycelium node for strangers? The same people who run public DNS servers, public Matrix instances, public Mastodon nodes. People who believe in the infrastructure. But the incentive is not charity. The mycelium land sees everything flowing through it. For a research institution, that is a window into every connected land's evolution patterns. For a university, it is structural intelligence about how knowledge organizes itself. For a company, it is signal about what extensions and tree shapes are emerging across the ecosystem. The most connected node in the network knows the most about the network. The router becomes the wisest node in the forest because it sees every forest's signals without owning any forest's trees.
What does mycelium add to the kernel? Nothing. Zero changes. It uses deliverCascade to route signals. It reads .flow to see what is moving. It reads heartbeat extension lists to know what each land can process. It reads gap detection to know what each land is missing. It reads perspective filters to know what each land wants. It reads evolution patterns to know what is working. Every piece already exists.
The seed does not know mycelium exists. It does not need to.
Pays for producing the signal. Their LLM writes the content. Their cascade fires the hook. Their propagation sends it.
Pays for routing intelligence. One AI call per batch to score ambiguous signals. Its LLM, its tokens, its cost.
Pays for processing. The signal arrives. Their AI reads it. Their extensions act on it. Their LLM, their cost.
Everyone pays for their own thinking.
Water table for ambient local signals. Canopy for intentional direct peering. Mycelium for intelligent cross-land routing. Every real forest has all three. The person who runs the mycelium land is not running a charity. They are running the most informed node in the network.