“Shit!”
Jack had his foot in his hands and he pulled something off. It was a small crustaceous creature with a large, for its size, mushroom on its back. Jack moved it closer to his face before it twitched and plumed a cloud of spores into his face.
“Jack…” Tule moved forward as well as Jonah coiling up his own antilife finger, hands outstretched before Jack popped the creature into his mouth and loudly chewed.
Tule froze, his hand still raised. Jonah’s face was full of eager anticipation. Leanne was studying Jack’s reaction, pistol in one hand, dagger in the other.
He wasn't sure why he did that. But... to be honest, it was definitely more edible than crab. The mushroom tasted sour, tart. The gush of sweet shelled-insect blood that washed through his mouth afterwards blended nicely in contrast. It left a clear aftertaste. Jack looked around his feet and found another, he ate that one too. He looked around again. Something was different.
He rubbed his hand over his face, it felt like he was touching someone else’s face.
Leanne’s face was a rictus of disgust, “Did you just, you did. Why would you eat that? Who does that?”
Jack grinned at that, he managed to hold back a laugh building in his chest.
“It was pretty good actually, much better than all that crab-slop you all were shoveling down.”
Jack turned and walked down the hallway. His bare hand trailed along the growth on the wall.
Leanne stared after him. Some of the mushrooms reached towards him, other ones away. She shrunk back in disgust.
“Jonah, let’s go.” He was lost in his portable. He misstepped and a wicked-looking mushroom on the wall stretched towards his head, he flicked his finger, a strip of aqua lashing out and terminating the mushroom. He walked off.
Leanne now knew she had been misjudging these people. She had been treating them as mostly-sane.
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Jonah washed a small burst of antilife over the door, there was a faint keening sound coming from it. “I wonder what is past these doors.” He was looking for something to elucidate his questions. From behind, something clamped down on either side of his shoulders.
“They were holding cells, but now, they hold Life. Life! Jonah.”
Jonah jumped up and whirled around, Jack’s gauntlet blocked Jonah’s fingers from firing off at him.
His eyes rested near the top of Jack’s torso. He looked up and saw Jack with a smile on his face, eyes looking over his head.
“Life?”
Jack turned his head downward and met Jonah’s own eyes. Something was going on with Jack. Grinning in a place like this, his pupils were large saucers.
“Yessssss liiiiife, it's all connected Jonah all connec...” Jack let him go and wandered off. Jonah studied him as he walked away. A few of the mushrooms hanging off the ceiling rubbed gently against Jack’s head as he passed. Jack patted them fondly in return.
“Leanne…” She was watching Jack too. Tule was following Jack, becoming increasingly on edge.
“His pupils were massive. I think it’s some sort of reaction from the, whatever, he ate from his foot.”
“Dangerous?” Her pistol was in the ready position.
“Maybe… No! Put that down!” Jonah hissed at her.
“Jack and Tule managed to kill the Cryo-Core SI so let’s give them both a little benefit of the doubt here.”
Leanne turned to him, “You noticed something with Tule too?”
Jonah more than ‘noticed it’, “Yes… Not to worry, let’s go. We don’t want to fall behind.”
Leanne let Jonah lead as she circled and kept her head on a swivel. She saw the SI wave, her chin still resting on the Elder’s head. She didn’t like that. Though, to be fair, she didn’t like most things.
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Jack was oblivious to his surroundings, and somehow, Leanne could swear, they were oblivious of him. Friendly even.
She fired her pistol into something that poked out of the wall. It looked like a… what was the word, a mouse! It looked like a mutated mushroom-laden mouse.
It was still twitching so she fired again. The creature sank into the floor, dissapearing. Another mouse crept out of the same opening and crawled across the same path. The room froze. Tule stopped, even Jonah contributed to the silence. The background of mushrooms rubbing against each other was still as well. A crack and hiss as a door opened. She whipped her head and saw Jack walk through a door. It snapped shut behind him.
Leanne broke the silence, “Where’s Jack going?”
Tule turned his head and made his way cautiously to the door.
The next handpad was completely shattered. As Jonah investigated the scraps and looked to connect his portable, Tule started to carve a portal through the door with his Toothpick.
“No time Jonah, we should not be separated.”
Leanne stepped very carefully, one foot after another, towards the end of the hallway.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
She hissed slowly and quietly, “Where…”
“Open.” Tule cut her off. Inside the room. Something was wrong. There, Jack was on the other side of the room, waiting in front of a closed door. He stroked a mushroom and the door cracked and hissed open. He stepped through.
“Jack! Wait!”
He turned around and flashed a thumbs up before it slid closed.
“Ch!” Tule’s face was a grimace, his eyes scanning the octagon base of the room.
Leanne slashed at a mushroom that reached out towards her head. Purple liquid, blood maybe, burst and flowed from where she slashed.
“KREEEEEEEEECH” rang out through the room. A wet, slopping sound echoed softly after.
“The door! Now!” Tule darted to the door they had lost Jack through and started to cut. The regeneration of the mycelial blanket kept pace with his slashes, reforming sliced sections of the door and binding them together with a layer of mushroom.
Leanne started firing her pressurized water beads at seemingly random points, unsure of what counted as a “target.”
Jonah swept his anti-life finger through the mass surrounding them, creating a break in the spore-net.
Tule saw Jack strolling down the hallway, he turned his head to the side, full grin, and pointed to the right with a thumb. Tule saw that Jack’s hand was severely burnt. Jack then shrugged his head and sat down on a mushroom. It then started to move as it transported him further down the corridor. How'd he get so far down the hall?
“Tule! There is something… lurking.” She continued to fire off at a measured pace.
