I didn’t sleep well.

My shifts kept me working late into the night. I ended up falling asleep in Staff Lounge 3 with my PPE still on. And just like home, I’d spent the last half hour or so before bed doom-scrolling on my console, because nothing said middle age quite like doom-scrolling before bed. I should have been exhausted, but I was strangely wired; I figured that was a side-effect of turning into a wyrm.

Did wyrms need sleep?

Only time would tell.

The doom-scrolling started with me reading some articles that Dr. Derric had texted to me. From there, it had metastasized into an all-purpose web-prowl, with a focus on news and social media. Corpo-governmental censors were working on overdrive, so there wasn’t much, if anything, being said about Type Two cases like me. A lot of stuff simply wasn’t accessible, period. I figured it was because the powers that be wanted to maintain public order and suppress panic and all the unrest that would follow.

If only reality were so easily altered.

What little I did see left an impression of rats scurrying around on a sinking ship. One picture haunted me to no end: a Moonlit beach, completely covered in corpses—tens of thousands, likely more—bodies floating in and out with the tide. And now, it was part of me until the end of time.

Last night made it clear just how much my mental abilities had already changed. My memory was eidetic—one of the perks of wyrmhood, as Andalon had explained.

I remembered… everything.

It was the most thoroughly mixed blessing I’d ever seen. On one hand, with just a thought, I could recall—even relive—any moment I’d ever experienced; any piece of information I’d ever noticed. I could recite every meal I’d ever had, in order. I could gaze at every painting I’d ever seen; I could tell you every word I’d ever heard Rale say. I could count the number of times I chewed the third bite of the second piece of chocolate caramel tiramisu I’d had at our wedding reception. I could even rewind back to what I was pretty sure was my own in utero pre-existence, though the memories degraded into useless blurs starting around when I was two years old.

If I spent a moment pretending that this wasn’t happening to me, personally, I had to admit that—as a practicing neuropsychiatrist—my evolving mental capacities were utterly fascinating.

People liked to think of their memories as unshakeable, rock-solid foundations, but the truth was anything but. Memory had a multifaceted neurophysiological basis. Short-term memories were formed by chemical modifications within and, especially, between individual neurons, strengthening and reinforcing particular synapses. From there, the short-term memory would either be kept simmering, like a pot on the stove; transferred to long-term memory, by being integrated into more substantial neurophysiological networks; or simply tossed out and forgotten altogether. The practical implication? Our memories weren’t as reliable as we thought they were. Our memories were cabinets of curiosities that we collected throughout our lives, and our minds would readily fabricate details into existence if pressured to fill the gap.

So, technically, I shouldn’t have been able to recall my every waking moment of existence, because the vast majority of the information was simply gone; it had passed through my brain like water between my fingers. Yet, I was able to recall those very details. And I had no idea why.

It turned out the memory retrieval was facilitated by a bit of supernatural entropy-reversal, using a recursive algorithm that extrapolated reverse causality along the various superpositions of the quantum foam. For quality control, the fragments of my memories which had been stored in long-term were referenced as a baseline to ensure that causality was reversed along the correct world-fiber—within a certain degree of tolerance, of course. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Also, apparently, I could now think in footnotes—multiple lines of thought.

Yeah, it was weird.

So, yeah, it was pretty darn trippy.

On the other hand, now that my mind was flypaper, it didn’t just catch the flies, it caught everything; crumbs, dirt, hair, little pieces of rock. I’d always been prone to having wandering thoughts, but that had never posed any risk to my overall health and safety, but now it did, and it was all thanks to what had to be the most extreme case of hyperphantasia in recorded history.

I could visualize anything, and I’d visualize the heck out of it. With just a thought, I could conjure anything into existence right in front of me—and I mean anything. My memories played out in front of me like holographic dioramas. Thinking back to a moment of sorrow and death was enough to materialize infected corpses in front of me, running around screaming like something out of a zombie movie. It made every corridor into a potential haunted house, and I did not have the constitution to deal with that.

And it was far from the only problem on my plate.

Some of the articles Jonan had sent me went into frightening detail about the Green Death’s morbidity.

The mortality of a disease is the proportion of its victims that it kills; meanwhile, the morbidity of a disease was the proportion of the population the disease affected.

The Green Death’s morbidity went far beyond our wildest imaginations. The fungus was spreading through the population at an almost supernatural speed, as if the whole world had been seeded with NFP-20 spores at the same time.

By now, it was clear to everyone who cared about the truth that NFP-20 wasn’t just being spread through bodily fluids or aerosolized cough droplets. The disease had been named the Green Death on account of the bright green trails that inundated the horrid black ooze that exuded from the victims’ bodies—which seemed to replace their very blood. Those streaks of green consisted almost entirely of the fungus’ microscopic green spores. Though most cases had the respiratory system as the primary site of infection, the articles posited that the spores could infect victims gastrointestinally, or perhaps merely by contact with unbroken skin. If that were the case, it would go a long way toward explaining the fungus’ insidious spread.

