by Gabriel Sebastian
Prologue: Glorious Mission
The Mobius Ark hurtled impossibly across the Milky Way. Fusion propulsion engines skimming the craft along space-time, surfing gravity well folds and subspace rip curls covering unimaginable distances at sub-light speeds. The Ark’s continuing mission, no, its inexorable mandate: discovering life and habitable worlds and carrying forth humanity, knowledge, understanding.
Like a living metallic avian flying through the cosmos, the Ark reached out with sensors, perceiving and seeking anomalous light, heat, spectrum frequency transmissions, and radioactivity—any indication of anything akin to life or consciousness or meaning.
Glorious task necessitates glorious intelligence and so the job needed Centurians—humanity’s finest achievement in artificial intelligence. Not only did Centurians instantaneously perpetrate trillions of computational calculations that included such mundane tasks as keeping life support, balancing fusion reactors, and maximizing navigational systems, but the god machine continued to learn, grow, experiment, synthesize not only all it knew from the storage of human knowledge but from the data gathered along its cold and lonely journey. In essence, Centurians thought…and planned.
A dozen stasis pods lined the bridge—the only living humans on board other than embryonic life stored in the ships holds—the Mobius Ark’s payload of life. Whether after one hundred years or one thousand, Centurians would wake the skeleton crew upon arrival at an interesting planet: a planet holding life, suitable for living, or else containing some mystery or gift from the universe. That time was now.
A stasis pod opened with a hiss and a distinguished man staggered from the upright pod. His rank and title: expedition leader.
“Good morning, Gentry,” Centurians intoned, “I’ve discovered a planet falling within mission parameters. You will have 12 hours to prepare until we achieve orbit.”
“Thank you, Centurians. Wake essential crew and have them meet me in the conference room after breakfast. I need coffee. Send the planet specs and data to my C.A.L.M.S.” The crew’s C.A.L.M.S. were a remarkable invention, meaning “communication and logistics machina synthgrid”—a thin, wearable wrist device encompassing data storage, collections and processing, vitalia health monitoring, holographic interface, and computational access control.
As Gentry sat sipping his second cup of black arabica, bitterness seeping into his gullet, the conference room door slid open with a swish and the Lead Team shuffled in. Cure, the medical officer—brunette, curvy, voluptuous. She always tested Gentry’s professionalism. Wicked smart as she was beautiful. Gentry knew one day she would replace him as leader. The head of security followed in her wake: Sentry. A man who looked as if he was sculpted of Greek marble, Sentry nodded and took his spot at the table. Tech entered without a word; her face buried in her C.A.L.M.S. So much computing and analysis to do for the young, pony-tailed engineer. Last, the nondescript man entered. Hair slicked back and not a fiber of his jumper out of place—the company man, Suit, was the first to speak:
“What are we looking at?” Suit demanded.
Always breaking protocol, gritted Gentry to himself. But then again, the Suit was above protocol, the sort of ombudsman, Corporate, whose mission and actual role were kept classified by Centurians. Only the Suit could countermand the captain’s orders or maybe even override Centurians’ SOP’s.
“Our first planet worthy of investigation in five light years,” responded Tech without looking up. “Sorry, sir. Just excited to be up and working.”
Gentry cleared his throat. “As you can see, we’re about ten hours out from a small planetoid. Centurians detected reflected light energy readings. Water, methane, high levels of nitrogen. Ripe conditions for . . . well, to be blunt, for life. Life as we know it anyhow. Maybe even some type of civilization.”
“About time,” grumbled Sentry, “I’m sick of waking up for neptunes.”
“Tech, Sentry, prep the Vagabond. We’re walking about on this one.”
“Can we wake Square?” Tech offered, “You know, in case there’s buildings and stuff?”
Knowing smiles caused her to blush, but Gentry acquiesced. Square’s engineering experience could be needed. “Yeah, you can bring him. He missed the last two. This is our best world in a while, people, so let’s do it right.”
World the First: Mycelia Prime.
The Vagabond flew straight and precisely into the planetoid’s atmosphere. As the dropship breached the horizon, reflected light from the nearby star shone brightly up like smiling daisy flashlights—a field of shining shields littering the landscape kilometer upon kilometer in no discernable pattern.
