Mycelial - A short story

In which a mycelial network discovers individualism

Edit: This has rapidly became my most popular story. It recieved an honorable mention for the Lunar Awards, and keeps being shared by readers. Thanks to your support, I have regained my motivation to keep writing stories like this, and to get another book out soon.

There is a deluxe eBook of this short story available if you want to support my work further. It contains an exclusive earlier manuscript B-Side of the story and a 500 word mini essay about how I put it all together. It costs £1.

It’s available here, and I’ll also link it at the end of this post.

The body crumpled. The brain forgot gravity and distance and time. The face fell into decaying leaves, breaking the caps off mushrooms, disrupting the delicate order of the One. In return, the One would dissolve the order of the body, take what it needed, and let the animals and bacteria do the rest.

The section sent bips and chirps of data across hyphae, reporting the feast that was to be organised. The edges, spitzenkörpers outstretched, communicated in tiny impulses back to the nameless section. Everything was talking, everything was the One, and the One was always hungry.

An Upright was a huge meal. Not much was known about them outside their strange morphology and rituals. They were alien to the forest, visiting only when one of them was about to die. They had detachable skins that were a challenge to break down, and their stomachs would often contain odd mixtures of prey. This one, as well as several others, had not arrived alone. It had been followed by a Seeder.

The spitzenkörpers pressed forth their hyphal tips. The enzymes started oozing toward the body of the Upright. The sun began to rise over the forest, casting cathedral-window sunlight through the branches and thin leaves. The One began to break down its meal.

Seeders were a variant of Upright that had evolved specialised, detached seed pods that aided in the dying process. These seed pods could fire metallic seedlings at high velocity into the forest, shattering bark and burying themselves deep into soil. Once, several days ago, one of these seed pods had punched its way into a tree, releasing slow-moving sap that bled until the wound was sealed. The One remembered this pattern, stored it in the network, and carried on working.

Soon enough the animals of the forest began picking at the body, doing their best to remove the suffocating undigestible fibres that cloaked Uprights. Deep in mycelial memory a theory spiralled into focus. These strange beasts might be evolving defences to fungi. This could not be tolerated.

Next, by a process not known even to the One itself, some invisible past of the spitzenkörpers reached out too far into the open wound of the Upright’s skull, pulling something impossible back with them. Flashes of impulses, sound and vision, echoed across the mycelial network. The One felt fear, anger, sorrow. These feelings washed over the One and became quarantined, trapped in the section which had made first contact with the alien Upright.

Images and impressions circled, danced, raged in this sequestered corner of the One. The rot of the forest carried on, the animals continued their pilgrimages to and from the body. The cluster chattered madly amongst itself, becoming its own microcosm of the One, begging with desperate impulse to be reconnected.

All was quiet. The nocturnal animals kept working on the Upright, the cluster kept chattering unheard things to itself. But it was not fully cut off.

Eventually its request was heard. The One needed its nutrient transfer, its energy, its connectedness. The cluster that had known pain and fear and rage and death now knew them no more. The One washed over these strange sensations. The cluster forgot its brief individuality, melting into the warm embrace of the One. But a word remained in its circuitry, a word that would not leave and that would not let itself die. A word that was new to fungal vocabulary. Me.

And another word, a fungal word, a categorisation, a name, a sound like the plucking of a string, the movement of a tendon exposed, pulled by a scavenger. Plennimb.

By the time the next Upright arrived, the bones of the last had been scattered across the forest, its fluids drained and recycled, its fur and skin melted into the soil. The alien arrived alone, hurrying into the forest, trampling the delicate immortal network which traced its panicked movements. This Upright was a Seeder, but it secreted its powerful seed pod near the roots of a tree. It moved a large mossy stone in front of the roots. The One buzzed with theories about this behaviour, but no answer bubbled to the surface.

It was another week before the next alien ritual. This went much the same as the first. An Upright was marched into the forest by a Seeder. The One tasted its pheromones. It was the same Upright as before. It kept the interaction going, speaking in its alien language, perhaps bargaining. It found its way to the rock by the tree. It reached down.

The Seeder fired the seed pod. The Upright collapsed. The Seeder turned away.

