The interview with the mushroom went something like this:-

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It was a resounding disappointment.

It was a disappointment to Narul, the director of the project, on an artistic and intellectual level. He had spent three years setting up the opportunity to bring his fellows their first communication with a long, long lost cousin. As a side note, three years on Narul's home planet is equivalent to 257.34 Earth years.

Narul was not best pleased with what the mushroom had to say.

Nor were the approximately 3.4 million mindsharers who tuned in to Narul's intricate sensory equipment to experience what the adverts had told them was the first conscious life found outside their galaxy. Perhaps, Narul's most diehard fans argued, their fungal friend was indeed conscious, but was just having an off day. Maybe fruiting season was coming up, here on this most alien of worlds, and fruiting season always brought out the grouchiness in everyone. The silence raised a hundred different possibilities involving the gulf of lived experience between beings in such vastly different stimuli, and the prospect that this was the most thought-provoking piece of mindshare in the history of mindshare, and that the five minutes and thirty seven seconds of footage taken before some ignoramus decided to pull the plug would fuel whole schools of philosophy in the more enlightened ages to come.

The other, more honest folk, said it was boring and also a bit shit.

It was also a disappointment to the conglomerate of buisnessshrooms, quadrillionaires, megaboards and media giants who had come together to finance the whole thing at unprecedented cost. It was in fact one of these shadowy figures who was the ignoramus bemoaned by the ultrafans for terminating a motionless picture of what appeared to be a dummy on a far-fetched fantasy stage that was costing his company around 3.2 standardised frions every second. This nameless individual was actually very clever.

In addition, the event was a major blow to politicians of the Aruta region, to which Narul belonged. They had long hyped the interview as a definitive statement of power in the centuries-long space race with rival regions of the capital planet of Vanawr, given the extreme distances that the thankfully private sector backers of their nationality had managed to reach. The other regions now laughed at them. In a species with no concept of physical violence whatsoever, being laughed at is no laughing matter.

Worse, the king found it monotonous, and that is just not on.

There were only two groups in all of Aruta that found some merit in the whole flopping flop. The first were the guys who make that other mindshare about those young shrooms who have just left home (and by just, we mean 513 episodes ago) on a quest for girls and glory in a small tuber plantation at the north pole, and get up to all sorts of totally different shenanigans each and every time, like breaking the humidity generator or breaking the humidity meter. Those guys got back that huge share of the market who had broken away to expand their horizons and educate their enormous minds, and just in time for their crowning glory. Some bright spark had conjured up a storyline about someone spilling tuber juice all over the temperature controls, and once they got into that, their audience would be hooked forever.

The second group was the scientists. Because no matter how disappointing a new disappointment may be to the general public, scientists always have a way of finding something in it to make things even boringer.

The initial newscast, and then the follow-up documentary miniseries, were, like the interview, duds, but on a brighter note, less expensive to produce, resulted in fewer nationwide riots, and caused zero celebrity directors to spiral into self-doubting breakdowns involving indulgent usage of illegal narcotics which led on to ironically successful mindshares about said directors' downfalls.

These failed broadcasts laid out what the scientists were interested in in simple, layshroom-friendly terms that any watcher could understand. The scientists had little to say about the alien mushroom, anchored in the weird green grass against a weird giant plant in front of a weird grey sky with real liquid falling out of it without even a basic condenser in sight. They couldn't tell why it didn't want to talk, and who knew why it would be grumpy with all that water puddling around it. It had the life of Riley.

No, the scientists were interested in what was going on in the background.

There were other lifeforms there. Ones they'd never seen before.

Of course, all planets with shrooms had some sort of ecosystem to lord over, but there were a few differences here. Over zoomed in, zoomed out, colour-graded, heat-zoned and otherwise fiddled about with images, the scientists laid out some properties of the exotic lifeforms that made them pretty special.

These things seemed capable of simple environmental manipulation, like creating shelters from stone and wood and making smooth routes through the landscape from a material wholly unknown. Nothing like the dendral hyperways of Aruta, but still, fairly impressive for something so simple.

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They could also transport themselves rapidly through their environment, presumably to breed or to colonise high-resource habitats. They propelled themselves along the paths in cute little metal capsules. There was debate as to the nature of the cute metal capsule flying through the air above the scene, and the analyst who suggested that this was an airborne equivalent to the terrestrial propulsion system was promptly hounded out of the focus group for jumping to wild conclusions.

When the audio feed was enhanced, the scientists sadly heard no begrudging creakings from the star of the mindshare, but did pick up on a curious rapid-fire high-pitched chatter from beyond, which seemed to coincide with the movements of the pink and brown animals which dotted the roads and entered and exited the dwellings and generally seemed to be the dominant life in the region. Excluding the reticent mushroom, naturally.

After this chatter was slowed down and the images zoomed in even more, it seemed the animals had some tentative control over the openings in their posterior end, which created soundwaves to somehow communicate with their fellows as they generally sort of wandered about and existed. One guest anthropologist invited to the series pointed out that in certain circles, it was speculated that the distant ancestors of civilization on the capital planet used similar means to speak, before evolving the infinitely more versatile telepathy that all mushrooms use today.

The other wonder of note was just how vast this population of unknowns appeared to be. Extrapolating from various streams of data, details of which were wisely left out of an already numbing presentation, the team concluded that this mass of organic stuff carpeted nigh on the entire world, and named their sea of writhing wriggling bodies the Urban Mat. Three weeks later, after the series had ended, and around five weeks after it had been forgotten by literally everyone, a committee quietly renamed it, because this primitive mess had nothing to do with the likes of the Arutan cell cities with their nexus hubs and soma channels and pop-up tuber stands. It was renamed the Protein Mat, which almost everyone still interested agreed was much more appropriate.