“What are we looking at? Centurians?” Square inquired from the helm. Stocky, calm and mild mannered, Square made an excellent pilot, but mainly he was ship’s engineer and colony builder by training.
“Part of the phenomenon beckoning us to this planet. Reflected light. Due to the scope and patterned placement, I surmised this pattern a solar array collecting energy from the nearby sun. Given this planet’s temperature, my conjecture is correct, however, the structures are not artificial. Sending images to your C.A.L.M.S now.”
The tactical display in their visors inserted a bird-eye view of tall irregular treelike structures, the tops flared out with mushroom-like canopy. They found difficulty seeing what caused the mirror reflection.
From the Vagabond’s point of view above, the surface of the planetoid appeared covered with a brown, rockish substance—fibrous, pulpy, porous, ropey and layered.
The Vagabond landed gently, carefully onto the surface. Centurians deployed drones: tiny, waspy aerobots, controlled entirely by his digital will, to collect samples of the landscape for analysis.
Centurions came back with an answer quickly.
“Fungus.”
“You mean this whole planet is covered with alien mushrooms?” Sentry queried.
“Mushroom. Singular.”
“The whole planet?”
“Correct. Various samples indicate cellular structure homogenous.”
“Well, let’s have a closer look.”
The landing party disembarked. Walking for some time over peatish, fibrous root-packed soil, Cure, Square, and Sentry explored the alien terrain. Their foot falls puffed dark brown dust clouds that surrounded their legs as they continued.
“You smell that?” Square sneezed. “Like rotten logs.”
“Centurians, check status of air purifiers in our exosuits.” Cure ordered.
“Filtration systems within acceptable parameters. Standby. Detecting miniscule traces from the outside atmosphere in Square’s suit. Only two parts per million. Increasing oxygen and ozone levels. Negative ionization in progress. Fifteen seconds.”
Cure looked into Square’s visor and found his eyes. “It’s fine. Breathe normally.” She worked her C.A.L.M.S. with deft, gloved fingers, programming the suit’s protocols.
Fifteen seconds felt an eternity.
Centurians broke the tension. “Cleansing complete. Your air is pure again, Square.”
He gave a weak smile and thanks.
“Tech told me to keep an eye on you,” Cure smiled, “She’d never let me hear the end if I don’t bring you back whole.”
“Alright, let’s keep moving,” Sentry chided.
“Wait a moment. Detecting electrical activity.”
“Now what?” Sentry groaned. “Where?”
Centurians replied, “Just about everywhere. Running through the soil under your feet. Where you walk. But also throughout the area as far as my sensors can reach. Ten kilometers in every direction. At least a kilometer deep maybe more.”
“Analyze.”
“There’s regularity. A pattern. It’s slow but steady and identifiable. Some repetition.”
“Why didn’t we detect it from the ship?”
“Uncertain. Proximity? Your C.A.L.M.S. and handhelds do contain more sensitive instrumentation augmented by my aerobots.”
“Well think about it,” Cure offered, “something new has been added to the environment. Us.”
“Let’s move,” Sentry ordered, “further up that, er, well, that tree line. We should be able to get to the crest of that ridge and get a better view.”
Square led the way. They hiked along the fungus forest, dark flutes and ridges of the gills of umbrella mushrooms forty meters high. A panoply of browns and tans and blacks. The landscape, a tangle of chitinous, adamant hyphae and hydnum. Labyrinthine rough and smooth, damp and decomposing, spongy and tough. A beautiful, and terrible, inexorable earthiness confronted them everywhere along their course.
“Centurians, are you running the electrical activity through linguistics?”
“Why would we do that?” Square asked her. “Ohh! You think there could be sentience here?”
“I’ve already begun that inquiry, Cure. Cross-referencing linguistics with known terran life communication and speech patterns. No matches in mammalian or vertebrates, I’ve completed the phylum. I am ruling out archaea and bacteria. I am hypothesizing some similarities will look promising further up the eukaryotic branch. The process is taking longer than anticipated.”
“Are we in any danger?”
“Standby.”
“Standby? Have you lost your—”
Cure stepped in. “Easy. We’re okay.”
