Chapter 1: Mushroom Magic
What the fuck was in that drink, David thought to himself.
Patrick had told him that he had prepared a ‘super special birthday smoothie’ for him and his mates to share. He wasn’t much of a partygoer, and Patrick knew that, so they had compromised on more of a ‘chillout with the boys’ style birthday. David was beginning to believe that Patrick had a very different understanding of the term ‘chillout with the boys’ than he did.
“Twelve hundred milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol, nine hundred milligrams of morphine, two hundred forty milligrams of dimethyltryptamine, six hundred milligrams of methylphenidate, twenty-four hundred millilitres of ethanol, sixty millilitres of petroleum, and a variety of other chemicals associated with dishwasher detergent, pancake mix, chilli powder, engine lubricant, and psychedelic mushrooms.” A voice echoed in David’s mind.
He looked up, the surrounding blue-green triangular grass that spanned out to infinity was replaced by millions of towering mushrooms that blotted out the sky.
Chill-out more like freak the fuck out, I’m tripping balls.
“Where are you?” David shouted into the wind, which suddenly increased in intensity.
“I haven’t moved. I am still over here.”
David turned to the voice, the towering mushrooms seemed to shrink down as he lowered his gaze. Standing before him was a large mushroom that was human-tall but more than human-wide, assuming you took the shoulder-span and not arm-span of a human as the measurement scale.
As he stared in bewilderment, the strange organic patterns on the white cap of the mushroom shifted and suddenly took the form of black pupils. The mushroom cap was growing eyes.
“What are you?” He spoke.
“I am The Mushroom God, The God of Mushrooms, The Great Mushroom, The Mushroom Which Sees All, The Mushroom at The End of Time, That Which Heralds the End of Mushroom-lessness.” The God of Mushrooms replied.
“I see…” David responded.
“You have imbibed enough mind altering and potentially deadly chemicals to visit and communicate with me, impressive work.”
“Ahh… don’t mention it. Anytime.”
“No need to be humble, your duty is yet complete.” The God of Mushrooms continued.
“What do you… mean?” David slurred. His eyes were bleary.
David blinked and lost sight of the mushroom deity as though it were the olive oil in the cupboard, and he was trying to cook something.
“I mean many things; I can be considered an example of the natural tendency of the universe to create intelligent life for example. It is a product of the statistical nature of the universe that the semi-stable state of ‘containing intelligent life’ seems to spontaneously erupt from random stochastic processes. Perhaps it is inevitable that life should exist and should be capable of thought. Perhaps it is an exclusive property.” The God of Mushrooms answered him.
The otherworldly creature had misunderstood him. Either that or it had suddenly decided to give him spiritual guidance, ignoring the context of his question.
“That’s… not really what I meant to ask.” David said, once catching sight of the being.
The God of Mushrooms shivered, and a shower of glistening spores slowly gravitated towards the floor.
“I see.” There was a pause.
“I see all things.” The God of Mushrooms continued.
What? David thought. He heard what was said but didn’t understand
“Here, my gift to you. The pure flesh.” The DMT entity spoke.
The God of Mushrooms looked in all directions at once, and then all its eyes focused to a point in the air between itself and David. From this point emerged a white mushroom, it was beautiful in every sense of the word, unnervingly beautiful.
“Eat.” The God of Mushrooms commanded.
David didn’t hesitate, he had the munchies. He took a bite. The mushroom tasted unusual to him, but he didn’t exactly go around eating raw mushrooms all the time, so he wasn’t an expert. David swallowed and took another bite, which brought on a bout of nausea.
“To consume is the nature of life, you must consume.”
David was struck with a sense of profanity, no, profoundness was the word, from the deity’s speech. He was determined to eat the entirety of the white mushroom at whatever cost.
This was the pinnacle of his life, his greatest moment. David took another bite and struggled to swallow it. Instead of taking a smaller bite, he shoved the remainder of the mushroom into his mouth and struggled to stop himself from spewing. It took him a moment, but he managed to swallow the remainder of the nauseating mushroom before his head began to spin.
Since when was I spinning? David thought as the world accelerated.
“You are an apostle. Goodbye.” The creature dismissed him.
***
David awoke to the sound of the screaming wind. He struggled to stand under the assault, so he settled with crawling on his hands and knees. A great open ocean was before him, huge waves rushed to invade the sand like ill-fated soldiers. The scene was utterly chaotic, and the cold wind numbed his fingers and threatened to topple him back onto the damp ground.