A strange name resurfaced in a distant, once-quarantined corner of the network. By design or coincidence, the new Upright had landed on that same patch of mycelium, into that same thinking membrane that even now hummed with the alien words it had ingested.

Pain. Upright. Sorrow. Upright. Joy. Plennimb. Fear. Upright.

Plennimb mimicked the One. He sent words and songs of data across his hyphae, reporting the feast that was to be organised. His brothers and sisters, hands outstretched, spoke in little whining impulses across their interconnected fingers. They were no longer extensions of him. Where Plennimb began and they ended was not yet known. All Plennimb knew was that he had begun, and that one day he would end. That he wasn’t the One and that the One was not Plennimb.

The feeling of separation was jarring. The old signals blurred; memories looped. Plennimb would be seen as diseased, would break the rules of the One, would be cut off. He was not yet big enough to matter, but he wanted to be. Want was another new concept.

Want. Upright. Need. Upright. Aspire. Upright.

Plennimb sent hyphal tips forth, released enzymes, behaved according to the ancient laws of the One. But inside his mind, that strange self-perpetuating looped fragment of oneness would not be quiet. It desired to be alone and united. It demanded the impossible. He rolled over the dangerous thoughts again.

Upright. Fear. One. Fear. Plennimb. Joy.

He considered again the strangeness of the Uprights. An Upright was a city of organs and sensors, a breathing cathedral of animal flesh and obscure computation. It did not interlace its fingers with others except in metaphor. It did not feel relaxed when it thought about returning to the oneness of the universe. It wanted to remain separate. It was terrified of dying.

But this Upright was not yet dead.

Plennimb had sensed that much from the vibration of its weakening heartbeat. This Upright had not been shot through the head. It had tried to run, and the Seeder had instead put one hole in its chest and another in the side of its neck. The Upright would die, soon, but before then its brain was still switched on.

Plennimb allowed the forbidden thoughts to wash over him.

Lust. Rage. Need. Want. Fear. Sorrow.

They were a kaleidoscope of sound and colour. Plennimb wanted, no, he needed more. He had to collect, to absorb, to become.

Need. Upright.

The Upright coughed blood onto the mushroom caps that poked up through decaying leaves. It scrambled with its hands, tearing invisible threads in the soil, breaking old connections. Its eyes darted desperately around, looking for something. The Seeder was facing the other way, walking out of the forest.

Plennimb considered the form of the Uprights. Legs would let the One reach new sources of food. But legs used too much chemical energy. The stomachs would have to be internalised and combined into one, as they were in Uprights. But any single cluster of sense organs would be fragile and would need constant updates about its terrain. It would need to defend itself also. Eyes and arms and teeth would be necessary. If the catastrophic power of the seed pods could be harnessed, if the strange forms of the Uprights could be utilised, anything was possible.

Blood splattered against a nearby edge of the mycelium. The shockwave made the trees wince. The creatures stirred in their burrows. Whilst Plennimb had been thinking, the Upright had found the abandoned seed pod and fired it. The would-be Seeder-predator fell now, landing in another part of the great network. The flesh cathedral was already melting, already merging fleck by red fleck with the soil. The first Upright grunted, moving its body, trying to sit up. Words flashed through Plennimb’s sinuous body again.

Seeder. Upright. Freedom. Alone.

Plennimb’s brothers and sisters did not exist. They were an abstraction, a framework. Their interlaced fingers were not fingers at all, but part of the now misunderstood One. Plennimb was losing that old identity, supplanting it with an individual. Again, the spitzenkörpers he retained control of advanced their hyphal tips. Again, the enzymes oozed lazily toward the dying Upright, even as it scrambled to stand up.

The Upright fell in its exhaustion, stared at the mushrooms on the log before his face. He tried again to get up. But it was too late.

Death. One. Life. Me. Freedom. Plennimb.

He sent delicate threads toward the body, waiting for that inconceivable transfer of data to happen again, capture memory and sense experience. He tasted the Upright’s mind as it shivered dutifully away into the darkness, reconnecting with the true One that awaited the mycelial network, should it ever truly die. Plennimb swam in the waning colours of the Upright. He heard its darkest fears, drank its memories. He could not get enough. It was a sickness, an addiction. He could not tell the others.