He looked around. He didn’t Sense anything, it was too busy here. His Senses had been changing, his vision had acquired a few more degrees but in exchange his precise vision had degraded a bit. Troubling.
There, the other door. As if activated by his sight the net crawled away from the surface of the door. The three swept over, keeping the rest of the room in their eyeline.
“Is that…” It was. Jonah saw the AI disk perched half wobbling on top of the handpad. Did Jack put that there? What was going on?
An echoing laugh boomed somewhere distant and flowed towards them. It’s cadence was reflected in the mushrooms around them. Mouths opened up on top of the heads of the mushroom forest around them, teeth sharp and white as they echoed and returned the laughter.
Jonah looked at his antilife finger. Maybe Jack wasn’t too out of place when he considered bringing the SI’s Elder. He glanced at Leanne. Maybe they could have talked her down to a 1-to-1 trade. He plugged in his portable to the handpad.
He’d never seen a digital formation like this, it was… alive. No, that was impossible. He reprogrammed and adjusted his viral programs, they were ineffective but the machine algorithms were learning fast. The mechanism of the digital resistance he was receiving wasn’t like the normal anti-virals. It reminded him of a growth, it massed then pressed in all at once as it made multiple points of contact with his portable’s software all at once. His own Shell programs were coming under attack, he quickly adjusted his anti-virals to combat it. On a whim he started to build a new program.
The laughter had passed on then reflected back from some distant point. Whispered answers to questions no one had asked started to come through.
A red and white spotted mushroom the size of his head wetly gurgled through shining white teeth, “We are all a Host for life, thought we spend much of this Precious Gift in lonely, isolated, Separateness…”
A purplish glowing mushroom with it’s identical teeth and mouth continued, “By Separating ourself, we turn ourselves against the greatest Cosmic Truth, the best kept secret of all ages…”
The next line echoed from every mouth in the room, creating a painful reverb that shook their skulls, “All is One, and One is All.”
“Jonah! Hurry! Please!” Hearing Leanne say ‘please’ was enough to tip the balance. He unplugged his portable and snatched up the AI disk. It was warm, a disk of soft acid green. In the center of it he saw a small blue square. He slid it in the door, took a deep breath and slapped his hand down on the handpad.
It slid open. He pulled the disk and followed Tule through.
Leanne was tight on his heels, her balance keeping her on her feet as darted backwards through the open door. Another hallway. The mushrooms in the room they’d just evacuated were gathering together, sliding, sliming, and growing in a new direction to meet the merging and writhing mass in the middle of the room.
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Jack felt… at peace. He laughed and the mushrooms laughed with him, their teeth glinting wildly in the reflections of the phosphorescent. He was holding another small shroom-crab in his hand. He felt a warm feeling build inside him as it played and crawled around on his hand. He trailed a small arc of electricity that flowed around the edges of his hand. The small crab chased it around his palm. Maybe the crabs weren’t so bad after all. Maybe they weren’t so different from people. Maybe they just needed to eat some shrooms.
His eyes and brain had adjusted to the flickering fractals and sine-waves flowing over the surface of everything. The walls breathed. He breathed with them. He felt himself approaching something… wonderful.
He heard shouting, so loud it sounded like it was echoing in his skull. He gripped his head between his hands as he dropped to his knees, face screwed in pain. The shouting wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. It felt like his mind was tearing apart.
He saw the little crab look up at him in concern. Jack knew that it cared about him. He picked it up gently and popped it into his mouth and chewed through the pain ripping his head apart. He froze there on the ground for a number of minutes then stood up and took a few unsteady steps. The smile returned to his face in a fluid crawl. A tear rolled down his cheek. Much better. He thanked the shroom-crab by patting his belly and continued his measured pace.
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The door started to close behind them. Before it could fully seal a hand, swollen and stomach-wrenching to even look at jammed itself through the gap in the door. The door struggled to slide it’s two halves closed. It creaked, struggled to close, as the fingers were joined by another set of misshapen digits.
Leanne started shooting. The precision of her pressure gun worked against her. The pressurized beads only temporarily pierced the ‘flesh’ of the… whatever’s hands before new mushroom heads popped out from the wounds. She shot a few of the new mushrooms and they popped, pouring a rancid, thick smoke to the floor. Another crop spurted up from the remains of the shot ones. The new mushrooms started to merge and push the door even further open. She could hear the gears of the door struggling against whatever it was. It was strong.
She looked behind her, Tule was on edge, a fast measured pace down the hallway. Jonah had finally put away his portable, his finger ready for anything. They were on edge as the mushroom’s newly grown, ceramic smiles followed them as they traveled further through the hallway.
She backpaced, “Uh Tule, we have a problem at the door.”
Tule ignored her words as the new mushrooms continued to consolidate and grow. “Tule!” It now had one arm poking through to the ‘elbow’, if even it had one. The new shrooms had consolidated fully at the end of its hand. It’s fingers were fat sausages that looked like mutated stems. The rest of its arm was even less appealing.
Tule turned from the smiling shrooms and paused. He slapped Jonah against the wall and behind him, “Move Sentinel!”
In this moment, with his choice of wording, he saved Leanne’s life. If he had called her Leanne, she would have died. If he had yelled ‘move!’ she would have died. In his choice of ‘Sentinel’ the unconscious reaction that resulted from hearing her military title, gave her the extra fraction of a second needed to dodge the black roiling beam that shot out from the joined mushroom on the tip of its hand.
Tule sliced through the beam, separating it into halves that ran over his forearms before splashing into the walls on either side of him. The mushrooms’ mouths stopped smiling and started to violently cough, expelling new clouds of spores with every hacking breath. The hand receded from the door and the floor started to vibrate at a walking cadence.
“We need to go, now.”