Thunder cracked instead of rumbled, and the gentle sprinkling rain suddenly increased in intensity. The new rain was heavy, and it exploded against the damp sand, sending fragments in all directions. David couldn’t feel the pelting rain on his back, only the heavy thumping which reverberated through his body. His back was already numb, so it wasn’t painful, not yet.
David knew that he needed to find shelter, or he would freeze to death. He looked away from the water. The coastline was eroding, the split between the foredune and the beachfront was a sharp incline of sand. On the higher ground, various plants grew in the sand, mostly beachgrass. Further away from the water, the plant life had more variety, with various shrubs and bushes. Those would offer little protection from the cold. Unfortunately for David, the cold quickly became a secondary priority.
A chunk of ice slammed into the back of David’s head, sending him scrambling for cover. It had begun to hail.
David rushed for the bushes as fast as he could. The hail battered his skin through the weak protection of his clothing, the chunks were getting bigger, and heavier. He protected his head as best he could with his arms, but the wind necessitated that he use them to maintain stability as he climbed the foredune away from the waterfront. He sheltered beneath a bush, the stems and leaves of which managed to dampen the falling hail, if only slightly.
“H-holy shit” David whispered as he shivered.
A big chunk of hail battered through the bush and cracked the back of his hand instead of his head. David scrambled deeper into the small bush. His hand ached, and once he had curled up, he brought it in front of his face and saw a nasty gash that bled slowly in the cold. The blood streaked across his skin, merging with the sand, dirt, and plant matter that covered his hand.
The hail retreated, and David remained in the bush, hiding from the wind. He was still shivering, and he felt a deep ache in his gut that forced him to stay conscious. The wind gradually settled to a breeze, and the rain to a sprinkle. The sun poked its head from behind the clouds here and there, but never for long. Eventually the itching and scratching David felt from the moist mixture of dirt, sand and plant matter exceeded his tolerance level, and he made the effort to move again.
David did not remember a time where the action of standing was as difficult as it was now. Not even the time when he had surgery on his leg. Rather than excessive pain, it was a mixture of weakness, lack of control and the inability to feel whatever he was touching that foiled David’s first few attempts.
He got on his feet and realised his entire body had begun to ache. Purple welts were emerging on his arms and legs. David lifted his shirt and was shocked by a sharp pain across his back. He pulled the back part of the shirt around a bit so he could see it better, it was wet and covered in mud, with streams of blood that slowly dripped from the bottom. His back had obviously taken the brunt of the hailstorm.
Where the fuck am I? None of the others are here. He thought.
David took a moment to consider just how lost he was. He had drunk the super smoothie, blacked out, tripped out and woke up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. And now he was freezing and covered in bruises, not a great start to the day. But it was a start, and if he would be dead soon if he kept standing around.
David was extremely glad that his shoes had come along with him as it made it much easier to move through the dense bushland, since he wasn’t worried about cutting his feet up on sharp sticks. He hadn’t found anything edible, but he had cleared a small area and collected some dry wood, which unfortunately wasn’t very dry due to the earlier storm.
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Fortunately, he could peel the bark off of dead tree branches, which removed most of the moisture from them. After some struggle with a variety of sharp rocks, he had scraped some tinder from the dry branches.
While protecting the tinder from the rare droplets that fell from the wet trees above, David fashioned a crude bow drill with his shoelaces and a curved stick. He got to work in his attempt to light a fire, which was much harder than the survival guides he used to read had made it out to be.
Once the tinder started to smoke, he blew on it and put it into his fire tepee. Thankfully, he had managed to get a flame going. He got to work drying his clothing and warming up.
The warmth, while lessening the numbing fatigue that he felt, exaggerated the hollow feeling in his gut. He was starving. He took his wet shoes and socks off after remembering the threat of trench foot, and sat down on the cold dirt, warming his hands by the fire.
The sun slowly fell below the horizon, and the chill in David’s bones began to rattle again. After his clothing had mostly dried out, he had spent most of the afternoon walking around looking for firewood and anything to eat, but he couldn’t find anything other than leaves, wood, and dirt.
Now that the sky had dimmed, he sat by the fire watching and caring for his lifeline, feeding it slowly while he himself starved. He knew he had no chance at surviving the night without Prometheus’s gift.
David struggled to sleep through the night, awaking to nurture the fire when it got too cold or too dark. He didn’t mind that though, he was more distracted by the lack of a comfortable mattress or pillow, the painful bruises on his skin, and the breeze which intermittently made him shiver.