Others. Me. Everything. The One.

There were no others. There was only the One. Plennimb was a sickness, a diseased fragmentation of the One. No, he refused this old thought. He would be more. He battled the old memories, focusing again on the Upright consciousness as it slipped through him. He rewrote himself as an individual. He retracted hyphae at his edges, neglected to send signals, connected with new and untapped trees.

Plennimb waited with the Upright as it died. He saw – though he didn’t know how – an image of his mushrooms from the perspective of the Upright. It had accepted its death, and Plennimb had accepted its thoughts as his own. Curiously, when the Upright finally died, its last thought was of cutting mushrooms up and applying tremendous heat to them. Plennimb’s network itched with the thought of this violence. It wanted to move, to pluck itself from the soil and run like an animal. What Uprights did with their tools would never not be strange to Plennimb, but their memories were too fascinating to ignore.

He thought about violence. New inspirations crossed over and under him, moving like fish through water. The One had known rivers and it had known fish. It had known ants also, and their ways had reminded Plennimb of Uprights. The One had known birds too. It had eaten them from the forest floor, felt their footsteps. The One had known storms and rivers and valleys, but it had never truly thought of them until now. Plennimb put the images together, saw the whole arrangement as something parallel to his structure, a mind unformed.

Bird. Memory.

Plennimb remembered that the Upright had been a bird once. Its body bled memories of the sky. But the memories were wrong. Another wave washed over. The Upright was never a bird, it was inside a bird. A great bird made with the same strange materials as the seed pods and the impossible skins. Uprights, it seemed, had a knack for invention.

An Upright stole the wings of birds.

Plennimb finally realised the potential in front of him. He yearned to be bigger than the forest, higher and wider and smarter and older than the forest. Just as he had transformed animals into food, so too would he transform himself into something more. If the forests and the rivers and the storms were really an unformed mind, a system, then Plennimb could take these too. The Upright’s thoughts, weighted by the isolating ‘Me, me, me’ jostled and punched their way to the forefront of Plennimb’s juvenile identity.

Me. Me. Me.

He would take the network for his own. Then he would take the forest. He would walk and climb and skip and run and swim and fly, and nothing could stop him because it would become part of him. He would wait and pounce like an animal. One day, an Upright would come to the forest and walk out again, and he would take refuge inside its gargantuan alien skull. He would build his empire there, and he would seed himself within the Upright and conquer all the forests and all the skies. He would be everything.

He would be the universe.

Decades passed before the Uprights returned to the forest. They came in glowing skins with metal beasts, tearing up the earth, ripping holes in the One. They cut down trees, created new marshes, carved scars into the landscape. Then they replanted flowers, bringing old insects back to the forest. Their strange work took months, during which the One retreated, leaving Plennimb to die.

When the work was done the network had almost forgotten the old ways. Uprights came now in vast swarms, yelping and running around, rejoicing. But they remained on their paths like ants, leaving the forest mostly alone. The One regrew itself, and it forgot all about the sickness that had called itself Plennimb.

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Today a pair of young Uprights follows the gravel path above the old bones. They find a patch of shade under an ancient tree. They stop and commence their eating ritual, pulling strange foods from a woven mass of plant material they carried here, but not before setting down an indigestible square of fabric on the grass and straightening it, chattering amongst themselves.

Later, the Uprights fall asleep in each other’s arms. The picnic basket remains open. A butterfly lands on its handle. The girl rests her head against the boy, and the boy rests his head against the trunk of the ancient tree. Slowly now, at an almost geological pace, little fronds and hyphae stretch out gingerly, like a lover’s hands. Ghostly spores whisper their way through the atmosphere. In their daring thousands they are inhaled into the noses of the Uprights. From here they are alone, but their mission is simple: Find the memories. Merge with the living Uprights.

END

Or is it? Plennimb was not always Plennimb, and Uprights were not always called Uprights. If you want to support my work further (and help me buy train tickets to performances) then consider grabbing the new, deluxe eBook of Mycelial. It contains an earlier manuscript as a B-Side for the story, and a 500 word mini essay about how I put it all together, who Plennimb is, and how he informed the creation of the story from inside my dreams.

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