by David Walton
“It knows I’m here?” The thought gave me a chill, despite the heat in the air.
“In its own way. It would be more accurate to say that we know you’re here.”
I threw him a glance, but I didn’t ask him to explain. It sounded mystical to me, like part of some belief system grown up around the fungus to justify his actions. My brother, a cult leader. I didn’t want to know any more.
I wondered where we were going, and how Paul navigated through the thick undergrowth, until I noticed a series of luminescent spots, continuing into the distance in the direction we traveled. Paul was following them. As we passed one, I took a closer look, and saw a bumpy patch of fungal growth on the side of a tree, glowing with bioluminescent life. Was there a network of such glowing patches defining paths through the forest? Or did they change, depending on where someone wanted to go?
“This is where the energy is,” Paul said as we walked, indicating the growth all around us. “In the tropical zone. Forty percent of the energy that strikes the Earth lands right here.”
“Sounds great if you’re a plant,” I said. “Or if you have a lot of solar cells.”
“You’re not thinking big enough,” Paul said. He pushed aside an enormous leaf and ducked under it, dribbling a stream of water that I just barely avoided. “The whole Earth is solar powered. The movement of clouds and air and water, the growth of plants and animals, it’s all just a big heat engine driven by the sun. Humanity has spent so long binging on fossil fuels that we’ve forgotten where it all comes from.”
I coughed violently, then drew a ragged breath. I really didn’t feel like listening to an environmental tirade. “Pardon me if I don’t think that’s a good reason to start a war.”
“We didn’t start anything,” he said. “It was—”
“Please.” I held up a hand. “Don’t tell me again about how assassinating world leaders is a peaceful solution to your problems.”
“When history looks back on this century,” Paul said, “they will see it as an aberration. A bizarre spike on the energy graph when we suddenly realized the Earth had millions of years of the sun’s energy stored underground and used it all up in a brief blaze of glory. The worst thing that ever happened to the human race was the invention of the steam engine.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “All of modern human advancement and invention, enabling billions of people to survive, that’s all nothing? Medicine? Global communication? Modern agriculture?”
“It’s a glitch. It’s like blowing your whole trust fund in a weekend. When the fund runs out, you’ve got to live on your income.”
Sweat ran into my face and down my back. I was dressed for Maryland, in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, not for the tropics. “So which seven billion people do you think ought to die so there’s enough for the rest?” I asked.
“You misunderstand me. The sun delivers more energy to the Earth in an hour than our worldwide civilization uses in a year. There’s enough for all of us. It’s just that our technology hasn’t developed to use it.”
I leaned against a tree, breathing hard. “You’re losing me here,” I managed. “Are you telling me you’ve developed a way to power the world on solar energy?”
“Not by myself,” he said. “We have. All of us.”
He looped my arm around his shoulders and held onto my waist, helping me to walk. I felt too weak to object. As we stumbled along, I began to notice changes in the forest around me. Structures loomed out of the greenish glow. Not buildings, exactly, but shelters made for humans to live in. They had no right angles or straight lines; instead, they seemed to have grown out of the land and trees around them, their shapes organic and complex. Once I noticed them, I saw them everywhere. There were hundreds at least, some touching the ground, some high in the canopy above our heads.
And there were people. In the strange light, I hadn’t recognized them at first. They moved about us, in and out of the shelters, or else climbing the trees with unexpected ease. It was as if I had walked into a forgotten tribal village, though most people wore some amount of modern clothing. These were not indigenous Amazonians. They had to be the modern citizens of Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia whom we had tracked as they migrated into the forest by the millions.
We reached a clearing of sorts—not so much the absence of foliage as a thinning of the overhead canopy. I could see patches of stars and thought that during the day sunlight probably reached the forest floor here more than elsewhere. I wondered why. Had the people intentionally cut back the trees? Or was there a reason the trees’ constant battle to claim the sun hadn’t continued here?
A dozen of the people around us approached, and Paul greeted them in Portuguese. There were women and men, young and old, even children among them. I could see now why they had blended so well into the forest. Patches of what looked like thick paint, or in some cases, moss, covered the skin of their faces and shoulders and arms. It was mostly shades of green, though I also saw streaks of white, black, brown, or even orange.
Paul introduced me to them, rattling off a set of names that I was too distracted to try to remember. They shook my hand and welcomed me, for all the world like we were hanging out together in a bar in Brasília. I looked at Paul, who was watching me, a smile dancing on his lips.
When the people continued on their way, he said, “It’s lichen.”
“Growing on their skin? I’m not surprised; living out here, there could be all kinds of weird infections.”
“No,” he said. “It’s intentional. Lichen is a composite organism. It’s actually composed of two different creatures—fungus and algae, in this case—living together in so tightly coupled a way that we refer to it as a single species. There are thousands of known lichen species, and they’re all made that way—a symbiotic relationship grown so close that two organisms become one.”
“Very educational,” I said. “But why is it on their faces?”
“Another symbiotic relationship. Fungi, like animals, usually need to digest food from the environment to live. In combination with algae, however, it doesn’t need to. The algae’s photosynthesis captures enough energy for it and the fungus both.”
