Transplant’s Personal Diary

Today was our D-day. We stormed a beach and fought overwhelming odds. Bullets and bombs versus worms, roots, and mushrooms.

It was not the best day to feel the way I did. I don’t know how to describe it. I didn’t exactly have a headache when I woke up in the cloud forest that morning; it felt like the sharp toes of an eagle had been probing all the little tunnels in my brain. The other spores slept well. We were all huddled together in a depression of moss and fleshy leaves the size of wakeboards. None of us cared we were sleeping with our sides touching, like fledglings in a nest. The Lichen left us our souls, but most sense of personal space is gone between us. Pawn is more my brother now than he ever was before. He told me that if anything happens to him he wants me to help Salt Shaker raise their daughter. No matter how my composition changes, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for that. The Earth is my child and parent; look at how I’ve cared for it.

I should have used my powers more aggressively before the Lichen called. Being an upper middle class American overpowered all my guilt. I wasn’t part of the problem because I bought cage free eggs and organic carrots. Somehow I just didn’t notice the gas my car drank, the toxic purple box I kept my art pencils in, or the lights I left on when I left a room. I could’ve gone out at night and reclaimed wetlands with my powers. I could’ve pinched forests back over construction sites like green clay. Instead I played the superhero and made big houseplants for people to gawk at.

I’ve learned more about the other spores too. Rot and Venus appear so strange because they let the Lichen replace bigger parts of them. Parts they didn’t like. Rot had the Lichen literally replace the pieces of him that convinced his human mind to commit violent crimes. Gone was the domestic abuser. Gone was the gambler. He kept his taste in fancy clothes, which is more than I can say for Venus.

Dry Worm has grown close to me. It’s impossible to hide anything in the knots between us, so the entire drama that could take two people a lifetime to play out took us one night. She huddled close to me and held my arm when we had settled in to sleep. We all shared silent stories around an imaginary campfire. The lesser spores hovered around us, feeding on the details of the human emotion they used to have like chickens pecking at seed. Too much would make them heartsick, so they came in waves to listen.

Stories flowed through her arm and into mine by the subtlest squeezes. A soft squeeze meant there was a time when she had been happy, even behind her veil. She had a garden. A Jolt of tightness. The garden was fading. It needed worms to help move and nourish the soil. She was walking home carrying a jar of them. The police showed up and manhandled her. The crime… irrelevant… something the man she was seeing had done. They’d killed him. That was when the Lichen rose from the cracks in the ground and swallowed them all. It spat out the police… dead. They were not fit for the call or anything else. The Lichen kept her and her worms.

Her squeeze loosened slowly. She’d lost her faith and her love of her home. She traveled the world underground with her pets, like reading a book backwards. The earth told very recent stories. Very painful ones. Landfills. Poisonous dumps. She swam in mass graves. Everyone was out to kill her garden and even she was guilty of it before the call.

She squeezed softly and stroked the soft side of my wrist with one finger. Nothing physical separated us spores. Not the age difference. Not the cultures. Not our bodies. It was just me that kept us apart. I don’t know who I want to be with. I like Dry Worm, but life is too overwhelming for me now for all that. I don’t feel much like starting a new family after abandoning two of them. I’m not up to it. Her grip loosened. I felt every bit of badness she did. Even in that nest you can still be lonely. The other spores felt it too. Her hand left my arm. There was war coming soon and it was perhaps the only distraction big enough to get her to let go.

The Lichen’s connections are stronger and more numerous than Act-of-Goddess’. When thousands of gallons of oil spilled on a frigid northwestern beach, we were alerted. We traveled there under the ground as fast as we could, expecting to find the ruptured hull of a ship or a flaming platform. When we emerged there was nothing in sight but a great sheet of acrid blackness clumping up in the tide. I took off my boots and walked out into the edge of it. I felt the greasy oil between my toes. Rot stood next to me. When the next wave touched his feet, a purple film took over the oil around him and ate it away. Among the thousands of species of fungi and bacteria all over his skin, one of them likes to eat oil. He waded waist high into the mess and started eating away at the black stains.

I consulted with the other spores. We were thinking about building some kind of dense kelp net to corral the pollutant. I was eager to get started before the sun broke through the puffy blue clouds overhead, but before I could reach down and grab up any washed-up plants the sand shifted. A silvery spinning spear shredded the sand, tossing it into our faces. A bulky machine like a cartoon robot with a drill for a head emerged from the hole. I had never seen him before, but the Lichen had shown us what to look for. It was Drill Baby.

I had previously wondered why the Lichen hadn’t made its way to him and tried to stop him with the call. The Lichen told me that some people physically could not accept it. Their minds were too hard, too impenetrable when it came to the suffering of other living things. They had morals that couldn’t find room for compassion. People like Drill Baby could only be threatened, jailed, or killed. When I saw his sneer and that E-cigar of his I dreaded that inevitable third option. His helmet opened.