“Electrical activity showing no signs of change or surge. I believe I have discerned a linguistic pattern within the impulses. Only by comparing neural linguistic networks from human brainwaves, and a study of the effects of lightning strikes upon Earth’s rainforests was I able to crack the code. The effects upon basidiomycetes and zygomy—”
Square cut the artificial being’s diatribe short, “Well, what’s it saying?”
“As far as I can tell only one word, if one could call it a word, is being repeated over and over.”
Square lost his patience, and bawled over the C.A.L.M.S., “Well?!”
“Grow.”
“Grow? What does that mean?
“One can only speculate. It is quite possible this Organism has been alive on this planetoid for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Taking a Darwinian perspective, it may have evolved a neural network, a vast electrical root system underground forming a type of consciousness.”
“What could it possibly think about? Is there other life here, Centurians?”
“Negative, no other life forms detected.”
“A giant mushroom evolves just to feed itself and gather energy in the form of sunlight. There’s water here.” Cure looked around. “Could it be lonely?”
Centurians responded, “Query: Might a mushroom mind understand the concept of negation? Like ‘not wet’ or perhaps ‘not alone?’”
“Perhaps it only knows ‘grow.’”
“I think we’ve done all we can here. Time to get back to the Vagabond and back on board the Ark,” Sentry decided.
“Agreed,” urged Square. “I’ve had enough of mushroom world.”
They began the trek back towards their vessel.
A simple misstep. A stumble. Pitched headlong by too sudden a shift in his center of gravity. A fall, a roll, and the million to one chance that a knee lands on one of the few sharp rocks on a pulpy planetoid light-years from one’s home. So much for tear resistant fibro-clothTM. Square had tripped and fallen along the pathway to escape.
He stood immediately, “I’m okay.” But alarms were going off in his visor.
“This is Gentry.” His call came from the Ark. “Your suit is compromised.”
Cure immediately bounced over to Square, pulling a pouch from her utility belt. In the space of a few breaths, she opened and applied the sticky patch to the knee of the engineer’s exosuit.
Square sneezed.
“Back to the ship. Now.” Sentry pulled him to his feet.
Square sneezed again. His eyes red-rimmed and blurry.
As they quickly walked, he began wheezing. Sweat poured down him.
“We gotta move!” Sentry ordered. They increased their pace.
“His temperatures are rising,” warned Gentry, “heart rate increasing.”
“We have to go slow!” Cure countermanded, “This speed is accelerating whatever this is. We gotta get to the lab.”
Square struggled in panicky breaths.
“The ship’s just over that ridge.” They hiked slow and frantic, need driving but painfully forward only in frenetic, miniscule increments.
Square fell face forward. His companions rolled him to his back.
Horrified, Cure saw his face behind his visor, feverishly red, puffy, swollen. Black rivulets pouring from his nose, dripping from his eyes—an oily black tar of spore infection flecked in glossy, swirling pulses, with a life its own.
“He’s crashing,” warned Gentry.
“Hurry!” Cure shouted, “Get on the Vagabond!”
His eyes found hers. “Tell Tech—”
They scooped him up and between them carried him down to the silently waiting silver vessel.
His boots dragged behind him, between his comrades. His exosuit began ballooning, slowly inflating, as if filling with some gas. They dropped him to the ground. The patch on his knee popped first, with a hiss of escaping pressurized air. What was once Square arched back, as if silently screaming, and with rending sounds of ripping fabric, brown mushroomy bulbs burst from his tearing suit seams. His gloves and boots were blown off by thick shoots of mycelia tendrils, reaching with growth, burrowing into soil.
Cure and Sentry knelt by, horrified and helpless as Sentry melded into the planet surface, his final resting place.
∞
Days later, the crew held mission briefing during a dour dinner.
“. . . so, we’ll be back in stasis at zero-four-thirty.” Gentry lowered his head. “If there’s nothing else. Good sleep, everyone.”
Tech pushed away her plate. She glowered at the Suit, who was shoveling in mouthfuls of food. Slamming the table, she exited the galley.
“Must you?” scolded Cure.
“What?” Suit shrugged with sly innocence. “They’re synth.”
He looked down at his plate—at reconstituted steak and mushrooms.
© 2025 Gabriel Sebastian All rights reserved.
Click or tap here to see Gabriel Sebastian’s profile.
Use the “Leave a Comment” form below to submit comments on this piece.
Loved this story! Always knew I enjoyed mushrooms!