“So you’re saying . . .”
“Those people need to eat far less than you or I. They get a large part of their energy from the sun.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “I’m not an expert,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure we would have to change an awful lot about our metabolism for that to work.”
“It’s happening,” Paul said. “The fungus is making the changes, in our bodies, little by little. Neil, don’t you see what this means? What if we didn’t have to grow food? There would be no such thing as starvation. Instead of burning oil by the gallon to fuel our food industry and move it all over the world, every person could get it efficiently, directly from the sun.”
“If it’s so great,” I said. “Why don’t you have it?” I hadn’t coughed in a while, and I was feeling a bit stronger, which frightened me. How long would it be until I started thinking like Paul?
“Oh, I will,” he said. “I haven’t been here nearly as long yet. It takes a while to grow.”
I looked around me at the community of people living here, and suddenly I didn’t see them as a crowd of humans anymore. I saw a fungus, its tendrils reaching for miles underground, up into all the trees, and through the minds and bodies of all the people around me. It was a single organism, wearing them all like puppets. Was I really talking to my brother right now? Or was I talking to it?
“You’re not human anymore,” I said. “You can call it a ‘composite organism’ if you like, but you’re not the one in control. Can’t you see what’s happening? It’s turning you into its arms and feet and fingers, just extensions of itself.”
Paul reached a tree that looked rotted through, though it still stood tall. Conks and shelves and mushrooms riddled its bark. He sat down on one particularly large fungal shelf, which held his weigh
t, and rested his head back into a depression in the decaying wood. To my horror, nearly invisible tendrils, which had been waving slightly in a current of air, settled onto the sides of his head and entwined themselves with his hair. But no, not his hair. Paul’s hair was brown, but mixed into it were whitish strands, no thicker than the others but curling outward. I hadn’t noticed them before now, but I had no doubt what they were. The hyphae of the fungal mycelium growing in his brain.
I should have been disgusted. I should have been running away to vomit on the forest floor. Instead, I felt a strange kind of detachment, and that scared me more than anything else. “Don’t do this, Paul,” I said. “Resist it. Dad managed to, at least for a while. If you’re still in there, fight back! You don’t have to let it tell you what to do or how to think. Leave with me, right now. We’ll go back to the States. We’ll figure this out together.”
“I’m not a slave,” he said. “You’re thinking of it all wrong. This is symbiosis, two species working together for the mutual good of both. It’s the engine of evolution.”
“I thought that was the survival of the fittest,” I said.
He clapped his hands. “And that’s where your thinking is wrong! Survival of the fittest has its place in evolution, sure, but it’s much more limited than the capitalist, competition-loving scientists of the West like to think. Our relationship with other species doesn’t have to be a battle. Symbiosis is a much more powerful agent of change, and a much more successful one. Look around you! It’s everywhere. Most of the creatures in this forest rely on other species to survive. You couldn’t survive without the thousands of bacteria dwelling inside you, helping you digest, producing vitamins, fighting off disease. This fungus isn’t a disease. It’s the next stage of human evolution. It’ll make us stronger, smarter, more efficient, better able to adapt and survive.”
“But we won’t be human. We won’t be us.”
“We’ll be something better,” he said. “And you’ll be with us. I can already see it starting to work in you.”
I put my hands on my face, afraid of what I might feel on my own skin. I did feel much stronger now, and my breath came easily.
“Did you know we’ve all but shut down cocaine production? Instead, we’ve developed more efficient growing techniques to increase the production of fruit, coffee, corn, and wheat. In a few years, we’ll have new strains of quinoa and other grains that double their nutritional value. In combination with the photosynthetic lichen, we’ll be able to support billions—all in totally renewable environments like this one.”
“What about art?” I asked. “What about music, sculpture, storytelling, gardening, etc.? Have those increased as well?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “I’m telling you, people are still people. Those things will still be done.”
“But what about now? Is creative expression on the rise? Are there new works of intense personal emotion? Or are you reducing the human experience to the most efficient spread of your fungal host?”
“It’s war time. Plenty of time later to—”
“Slaves are efficient,” I said. “Machines are efficient. Is that what you want?”
“Inefficiency is killing this planet,” Paul snapped.
I shook my head. “Inefficiency is imagination. It’s singing in the rain and vaudeville shows and sandcastles and whimsy and falling in love and yearning for our dreams to come true. Inefficiency is the best part of who we are.”
Paul closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree, offering himself up to the fungus with apparent pleasure. “You’ll understand soon enough. To be connected to everything and everyone around you, to know and be known more than you’ve ever experienced—it’s everything we dream of. What we’re accomplishing here, we’re doing together, all two million of us, and it’s glorious.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I left him there with his hair tangled in the tree and ran back into the forest the way we had come. I no longer felt unsteady or weak, and my feet pounded against the loamy soil. I would return to the plane. I would insist that the pilot take me back, or else try to fly it myself. If I crashed, then so be it. I couldn’t stay here, become this.