“I told my boys. The trap’s only as good as the bait,” he said, teeth clacking on the exhaust pipe in his mouth.

“You spilled this oil… on purpose?” Pawn asked. His skin can’t turn the color of rage, but I heard the purple in his voice.

“Did you think I’d let you destroy my operations?” he chuckled. “You done picked a fight with the heavy weight champ.” He spun the drills on his suit like he was beating his chest. “Shame on you for thinking I’m one of them boardroom biddies who sidesteps the stink-eye. I don’t pretend I’m apart from my work. I’m a world shaker. I’m not going to let everyone ignore the treasures pooling under our feet. I’ll drag the whole damn world into innovation if I have to.”

“And destroy the planet in the process?” I asked.

“I aint destroying nothing. Conservation of matter, learned about it in school. Everything I do sticks around.”

“Do you want to die?” Pawn threatened. His threats are bad and he knows it.

“A bear roars at me,” Drill Baby said, “and I just shove my arm down its throat to shut it up. Let’s get to work boys! Bonuses if you bag somebody’s head!”

That was when the sea turned to froth and a line of amphibious vehicles emerged from the water. Loading doors on the front of them popped open and vomited out their contents. Maybe the men in those vehicles were trying to protect their jobs or maybe Drill Baby had hired a bunch of ex-military to take us down; it didn’t really matter. They had guns. Armor. Black visors. That stupid drill-riding toddler on their chest. And they shot on sight.

All I had to work with was columns of floppy kelp, but I worked hard. One length of it around my waist kept me suspended in the air while I brought the other one down to slap a mercenary’s face into the oily sand. I pushed his head in until it was buried. I never felt the need to do anything like that in the Justice Backers. That was never war though. That was a game where we occasionally risked our lives, like climbing a tree and hanging upside down in a branch. Silliness. This was different. I don’t know if I killed that man. I don’t think I did.

Venus certainly wasn’t holding back. She went for the head, shredding necks with her hidden spines. Her body mostly absorbed the barrage of bullets, only occasionally taking wounds that looked like snapped pieces of celery. Rot swept in after her, covering the dying and struggling with a layer of suffocating mold.

Pawn reminded me of our own army, waiting patiently in an underground burl. I used the kelp to force my way into the sand and open a connection to the burl so the other spores could join us. They threw themselves mindlessly into the chaos to get chewed up and shredded. They didn’t think enough of themselves to consider death an actual consequence.

When I came back to the surface Drill Baby ripped through my kelp and tossed me across the sand. The guns on his chest fired, creating geysers of sand that came closer and closer. I was only saved by a sudden change in the terrain as a worm burrowed under me. It breached the surface and dropped itself on Drill Baby. He held the worm’s girth up with his mechanical arms and drilled into it. The poor animal’s guts sprayed all over him. Dry Worm snuck under him and placed her staff between his legs. The dried-out worm’s tissues inflated and returned to life. It wrapped itself around Drill Baby’s legs and tripped him when he tried to walk. That didn’t give any of us an opportunity to strike, as he just spun up again and burrowed out of sight. Oil and sea water poured into the hole he left behind.

Pawn was the safest from the bullets, so he did his best to coordinate the lesser spores. He had some of them gang up on the vehicles and flip them over. The ones that could ripped red thorns from their bodies and tossed them like knives. The oil. The blood. The strange green fluids from the worms and spores. They all mixed together into a vile slurry and then into a foam. I thought we all might drown in it.

Drill Baby’s arm exploded out of the sand and snagged Venus by the neck. She wrapped all her vines around him and tried desperately to bind him, but his armor was too powerful. He ripped one of her legs off. Her many hidden mouths split open and screamed. The sound struck my heart like a dagger and the strength went out of me. I thought I was still standing, but then I looked down and saw my knees grinding into the sand. Nobody deserved to have that filthy beach as their grave.

An unexpected savior leapt out of the ocean: a small black whale. It flipped through the air and at its highest point a woman leapt from its back and extended rubbery wings. Alpha Dog never would have sent her, but thankfully she doesn’t take orders from him. She bombarded Drill Baby with strange little bursts of air until he was forced to release Venus. The injured spore slithered across the gross sand like an octopus, looking for a lifeline. I threw her some kelp that attached to our underground burl so she could recover away from the fight.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Sportfish was the only one in the air, so her support was invaluable. Everywhere where we were getting mowed down she swooped in and broke up the firing squads. Our remaining spores limped forward and pushed more of Drill Baby’s soldiers back into the surf. She landed next to me and helped me to my feet.

“You’re helping us?” I panted.

“I assume you’re here to protect the beach.”

