Fungicidal
“Live pure, live free,” I said in response to the request for the password. The tiny window to the damp cellar closed and the door opened. I braced myself for the inevitable spurt of fungicide in my face, trying not to cough too much. Didn’t want to make the doorman think I had integrated.
“You don’t have to waste that on me, Davey,” I say. “You know me.”
Fungicide, now a banned substance, was more precious than gold. Just that spray alone probably cost the group twenty-five dollars.
“Can’t be too cautious,” said Davey. “I thought I knew my cousin’s girlfriend, but she showed up to Thanksgiving dinner sportin’ a new colony on the side of her head. Let’s just say the shrooms can have her all they want where she is now.”
I was the last one, late to the meeting again, and I followed Davey deeper into the cellar. It smelled like a locker room, and I found myself strangely nostalgic for high school. That was the last time anything was normal. Fifteen years ago, when I was a teenager, the first human scientist made contact with a fungal scientist. The shrooms and humanity had been trying to figure out a way to communicate for years, and they met in the middle. Suddenly, humanity and fungi were allies. Humans taught them technology and medicine, they taught humans innovations in architecture and alleged connection to each other on a higher plane, though I was skeptical. Humanity promised to stop eating fungi, and fungi promised to stop infecting humans. A few years later, the first integration happened, and a year after that, the first integrated baby was born. Now basically all of humanity sports some kind of fungal parasite. Everyone but us.
The meeting started with general bemoaning of our situations. Bob was tired of gluing on a fake shroom to his face every morning (which Linda reminded him was his own doing, and that not every integrated person had a visible shroom on them). Davey talked about the last ‘grated he wasted and buried in the ground, “if they love shrooms so much, they can feed them.” I talked about the reaction I saw a few weeks ago. Some old guy had been convinced by his grandkids to integrate, but turns out he was allergic to that kind of shroom. He came to the hospital where I worked unable to breathe. When I had tried to help him, I was warned by a doctor to be careful of the shroom. “To hell with the shroom,” I had said, which I was later written up for. I had saved a man’s life that day, but I had offended a shroom in doing so, which was my second offense in a year. I had to go to mandatory HR training in a few days.
This group had met once a week for three years for the unintegrated to share their stories and commiserate about what the world had become. Davey was a recent addition, and I was a bit worried he was beginning to radicalize the group more than it had ever intended to be. When he had first started, the stories he had shared about “wasting ‘grateds” seemed just fantasy—helping him cope with the new normal. Lately, I wasn’t so sure.
Tonight, Davey proposed his first coordinated attack on the shrooms. At first, he suggested blowing up the human-fungi embassy with a homemade bomb. That was quickly shut down. I was a nurse. I made it my life’s mission to help humans. I was not going to let any get hurt. Instead, I proposed a fungicide bomb in the same building. It would coat the building in a spray that would kill every fungus there. The humans would walk out ok (though probably a bit asthmatic), all unintegrated from the parasites. We would be freeing them from the hold of their oppressors. They would be pure again.
We began to set the plan in motion. It took several weeks and thousands of dollars for us to acquire enough antifungal spray for the plan to work, and several more weeks for one of the engineers in the group to create the bomb. It was decided that Davey and I would go on the mission, Davey because he had planned the whole thing, and me to provide any medical attention. Any more than two would attract attention.
“You ready, Matty?” Davey asked me as the engineer strapped the bombs to our bodies.
I nodded. The engineer said “You’ll just open this plastic and press this switch, and the bomb goes off.” He handed me a switch covered in a plastic cage. I was almost pissing myself with nerves. We were about to carry out one of the biggest terror attacks on the shrooms since the first integration. If we were successful, things might go back to the way they were supposed to be. I strapped a gun underneath my jacket. It wasn’t even loaded, but the ‘grateds wouldn’t know that. Davey didn’t either, and he ribbed me about how he bet he could kill more than me.
Davey and I emerged from the cellar into the city. It made me sick to be here-everywhere you looked it was only shrooms. A man had a single large mushroom cap growing around his head like a bowl cut. An androgynous person had a shaved side of their head with a thin layer of tiny filaments growing across it. A woman had a fungus growing out her nose that made me want to lose my lunch.
It wasn’t just the people either. Every building was covered in colonies of mushrooms, every car had them growing out of the engine, trees were covered from roots to branches with scaly brown shrooms. Just breathing the same air as them scared me.
Davey and I approached the embassy, a former laboratory where the first contact had been made. There was a guard at the window, and I “ahem’d” to get his attention. When he turned to me, I held in a cough. Behind his eyelids, where his eyes should have been, sat two mushrooms that were mottled white and blood red. He “looked” me up and down, and I held my breath, worried that the shrooms provided him some kind of second sight that would detect the fungicide strapped to our bodies.
“Go ahead,” he said, after what seemed like forever.