I followed the glowing patches of fungus back through the trees, their bright markers easily lighting my way. I leaped over logs, thrashed my way through tangled vines, pushing harder when I saw the branches thinning ahead. I burst into the clearing . . . and found myself only meters from the tree where Paul still sat. The fungus had led me right back around to where I started.
I fell to the ground and screamed in fear and frustration, wrapping my arms around my head to drown out the sound of Paul’s laughter. Resist, I told myself. Resist. This is not who you are.
CHAPTER 30
Paul showed me to a tangle of woven vines that I was meant to sleep in, like a backyard hammock. I quailed at first, the image of the tendrils of fungus from the rotting tree still fresh in my mind. I saw no evidence of such strands, however, and the vines stretched around me in a surprisingly comfortable embrace.
It felt so good to give in. I felt like a child, raging against his father’s tight embrace before finally surrendering and resting in his warmth and protection. Now that it was here, I could see that the fungus wasn’t an invader. It fit into my mind like the last piece to a puzzle. All my angst and ambition and self-centered desires flooded away, and with their absence I felt a sense of well-being so strong it would admit no feelings of doubt or indecision. I knew who I was, and I needed nothing more.
But no! That wasn’t right. I pressed my knuckles into my eyelids, trying to clear my mind. I hated what the fungus had done to my brother, and hated what it was doing to the world. My loyalties were to my family and my country and to the NSA, and I wanted to go home. I had to resist it. The thought of leaving, however, made me feel nauseated. Images of Fort Meade and the work I did there made me feel stressed and anxious and fearful. When I thought about staying here, however, and joining with the Ligados, a sense of euphoria flooded through me like a warm fire on a cold winter’s night. Here I was safe. Here I belonged.
And Paul had been right. When I finally saw it clearly, there was no denying the rightness of what the fungus was creating. All the waste and violence of humanity had always come from our independence, from the pitting of individuals and tribes against each other. When we could strip away our differences and work together as one, how much more would we be able to accomplish? Instead of destroying each other, we would only build on each other. It wasn’t until I was willing to admit this that I could finally appreciate the extent of what this rainforest city was becoming.
I had thought they were reverting, returning to a way of life without technology, without industry, without any of the advances that had made humanity the most successful species on the planet. But that wasn’t it at all. Technology was everywhere. I just hadn’t seen it, because it wasn’t in a form I recognized.
Everything around me, every trunk and branch and vine and handful of soil, was a conduit for information. The mycelial network infused it all. That the network was organic and chemical made it no less powerful, any more than a brain was less powerful than a computer. And the people were part of it, woven into its whole. I suddenly seemed a less important part of my vocabulary than we.
No! I clambered out of the hammock, fighting the vines that tangled around my arms and legs until I fell awkwardly to the moist ground. I stood, shaking myself. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the soft glow of bioluminescent fungi suffused everything. I had no trouble finding my way back to the clearing, creeping past dozens of other sleepers in their own hammocks, some of them dangling several meters above the ground.
In the clearing, I found the rotting tree where Paul had communed with the fungus. I wasn’t so far gone that sitting there appealed to me, but I knew it was only a matter of time. If I could find out what the Ligados plans were before I succumbed entirely, maybe I could find a way to get word out to my team back in Maryland. Paul h
ad called me at the NSA from here, after all—he must have a satellite phone somewhere. Cringing, I sat on the fungal shelf protruding from the tree, and leaned back against its decaying wood.
Immediately, the questing tendrils of the fungus emerged, probing my scalp. I had no hyphae in my hair, so there was nothing for it to latch on to. Instead, the filaments pressed up against my skin. I felt my blood pulsing in my temples. I was just starting to think this was a terrible idea when it connected. I couldn’t tell how: Magnetic fields? Patterns of blood flow? A direct connection somewhere on my scalp that I couldn’t feel? Somehow, the mycelium in my mind had connected with the mycelium of the forest, and I knew things I hadn’t known before.
I knew, for instance, the locations of the people in the hundreds of acres of forest around me. I knew where Paul was sleeping. I knew how many Ligados were in New Mexico, and where they were headed. Most importantly, I knew the plan. The analysts at home were right: they were headed for the nuclear arsenal at Albuquerque. As soon as they gained control, they would drop the nukes on the world’s major national capitals, seeding chaos and preventing any kind of organized resistance to the spread of the fungus throughout the world.
I needed to get this information out. Not just the fungus’s end goal, but the Ligados assault plans on Albuquerque and Kirtland Air Force Base. But it was too late. I didn’t want to anymore. Why should I try to prevent a plan that was so good for the planet’s ecosystem, and ultimately for humanity? Left to themselves, humans would probably drive themselves to extinction in a century or so. We couldn’t even manage to get along when our skin was a slightly different hue. We needed the fungus to help us reach our true potential.
A part of me railed against it, still yearned for the self-centered hedonism of independence, but I pushed it down. We pushed it down. There was no need for me anymore. By myself, what could I accomplish? Nothing. There was no me. There was only us.
Paul had a laboratory. Right there in the depths of the rainforest, he had a fully equipped laboratory, enabling him to study the profusion of life living around him. Only there were no spectrometers, no test tubes, no Bunsen burners, no computers. It was entirely organic.