And while the Great Disappointment and its aftermath faded from shared minds and everyone got on with their lives, some of the scientists carried on with their prodding and poking, because, after all, that IS their lives.

More apparatus was sent out to the mat and its constituent creatures. A couple more attempts were made to engage the mushrooms dotted about, but they were lazy people, and rude, and so the mission stuck to its primary directive.

Before long, AI had deciphered some of the communications of the main animals. It was curiously complex, infinitely diverse. Some of the observers, far, far away, began to talk of it in secret as akin to proper language.

To go with the possible words, even more absurd inferences were made. The Protein Mat had organisation, specialisation.... culture. This was all discussed in the strictest confidence, of course. Personal opinion only. Officially, the Protein Mat was meat and nothing more. But there were some who worked on the observation project who began to grow rather attached. It was like watching a pet krentorix squirming about its tank. Some of the more distinctive lifeforms started to acquire names. If you forgot the textbooks, some biologists would tell their friends, watched really closely, it almost looked like the things knew what they were doing.

The most crazy of them all, after a few rotroots too many, even suggested the famous radio message, received centuries ago from the vague vicinity of the galaxy in which the interview had taken place, that very same message which had originally prompted scrutiny of this particular area of the universe, had been produced from within the mass of the mat. The main evidence for this, apart from the positioning of the planet, was a similarity between the little figure within the decoded image from the signal, and the multicoloured animals that formed the main features within the mat. This similarity only became apparent if the image was stretched, rotated, transposed, quantum deconstructed and then realigned within an alternate dimension, and even then it required a good deal of imagination. The supporters for this theory argued back that the creatures just might not be very good at art.

And then, just like that, the dream was over.

It came one alien morning, a long, long way from civilisation, with a drone surreptitiously following a protein family close to point of first ignorance. It wasn't hard for the drone to be surreptitious, because it was about the size of a grain of sand and also invisible. The most danger a drone could be in was being in the vicinity of one of the primary animals when they opened their upper orifice to produce sound, which all the team back in Aruta, no matter their opinions on the meaning of that sound, could firmly agree was a sometimes tediously constant occurrence.

This particular drone was being operated by one Orara, a behavioural biologist who was writing a paper on the eating habits of the Protein Mat. Orara was firmly on Team Intelligence. He had already identified with reasonable statistic confidence that the constituent animals trended towards three intakes of food per day, often in large gatherings away from private dwellings. Now if only he could prove his suspicions that these meals were distinct in content and preparation within one day, yet consistent for each time across days, then he might be on to getting some more recognition and respect for his subjects, some evidence for the growing movement to attempt communication with the mat, and last and of course least, maybe one of those sweet research grants that Team Unintelligent always seem to be dipping their mycelia in.

The drone was, this time, in one of the rudimentary private hovels. One of Orara's colleagues had tentative reports of a cycle of seven days within the activity of the mat, characterised by heavy consumption of an otherwise little-seen liquid over the course of two evenings. The mornings after these intakes, vocalisations were often made shortly before the first meal that the scientists had dubbed "fry up". These appeared to be heavier heated meals that, at least in this part of the mat, had a significant correlation with the mystery liquids. Why wasn't the only mystery, and may in fact have been several steps ahead. That fateful day, Orara had sent his drone to merely identify the precise contents of the meal associated with the "fry up" expressions.

From his vantage point above the small congregation, Orara noted the heating of an oily substance in a disc of metal, a sizzling sound, and the retrieval and cooking of meats and vegetables from a large white cooled box in the corner of the room. This was all wildly exciting data, a veritable watermine of useful information for his studies.

His excitement lasted until, towards the end of the preparation, the biggest animal retrieved the final item from the box. When Orara identified the bodies of his own distant cousins, excitement turned to horror. When he saw what the animal did to the dead with a sliver of metal gripped in its appendage, and where the poor chaps went after that, Orara promptly switched off his camera, left the observation facility without a single thought to any of his team, and did not return until the completion of a complimentary twelve week counselling programme, by which time his reports had changed the direction of the research programme rather significantly.

Because the Protein Mat wasn't just a load of dumb animals, nor was it a civilisation. It was a threat.

Well, perhaps that was a little bit of an exaggeration, the media team were quick to assure the public once the next convoy of equipment was safely on its way. Detailed surveys had found absolutely no evidence that the aliens were capable of even leaving their solar system, let alone voyage all the way here. And besides, they might not find Arutans very tasty even if they did.

But somewhere out there, there might be cousins of the Protein Mat a little closer to home, and besides, it was noble to defend their own faraway relatives even if they were a little undeveloped, and the government had concluded safe was decisively better than sorry, and that was why the payload of experimental pesticide was on its way to the mysterious planet this very second. The compound had been constructed based upon the analyses of the researchers who had studied the Protein Mat's properties all this time, so the entire project had turned out useful to society after all, and everyone involved went away with shiny medals and got priority access to the new mindshare, which was worth the abandonment of some silly pet dabblings on the creatures in anyone's book.

And, with the probes neatly spaced around the entire seething mass of the predator planet at a thousand angles and in ultra high definition and surround sound and full spectrum clarity, this mindshare promised to be bigger and better than anything that had come before it.

Together, the mushrooms watched and listened and waited impatiently for the wink of silver against the blackness of the sky, and for the action to begin.