Even that was bearable, no, the thing which kept him awake was the crippling hunger in his stomach. Only forgotten in brief moments of unconsciousness.
The morning was blissful and full of sunshine which threatened to lull David back to sleep. He was still hungry, but it was no longer an overbearing presence. Instead, a feeling of weakness permeated his body.
David rolled over and flinched as he saw two people partially hidden in the bushes staring at him, one with a bow drawn in his direction.
Holy shit. David thought, as he froze in place. He had no chance of running or fighting, not when he was lying down, starving, and injured. One of them, a girl, threw something on the ground in front of him. It was some sort of metal collar.
Do they expect me to put this shit on?
The girl snarled, hissed some sort of command in a foreign language and then pointed her spear at him.
“Hey calm down, I don’t want any trouble. ” David spoke in an attempt to deescalate the situation. The girl stood for a moment before shouting at him again and kicking the metal into his face. It smacked into his nose, eliciting a groan.
“Go fuck yourself.” David said in response to the unnecessary aggression, but the comment irritated his throat and made him cough. In response, the girl waited for him to follow her command.
Upon David’s lack of movement, she approached him and struck his head with the blunt end of her spear. David curled up to protect himself from the beating, but the girl didn’t relent. She cracked him over the head several times until finally he went limp and forgot about the waking world.
***
David awoke for the second time since his birthday and was surprised to see bandages over his injured arms and legs, and a warm blanket on top of him. As he rolled on to his side, he was wracked with pain from the bruises. A sharp pinch on his neck made him jolt, and he touched the site of injury to discover a metal brace when went around his entire neck. Only then did he remember how he got into this situation.
Ah shit. David thought.
David sat up on the side of the bed while trying to avoid movements that caused him pain. It was difficult, as almost every part of his body was injured in some way or the other.
He was interrupted by the sudden opening of the door followed by the entrance of three people. A girl dressed in some sort of maid uniform, a man in armour and a woman with a pair of glasses and some form of cultish robes. Was he going to be sacrificed?
“Suurei, atle ma suurei no teimate kishna?” The lady with glasses spoke while making eye contact with David.
The cultists had their own cult language. David remained silent in response, which likely only served to annoy the visiting party. The man approached and grabbed him by the shirt, he lifted the visor of his helmet and stared into David’s eyes and spoke what could be inferred to be a threat. The man then withdrew a large, brutal knife from his waistline.
“I get it.” David spoke, making a surrendering gesture with his hands. The man stared at him for a bit before making a satisfied smirk and retreating to his group.
The lady addressed him again, with some variation of the same phrase she spoke before.
“I don’t understand what the fuck you’re saying” David responded. She stared at him for a moment, before waving her hands in a way that brought on a sharp burning sensation in David’s neck. He grunted as the metal seemed to cook the soft flesh of his neck until suddenly the pain disappeared.
“Jei vou ma teshna kuvante?” She questioned him, with a tone and expression that seemed to convey ‘how about now?’.
“I don’t understand you!” David shouted, exasperated at the lack of communication and definite violation of his human rights.
She gestured to the maid, who rushed out and brought back a wooden platter in a timely fashion. On top of the platter was a bowl, a piece of bread, and a glass. The sight reminded David of the pang in his gut.
The maid placed the platter on a small wooden table by the window, and then left the room. The lady gestured to David to eat. Once he was seated at the table, she pointed to the different dishes and spoke something about each that he couldn’t hope to understand or remember. After she finished, he began to scoff down the food, thankful that it wasn’t hot enough to scald his throat.
The lady stared at him for a moment, her eyebrows raised in confusion, before her and the armoured man left the room. It was just him and the food now.
The meal was some sort of meat and vegetable soup, with a side of bread and water. David loved it, hunger really was the best seasoning after all. The water had a softer taste than he expected, he was used to the harshness of city-water.
He finished the meal and stared out the window. There was a grass courtyard that was bounded on two sides by the building that he was in and by a great stone wall on the other two sides. There was a gravel pathway along the inner edge of the wall that he imagined wrapped around the L-shaped building he was in like a perimeter surrounding the entire premises. In the opposing corner, a watch tower emerged from the stone wall which observed both the inner courtyard and the hills and grasslands that surrounded the facility.
David took a moment to explore the rest of the room, there was a small closet on the right side of his bed which contained several sets of white shirts and pants. He had already seen the wooden table and chair by the window, which lacked curtains.