“Yes.”

“Then we’re on the same side for now.”

“Thank you.”

“You sure pissed uncle Eben off.”

“Pretty sure I’m pissing the whole world off,” I admitted.

Two mercenaries took aim at us. I was about to pull Sportfish to the ground with me when I saw her whale power up onto the beach as far as it could. It opened its mouth wider than any real whale could and created a sound so loud that the men were forced to drop their guns and cover their ears. Sportfish told me to cover mine as well. The whale got louder and louder. Through my covered ears I could hear that the sound had become a song, a really popular one in fact. One of those house music tracks with so many contributing artists that they wouldn’t know who to give the Grammy to. It felt like it had been years since I’d last heard music like that. My life has been all cicadas and peeping frogs.

The sound wave attack forced nearly all the soldiers to their knees. The spores mostly lacked ears. Pawn did not look concerned, even as his powdered eardrums ran out of his ears like sugar. I looked back at Sportfish to see her literally dancing along with the music. Every time a move had her extend her arm she fired another blast at a vehicle or a soldier’s feet. I hadn’t pegged her as the theatrical type, but then I noticed the small crowd of people gathered over the far dune at the edge of the battlefield. I saw at least a dozen phones recording us. After she was finished breaking it down, Sportfish saw me looking at the crowd. She switched off her whale’s sonic attack.

“The show was for them?” I asked and pointed to the phone stands across the beach.

“You guys might not need good press,” she said, “but I do.” Our eyes were drawn to the arrival of several police vehicles. I guess Drill Baby didn’t like seeing them either, because he vanished beneath the ground. What was left of his forces stumbled back to their aquatic tanks and sank out of sight. “You’d better get going too,” she said. We shook hands. She took to her whale and we spores descended back underground.

By the end of it we looked like a bag of mulch. The husks of twelve spores were left on that beach to get swallowed by the tide. They weren’t human anymore; they were plants that had twisted back and forth over the years as they chased the sun and forgot about the ground they were rooted in. They weren’t devoid of feeling though. There was faded pain when they died and that pain throbbed in all our minds.

It was pitch black inside the burl while we traveled underground, but I still felt like I could see the blood glistening on Venus’ fangs. I think we killed four of Drill Baby’s men. As a spore I shared in the murders my peers committed. I had known I would not return to the Justice Backers since the call, but today cemented it. Neither Alpha Dog nor Impala would take us after this. Even if they wanted to they would quickly lose the financial struts the internet provides. I rubbed my aching knee in the spot roughly equivalent to where Venus’ vine had been ripped from her. She would grow it back but for now it hurt us.

“We need a better plan,” Pawn said without words. Rot nodded.

“The Lichen has one already,” Dry Worm said. “We’re just to keep prodding. Humans are dumb. They need all the chances we provide to get the message.”

“We might get killed before that,” Pawn argued. Venus hissed out loud. The content of the hiss was clear. She had told Pawn he was welcome to leave any time if he didn’t agree with the Lichen’s course of action. The rest of our return journey was spent in near silence.

Even after the invasion, the day wasn’t done beating the crap out of me. I was tired and my brain still had that clawed-out feeling, so I decided to take a nap alone back in our nest. I closed my eyes… and I found a prisoner.

My dreams have metamorphosed since the call. They’re more like dandelion seeds in the wind, mixing with the seeds of my peers. It’s a melting pot of old fears and hopes fading into the distance like a Bob Ross sunset. It is not a safe place for a human’s mind. I found Dreamweaver in a shadowy cave-like corner of my dream world. She was bound in tight stone vines, leaned against the wall like a chrysalis knocked from its twig and deprived of sunlight. I couldn’t see even the tiniest fold of her dream dress. The Lichen’s consciousness is fluid; it doesn’t leave any spot untouched or exposed. I was frightened for her.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. She looked like she barely had the energy to speak. Her blue lips suggested the dream world had been utterly airless to her until I’d closed my eyes.

“I came to you from Monkey Girl,” she said. She had crossed between us when we were feet apart on top of the mountain Drill Baby had popped the top off of. “I needed to see if you were being controlled.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I know that now. I’m sorry about your head. It was me clawing around. I was so sure… I know you are not holding me here. This mind is… inhuman. It is like stones and water and a hundred other things before life. It is cold.”

“It is cold to you. The Lichen learned to appreciate the sun’s weak glow through centuries of impenetrable clouds. Its warmth is old and less intense.”

“Is it going to release me?” she asked.

“No,” I answered. I sensed a cold tear on my real-life eye.

“Is it going to kill me?”

“No. The Lichen cannot trust you. It can’t let you take its secrets back to the minds of men. It’s going to keep you here.”

“I cannot stay here.”

“I’m sorry. You won’t even be here actually. The Lichen is going to take you from me. You’ll be in its mind.”

