“We’re years away from understanding this,” the mycologist had said, stabbing his cigarette into an overflowing ashtray. “Years.” He was Asian, Korean maybe, and wouldn’t stop smoking no matter how many times the other scientist asked.
The other scientist, a plump little microbiologist, couldn’t sit still and paced the entire time. “You people built a bridge across evolution, jumped millions of years, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. Sweat had soaked through the armpits of his shirt and his eyes looked like a couple of hardboiled eggs bulging out of dark hollows. “You need to tell your bosses that we tried to warn you when the tests started coming in. We tried. Make sure you tell them that. You can’t just release something like that and expect it to behave.”
Cochran didn’t say anything.
The mycologist lit a new cigarette. “Some basic facts that you need to understand.” He held up his hands and tapped his nicotine-stained fingers as he went. “Fungi is neither plant nor animal. Yet it shares characteristics of both. The scientific community continually debates how to classify these organisms.” He spit a fleck of tobacco on the floor and shook his head. “In the last thirty years, the taxonomy classifications have changed more often than a map of Eastern Europe. But it has been on earth since the beginning. It was almost the first conscious life-form, but never quite made it, and God cursed it to clean up after the rest of the species.”
Cochran thought the man needed some rest and checked his watch to politely remind him to get to the point.
The mycologist ignored Cochran’s body language and ticked off another finger. “We’ve identified over 80,000 species. However, there are undoubtedly more. Many, many more. At least 1.5 million. Maybe even 5 million.”
“Who gives a shit,” the microbiologist snapped, waving at the smoke. “None of them have ever, ever acted like this. This stuff, it gets in you, it grows like cancer on crack.”
This, the mycologist agreed with. He nodded. “And God help you if you are close when it is ready to reproduce.”
The security footage taken from the conference room on the island made this quite clear. They’d watched in silence as Dr. Deemer’s head had cracked open and the eyes had popped, releasing the spores.
The mycologist told him that the fungus had somehow made the jump from one species to another with surprising ease, and that it was controlling the infected insects on the island to a limited extent before liquefying the abdomen and the head, then repurposing the legs somehow. Nobody was still quite sure how it worked, and the company wasn’t in any hurry to replicate it under controlled conditions. That island had been one of their top research centers, complete with some of the most secure laboratories in the world, and now it was nothing but a charred slab of rock in the middle of the ocean, thanks to the fungus.
While the microbiologist paced, the mycologist fired up yet another cigarette. He sucked in a lungful of smoke, blew it out his nose while staring at the table. He looked up, met Cochran’s eyes. “We think it can infect you two ways. One, when the fruiting body is large enough, it will burst, spreading microscopic spores into the air. These spores will infect anything they come into contact with. That’s like most fungus. But,” he paused to take another drag, “there’s something else going on too. You ever catch athlete’s foot?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “All you have to do is touch it. That’s all. A simple touch under the right conditions.”
He’d pointed to the footage from the security cameras from Greenhouse #6, where the two executives had broken in and tried to escape using the Zodiac tied up in the tidal pools. “They had already been infected, back in the boardroom, but here,” he pointed to the cobwebs. “Here, they picked up some of the infected insects. Of course, they were not insects any longer, not really. They were simply vehicles for the fungus to expand, to search out more flesh. See, traditionally, normal fungus will ‘move’ to food by growing toward it, but this species has figured out a way to actively use its victims to carry the fungus to new food. It has become a predator.”
The microbiologist stopped pacing and wagged his finger. “We don’t know that yet. We don’t know anything yet.”
The mycologist shook a sheaf of papers at his colleague. “We know damn well they used Ophiocordyceps unilateralis as a foundation for the DNA sequence.” He looked back at Cochran. “This is a fungus that controls ants. It latches onto the brain stem of a rainforest ant and controls their behavior, compels them to climb up to an optimum height, clamp on the underside of a leaf with their mandibles, and stays there until a large enough fruiting body grows from within the ant, until it explodes, raining spores down below, and the whole process starts all over again.”
Cochran almost felt sorry for the ants.
The mycologist threw the paper on the table and talked without looking at the other scientist. “So don’t tell me we don’t know anything. We know too damn much. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. We know just enough to go tampering with building blocks of life, but act surprised when life doesn’t react the way we hope it will. Besides,” he looked back at Cochran, “this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Look at the Permian-Triassic extinction, 250 million years ago. Sixty percent of all scientific families, more than eighty percent of genera. That’s ninety-six percent of all species in the ocean. All gone. We think that fungus had something to do with it. You want something more recent? Look at the plagues of Egypt. They all have a strong possibility of a fungal origin. They—”
“Oh, give it a rest,” the microbiologist said. “If I have to listen to any more of your superstitious nonsense I’m going to shoot myself. Dragging us back to the Dark Ages will not help us solve anything.”
“Man’s hubris is what brought us to the brink of extinction in the first place.”
The microbiologist leaned over and yelled in the mycologist’s face, “Spare me your platitudes, you fucking moron.” He went back to his pacing, and mimicked the mycologist’s accent, pretending to smoke with fluttering, exaggerated gestures. “Because, you know, you can’t spell fungus without fun!”
The mycologist had merely shrugged and lit another cigarette.
Cochran hung up the phone and listened to wind rustle the corn leaves. That meeting had been utterly useless. And now he still had no idea what the fungus looked like. How the hell was he supposed to be aware of microscopic spores in the air? The company had supplied him with emergency gear in the trunk of the rental car, but gave him explicit instructions not to use it unless he encountered irrevocable evidence of the fungus itself. Allagro wanted everything quiet and controlled.
He took one last look around the yard and trudged back up to the house to sit by himself in the living room, staring at a muted TV while Belinda sobbed in the bedroom and Bob locked himself in the bathroom.
Kevin had seen the footage from the Incident. Over and over. He’d watched videos of his mom arriving at the courthouse as reported by various networks on YouTube. He’d marveled at her coolness as people shouted questions and chanted slogans. Remembered how he’d heard her crying in the shower a couple times late at night. She would be furious if she knew he’d watched them again. Kevin knew the faces of everyone involved, especially the complainant. Knew how the asshole tried to get up out of his wheelchair and lurch over to the podium to speak to the press against his lawyer’s overly theatrical advice, like it was some kind of professional wrestling match. Knew too well how the asshole’s knee now worked like one of those wacky inflatable doofuses out in front of used car lots, forever flopping in random directions.