Jonan, though, had his own take on the matter. He insisted that any official statistics pertaining to the pandemic had to be treated with circumspection.

If there are any falsifications, they’re almost certainly going to be underestimates meant to downplay the enormity of the pandemic. Do they really think they’ll be able to stave off mass panic that way?

And the scary part? I think he had a point.

If the disease really could spread that easily, in that case, it didn’t matter whether people coughed or not, because they’d be expelling infectious spores with every breath.

I still wasn’t entirely sure what “having the afterlife inside me” entailed, but from what Andalon had remembered so far, my hyperphantasia ability was directly implicated in it; that, and the fact that the souls of the dead were being stored inside me and would supposedly manifest when called upon. That was our current working theory. I had yet to develop this manifestation power, but, at least we had a theory about the nature of Andalon’s mission and the part transformees like me had to play in it.

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I wish we could have said the same thing about the disease itself.

No matter how much I’d doom-scrolled, I wasn’t able to find any records of patients who had survived the Type One infection. No one seemed to be getting better. Perhaps we had simply lost track of the recoveries in the overall chaos.

Perhaps.

The deaths were chilling. Many of the patients who’d arrived last night suffered from tears in the diaphragm or the intercostal muscles, caused by savage, unremitting coughing fits. It wasn’t uncommon to find bruised ribs.

Morphine barely took the edge off the pain.

The subdermal infectious tissue—hyphae, Dr. Skorbinka had called them—ate our patients from within. In the disease’s final stages, fruiting bodies and hyphal threads erupted from the ulcers and necrosis that tore through the victims. Not even the patients’ minds were spared. NFP-20 sucked out the victims’ memories, leaving patients to wander in the aftermath of a disarticulated existence, as if their very souls had been stolen away. And when the end finally came, they died as strangers to themselves, lost in the agony of a disease they no longer remembered contracting. They died sobbing like frightened children, not understanding why everything hurt, nor why we couldn’t make the pain go away. They asked what they’d done to deserve such pain, and it didn’t matter what we told them, because, in a minute, they’d forget it anyway.

No wonder so many people were live-streaming their own suicides.

Like I said, I didn’t sleep well.

I woke before sunrise, which was probably for the best. If yesterday had taught me anything, it was that I couldn’t neglect the powers I was developing as a result of my progressing transformation into a wyrm. For everyone’s sake, I needed to learn the ropes as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This wasn’t just a battle between man and microbe; it was a fight between Paradise and Hell. The otherworldly fungus was an agent of Hell—perhaps even Hell itself, or a part thereof. Its goal was to reshape our world in its image, so that Hell might reign on earth. And to do so, it would make human beings into demons, be they fungal abominations that staggered through our halls, or the twisted, transfigured husks of those souls that had been lost to the plague.

I’ll be honest: it was too much for me. I’d come away from last night’s revelation in the stairwell feeling like I did back when I was kid, worrying myself to bits over each and every thing I did.

Would it be a sin to wake up on the left side of the bed instead of the right?

Was it a sin to eat raw fish after Unction?

Would I be damning myself if I told a lie to spare someone horrific pain?

I was not a happy child—then or now. Now, my doubts and questions had been upgraded from being about my damnation to being about everyone’s damnation.

That was where Andalon came into the mix. She was trying to save us, emphasis on the word “trying.” Yes, it wasn’t turning out very well, but at least she was trying. Her efforts were more definite than anything the Angel had done for us in recent memory.

Andalon couldn’t stop the fungus directly, but… she could work against it. While the fungus tried to drag souls to Hell, Andalon could hijack it, turning some of the fungus’ would-be victims into wyrms. And why wyrms? Because the souls of the dead could—and would!—be stored within them, safe and sound, and somehow, that storage was what my religion called Paradise. The wyrms were keepers of Paradise, which they held in their minds, where they could guard it from the icy depths of Hell’s endless Night. Andalon’s self-appointed task was to ensure that the dead found their way to that wyrmly Paradise.

That was the good news.

The bad news was the fungus seemed to be aware of Andalon’s scheme, and from what she’d told me, it had even figured out a way to make the wyrms spread the fungus, though I still didn’t know the exact details.

Again: it was too much for me. Unfortunately, I was already in too deep. I couldn’t back out now. That would just make things worse, and things were bad enough already. I was not keen on finding out what “worse” meant in this context.

Is this how people with terminal illnesses feel?