Outside the embassy, the world was full of mutant freaks, but generally the shrooms that people had were subtle: bells for fingernails, a patch of grey lichen across a person’s neck. Sure, sometimes there were some weird ones, but they were rare. Inside the embassy was another story. The first one I saw no longer had ears, instead replaced with white gills that ran up and down his head. A second one was more shroom than human, covered head to toe with rocky growths that jutted from their body. I saw one woman who looked normal enough, wearing what I thought was a white sweater, until I realized that her entire torso was covered in a fuzzy white shroom. I could barely contain my disgust. A girl walked past me, her face covered in the white webbing of a bamboo mushroom
“Let’s de-integrate these sons of bitches,” Davey whispered in my ear. I nodded and plowed forward.
Davey and I marched through the building and up a flight of stairs, passing weirder and weirder ‘grateds as we went. Any apprehension about our attack had dissipated by the time we got to the second floor, where our attack would happen.
“Attention traitors to the human race!” Davey called out, and the ‘grateds turned to look at us. “For too long, we’ve lived in the company of monsters. Today, we take back what’s ours: our humanity.” He held up the trigger. “Shrooms, prepare to meet your makers.”
I took in a deep breath and closed my eyes, anticipating the sound of the spray of the anti-fungal. It never came. Instead, a gunshot rang out. My eyes shot open, and I watched in horror as Davey fell to the ground in front of me. A tall female security guard stood across the room, a gun pointed at me, her fingers, which had been replaced by lady-finger mushrooms, firmly on the trigger. The shrooms were so anti-violence that it hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be armed security at the embassy. Another shot went off, this one grazing my forearm. I winced in pain.
I glanced down at Davey. Blood was seeping through his shirt and running down his mouth. One of the ‘grateds ran up to him, coughing a cloud of spores into his face. They turned to me, and I pointed my gun at them.
“Step back!” I call. “I don’t want to harm any humans, but I will to protect myself.” I watched in horror as Davey’s skin began to coat with a gray mold. It ran down his body, and, within seconds, he was entirely coated, with a large cluster covering the wound in his stomach.
The ‘grated looked at me. I could see their eyes rolled back: the tell-tale sign of them communicating with the parasite.
“You’re bleeding,” they said. “Let us help you.” I glanced down at my arm. It would need stitches, but it would be fine.
“I will use this!” I said, swinging the gun around. The ‘grated slowly began to step forward, and I realized too late that it was a distraction. I felt an arm wrap around my neck, and I glanced back. A hulking ‘grated with hair made from bioluminescent blue mushrooms was holding me.
“Shhh,” they said. “It will be okay.” They let out a soft cough into my ear.
“No!” I screamed. “You won’t infect me!”
I scrambled for the bomb switch at my waist, but I couldn’t get to it in time. I felt a slow crawling itch start at my ear and travel through my face. The ‘grated who had infected me let me go, and I slipped to the ground. My body was paralyzed, and it did not take long for me to feel my mind begin to change. The world around me warped for a moment, and then I couldn’t see anymore, at least not through my eyes. Instead, I saw pain and violence and pleasure and terror and sex and euphoria and sadness swim around my vision, like food coloring dripped into clear water. I swam through the colors, feeling every emotion. Somehow, I knew they were emanating off of the people around me. I splashed through Davey’s sickly green fear of dying and his pure hatred, redder than any red I had ever seen before. I floated into the soft blue relief and adrenaline of the ‘grated who had infected me, who I somehow knew was named Peter in human language and an indescribable name in the language of the shrooms.
“Matthew,” I felt, rather than heard-a voice say. “Everything will be okay.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“We are the spores that our friend Peter so kindly used to temporarily incapacitate you, though the idea that we are separate from Peter is reductive. All is connected.”
I felt hot tears running down my face. “Everything is so beautiful,” I sobbed.
“We have never meant you any harm, Matt. Even now, after you have tried to kill us, we will not harm you.”
“I’m sorry,” I cried out. “If I had known . . .”
“We offer you a choice,” the spores said. “We do not integrate with those who do not wish, if it can be avoided. We entered you to save those around you, but we can leave, allow you to remain unintegrated. We trust that this gesture of goodwill will prevent further violence. No harm will come to you.”
“Davey?” I asked, thinking back to his body coated in the gray mold.
“He is alive. Ellie reacted out of fear in shooting him, and we do not blame her. Forceful unintegration can cause some disorientation. We are healing him, and he will remain integrated until he is healed. Then we will awaken him and offer him the same choice as we offer you.
“If you choose to remain unintegrated at this time, you may always integrate later. The choice remains on the table. You do not need to decide now.”
I looked around at the colors. The red had begun to dissipate, and the colors became more muted, evidence that the threat that Davey and I had posed had been neutralized. “It’s overwhelming,” I said. “It’s so different.”
“It takes time,” they said. “Like with anything, your brain must learn to adapt. But it will. Soon, you will experience life like you never have before. Do you choose to accept?”
“Yes.”
Maxwell Folkman is a queer educator, researcher, and author from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His research primarily focuses on educational environments for queer kids. In his free time, he enjoys going to his local comic shop, working out, and spending time with his kitten Bassoon.