“Transplant please I don’t want to go there,” she cried. The Lichen was reverse-engineering her to figure out her powers. It was touching nerves that hadn’t felt a twinge since she was a flesh-and-blood child. “Transplant, the monster’s going to eat me! Please! I don’t want it to eat me. I don’t want to be in that dark stomach.” The stony vines started to drag her backward into the cave.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. I knew it wouldn’t kill her. It would try to be gentle, but the Lichen doesn’t understand us. It mixes with us and learns from us, but it won’t touch our flaws. Without those it can’t understand our fears. I can only hope that when it lets Dreamweaver go she’s still herself. Her sobbing little kid face disappeared in the cave. The Lichen tried to comfort me. It does care, even though it can’t do it in a human way. Its way is probably better.

Pawn shook me awake. We locked eyes and he learned what happened to Dreamweaver. We hugged. I don’t know if the person reading this knows much about coral, but I’ve got a depressingly good analogy. When two pieces of coral grow too close together, they fight. Neither can move, so they extrude their guts all over each other and try to digest their neighbors right out of their limestone shells. I saw it on the nature channel when I was a kid and it always stuck with me. That’s what the Justice Backers and the Lichen are doing. Their goals are just close enough that they have bumped into each other, but they can’t shake hands and play nice. It’s an acid fight. Pawn and I feel the burns on both sides.

Drill Baby’s Manifesto

(This document has been edited to remove Drill Baby’s recruitment information.)

I, Kenny Bittumer, of handsome mind and raucous body, do hereby declare war on the boot stain that calls itself ‘the Lichen’ on behalf of the entire human race. I intend to totally and utterly obliterate and annihilate this abomination of the Stone Age and all its slimy green subsidiaries. Let no weed go unburned. Let no mushroom stick its ugly flat head into our air. After seeing a vine eat the south, I will not be party to any treaties or laws that has man shaking hands with a stinking bog. We do not make deals with nature. We tame it. We make it beg for mercy. We do this because we recollect every crack of lightning that made our slack-jawed ancestors scurry into their caves. We do it because we recall children ravaged by polio, livestock dragged away by wolf teeth around their throats, and hurricanes that drown our cities. Nature is not your friend. It is our natural opponent, and I am one competitive sumbitch.

I can hear the worry warts already: but Baby, Earth is our home! Global warming! Endangered species! You’re pissing on your own rug! Yeah? So what? Y’all are smart people; I don’t need to split my tongue with you. Industry breaks things. It’s always been that way. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but life keeps getting better and better! You have your fancy phones and computers because we took all the pieces out of the ground. We move our cars and planes with what I take from the ground.

Is it going to run out one day? Of course! Conservation of mass, look it up. Once we turn all that oil and coal into something else there’s no way to turn it back again. Maybe magic can make the carriage a pumpkin again, but I aint seen anybody waving magic wands at present. What all the jawing heads on TV neglect to say is that we need the tank to hit empty. The red needle is a motivating kind of force. We stagnate without a howling danger over our shoulders.

There will be wars of shortage. There will be sleepless nights. The world will change. Don’t fight your natural urges. You’re a hard-working bullet-sweating god of a creature and if you want to take an hour long steamy shower on the massage setting, you deserve it! When the oil’s gone we’ll ram our way through the old impossibilities into a new set of supposedly finite luxuries and resources. You hear me? We thrive on the edge of annihilation because that’s where we were forged. This is my planet and I’ll use it up as I please. If the Lichen wants to stop me, it knows where to find me. Even as some yellow countries start to shut me down, I can always count on the good old U.S. of A to keep chugging on. My operations there will be increasing. Tar sands. Natural gas. Oil and coal. If you want to help me defend them then you can answer my call.

(redacted)

A warm welcome to all my new soldiers of fortune. I’ll be sending you a free Drill Baby flag you can fly on your home. We are a nation within a nation that’s finally ready to say, ‘I will not respect the boundaries of nature. I will fight to better my life and my family’s life and I don’t care what the dirt or the air or the sun has to say about it!’

I’m also officially inviting the Justice Backers to join us in defending the human laws of their homeland. They’re not a bad bunch just because a couple of crabapples got mixed in. This is the kind of war everybody fights in whether they say they’re a soldier or not. If you were standing right next to me while I did my work you’d either let me stick that drill in the ground or you wouldn’t. If you sit on the fence you’ll only get splinters. So join me! Support our troops and feel some pride at the pump!

If you’re a tree-hugger or a Lichen-lover I only have one thing to say to you: don’t you dare tread on me. I’ve got fangs full of oil and I’m not afraid to use them. We are at war.

With respect to human craftiness,

Kenny Bittumer

Known in his moments of glory as

Drill Baby