David noticed that beyond the closet, the floor was covered in tiles, which sloped downwards towards a drain. There was also a ceramic toilet, attached to the wall and hidden from the view of the window by the profile of the closet. He couldn’t find a shower or sink.
David, upon the absence of any further contact with his captors, was reminded of how tired he was. The injuries had taken a toll on his energy level, and the bed was the comfiest spot in the room.
He was awoken again in the evening by the maid, who entered the room alone, holding another platter and removing the old one. David went over to eat his second meal of the day when the maid once again entered, this time with a bucket filled with water, a bar of soap, and a toothbrush. She placed these in the tiled part of the room before leaving.
After finishing his second meal, David cautiously approached the door and put his ear against it in an attempt to listen for anyone who might be guarding the outside. Curiosity eventually got the better of him, and he tried to open the door to find that it was locked.
What did I expect? David asked himself.
He tussled with the handle for some time before giving up and deciding to clean himself. The water bucket was still warm, which he thought made it more comfortable, but the abrasive cloth irritated the bruises on his skin.
He discarded his old clothing, which was still dirty from storm and replaced it with his choice outfit from the wide selection of identical uniforms from the closet. He left his old clothing on the back of the wooden chair and laid down on the bed, eventually drifting off to sleep again.
David spent most of the next few days eating and sleeping in the room, sometimes with the opportunity to watch soldiers in the courtyard practicing some form of martial arts and sparring with each other.
The sparring was strange, some of the soldiers moved at ridiculous speeds, or jumped excessively high. Often some form of light would radiate from the soldiers’ weapons when they collided or struck a surface. It was surreal, but less so than his meeting with The God of Mushrooms.
All the soldiers had a device stuck to their right hip, the device held several tubes, he guessed four or five, which the soldiers would pull the caps off before sparring. David couldn’t understand what they were used for.
David was sick of sitting in the room all day. Exercising was painful, but it gave him something to do in the boredom. When he grew tired of that, he would spend his time watching the courtyard for any activity—or staring into the prairies.
Today a different group of soldiers were occupying the space. One of whom he thought he recognised from his night in the bushland. These soldiers had much lighter armour and used spears and bows instead of the large swords that the other soldiers did.
For the more heavily armoured soldiers that sparred earlier in the week it was harder to tell gender, because most of their bodies were obscured. But for this group, which had much lighter armour, it looked as though the majority were women. Although at this distance, it was difficult to tell.
The soldiers practiced their archery on small stone disks that flew through the air at random, defying the laws of physics. The soldiers fired in groups, and their arrows streaked through the air in an instant, rarely missing.
The arrows were fast, but they didn’t have much effect on the stone targets, which were obviously purpose designed for training. It was a very impressive display of discipline. David continued to watch until the commander, who was in a different uniform and hadn’t participated in the training, shouted something.
The soldiers returned to the sidelines in response, chattering amongst themselves and pulling arrows out of the stone targets which had lost their unnatural ability to fly, once more constrained by the law of gravitation.
The commander spoke again, and the soldiers returned to their positions, this time with spears instead of bows. The soldiers cycled through different formations, usually in groups of three. Not once did David see the famed phalanx formation, probably because they weren’t in Rome and the soldiers didn’t have shields.
The commander would shout out different commands, and the soldiers would perform different strikes or movements in response. The practice continued for some time until the commander divided the soldiers into pairs.
The pairs then lined up and went through different exercises against their partners. David thought that this group was much less proficient in melee combat than the heavily armoured soldiers.
The day continued, and the soldiers packed up all of their equipment and entered some other part of the facility, out of David’s line of sight.
***
Luthina was perplexed. A human had appeared on the Eurena coastline, hundreds of kilometres away from civilisation. Battered and bruised from the storm, the human had built a campfire that signalled his presence for miles.
She had screamed at the mindless lieutenant that had brought him back to the base. It was an egregious breach of facility safety protocols; it would take only a single leak to sink this ship. Despite that, nothing had happened. The human did not speak in a language she recognised, nor was he capable of understanding her.
He didn’t even flinch at her warning that the food contained deadly parasites. It didn’t of course, but the lack of response indicated that he was either a highly trained suicide agent, or really didn’t understand what she was saying.
Whatever the case, Luthina knew that she would have trouble explaining how the facility had failed its operational requirements for two months in a row. Another two of their subjects had died this week, giving no insights into development. They were running out.
Luthina had a choice, execute the new human according to safety protocols, or use him as a subject in their research. Given the current agency director’s opinion of her…
It was an easy choice.