I could ponder the question in my spare time. For now, what time I had needed to get spent on as much “self-improvement” as possible before I had to dive into my next shift. I quickly watched the mandatory training video that had been sent out by management last night regarding the use of quarantine tunnels; having wyrm-memory meant, just by seeing it, I could recall the information at my leisure later on in perfect detail. Once that was done, I was free to do what needed to be done. Just to be safe, though, I set a timer on my console. I didn’t want to be late for work.

Breakfast was two protein bars, cookies-and-cream flavor. It wasn’t quite as good as the birthday cupcake flavor, but I wasn’t complaining. Was it absolutely surreal to think about sitting down to enjoy something like an ordinary breakfast when a plague was ravaging the world and I was turning into a wyrm who held the afterlife in his brain?

Yes, yes it was.

So I tried my best to make things as simple as possible and had the darn protein bar and got on with my day. I’d eat some more if—well… when—that proved to be insufficient. I had no interest in advancing my transformation any more than I already had. Heck, I was so scared of turning into something inhuman that I didn’t even bathe, for fear of seeing what I’d become. There were showers in the staff locker rooms scattered around the hospital; I had no intention of using them. I kept picturing the water pressure sloughing my face and skin off my body, oozing down the drain like mucus. In fact, I pictured it so much that I actually saw a drain appear in the middle of the floor and watched in horror as hot rain filled the room and peeled away my clothes and skin.

It took some very deep breaths to make those hallucinations go away.

Even so, it was just another reminder that, the more I ate, the more I changed, and the more I changed, the more my powers developed, and the more that Andalon remembered about herself, the fungus, and her wyrms.

Why couldn’t there be an easier way?

Why couldn’t I get to stay me?

Only the Angel knows, I suppose.

Speaking of Andalon, she popped into existence not long after I’d finished my protein bar breakfast. The spirit-girl emerged from the aptly named “not-here-place” right as a couple spurts of spectral blue flames descended from the ceiling and flowed into her and me. I still didn’t know what the flames were, but they appeared after I ate, and Andalon regained more of her missing memories whenever they appeared.

“Good morning, Andalon,” I said.

“What’s morning?” she asked.

I chuckled softly. “Something to pass the time.”

“Oh, Mr. Genneth!” Andalon perked up, floating off the carpet on the lounge’s floor with a spin. “I ‘membered something!”

“Yes?”

“You’re gonna get lots of ghosts, Mr. Genneth! You’ve got a lot already, but you can’t see them so well, ‘cause you’re not wyrmeh enough.”

I responded by moaning rather loudly. That was not the kind of news I’d wanted to start my day with, and Andalon couldn’t seem to understand why that bothered me.

Rather than work myself up explaining such nuances to her, I decided to play it safe and nurture my sanity: I got my clarinet case out of my locker and brought it with me into the lounge.

And of course I didn’t forget to include the countdown before I started to play: “And a one, and a two, and a three.”

Music…

Music was nothing, and yet it was everything. It was a story without words, a picture without an image—and yet it moved us. Music made sense in a world that didn’t. The sound of sound resolving from one tone to the next was a kind of universal prayer, a hope for order, reason, and justice. It was a dream of a world where control would be ours; where we could turn back the clock and stay death’s hands. My mother was dead, my sister dead, my son was dead, my father would probably join them soon, and there was no way to bring them back. They would never get to come home. But music could. Music could do what people could not. It could do what the world could not. It could do what God would not.

It came home, and it was as easy as I V I.

As I took out my clarinet, I realized this would be my first time playing it while under the effects of my wyrm-transformation-induced Nalfar’s Delusion, which made me believe my body was dead, though the real challenge came from the lag stuck between my will and the movements my body made in response to it. The lag complicated my music-making beyond belief. Playing a musical instrument generally required a great deal of fine motor control and hand-eye coordination, both of which were difficult enough to do on their own, but with a motion-lag thrown into the mix? It was impossible. My coordination was shot. Sure, my fingers hit the tone holes, but either too early or too late.

I had to give up on playing anything complex. Instead, I lilted through a couple of leisurely, improvised melodies, eventually falling into simple broken chords, playing them slowly, and with reverence. Dominant sevenths resolved to the tonic. Half-diminished chords dreamed and yearned. I shivered down from the top of my scalp to the tip of my fledgling tail where it curled around my left thigh.

I did that for about ten minutes, about forty-five seconds of which I spent crying quietly, with Andalon watching all the while. I then stowed my clarinet in my case, put it away in my locker, called the house, canceled the call mid-dial, then called again, only this time I went directly to messages, where I left a videophone recording for my wife in kids where I told them I loved them and that they needed to be brave—safe, and brave.

Then, clearing a thick layer of gunk from the back of my throat, and making sure my lucky, red spotted yellow bow tie was in its place around my neck, I left Staff Lounge 3 and set out for the nearest aerial garden, stinking of sweat and resolution.

It was time to get my shtick together.