“So do you know much about the Encyclopedia Fungus?” asked the man, Roger, as they walked.
“No,” said Dave. “I read a brochure about it. Well, not all of the brochure, I guess. I remember it said something about a natural Internet, and being able to use the fungus to upload and download information. I taught computer science and programming before I—retired. So the mention of a ‘natural Internet’ piqued my interest a bit.” He intentionally left out the fact that he’d been convinced, and still was, for the most part, that the whole thing was a scam.
“Is that right? Well, then, you’re in for a surprise. Have we ever had a visitor who was an IT guy, Lindy?”
“Not that I know of,” she answered. “You’ll have to teach the Encyclopedia Fungus about computers. It knows all sorts of things already. Dad taught it about fly fishing and medicinal plants. A musician from town taught it a bunch of Appalachian folk songs. My cousin Travis taught it about auto mechanics, and a medical historian was here all the way from Germany the other day, and she taught it about the history of the Bubonic Plague.”
“What have you taught it?” asked Dave. He was still unsure if all of this was real, but he’d play along.
“Oh, mostly stories. Folktales and stuff.”
“You know,” said Roger, “Lindy Ray here knows more about pleurotis gnostica than just about anybody. In fact, she discovered the fungus herself.”
“Really?” said Dave. “You look like you’re barely out of high school.”
“I’m not out of high school,” she laughed.
“Here we are,” announced Roger as they rounded a bend in the path.
Dave looked around. “Where is it? The—what'd you call it? Mat?”
Linda Ray walked a few paces off the trail, knelt down beneath a towering old oak, and brushed the accumulation of dead leaves away from the forest floor. “It’s all around you. Under your feet. Here’s a busy patch. Come watch.”
Dave stepped over to where she was kneeling. Sure enough, there was an exposed network of ropey, white fungal threads. Mycelium, he remembered from the brochure. Lindy Ray sat down on the ground and placed her hands in the mycelium laced soil, palms facing down. “What’s going to happen?” he asked, forgetting about his suspicion as a sense of curiosity crept in to take its place.
“Just watch,” said Lindy Ray.
Several minutes passed by as he stood in silence, observing her hands on the ground. He began to feel impatient, and the suspicion returned. Nothing’s going to happen. They’re having me on. Trying to get me to see something that isn’t there, so I’ll shell out money for their scam.
“Look, there it is!” said Roger excitedly. “I never get tired of seeing it.”
“What?” asked Dave, who couldn’t see anything.
“Right there. Look at the index finger of her left hand.”
Dave looked closely. A tiny strand of mycelium was emerging from the soil to make contact with her skin. As he watched, another strand began to wrap itself around her right thumb. Then another on her wrist, and another on her pinky finger.
“What is it doing?” he asked.
“It’s learning,” said Roger. We’re not sure yet how it works. We’re working on a coupl'a theories, though.”
“How do you know it’s learning?” asked Dave, his skepticism fading.
“Because,” Roger replied, “it can also teach you what it’s learned.”
“Can you tell me what it’s learning right now?” asked Dave, his incredulity tinged at the edges with awe.
“I’m teaching it a story my Pawpaw used to tell me when I was little,” said Lindy, looking up with a toss of her curls.
“It’s about a farmer and a bear.”
“Can I try?” Dave said, a little uncertainly.
Roger chuckled. “Ain’t that what you’re here for?”
Dave sat on the wet ground, and feeling half a fool, untied his laces and removed his right shoe and sock. Gingerly, he put his bare foot down on the exposed patch of mycelium. “Do I need to do anything special?” he asked. “How
does it know what I want to teach it?”
“You tell it,” said Lindy Ray. “As soon as you feel the mycelium trying to make contact with your feet, think about the thing you want to teach it. Then it’ll kind of draw it out of you. It’s easy.”
“Okay, then.” Nervously, he watched and waited. This is surreal, he thought. I wonder what it’ll feel like.
It didn’t take long to find out. The first sensation was a tickle under his smallest toe. Then more tickles under other toes, and elsewhere on his foot. He tried to think of something to teach the fungus, but his mind, paralyzed by the novelty of the experience, drew a decided blank. Soon, there was a mild feeling of tightening, as if the mycelial threads had a gentle grip on the tough skin of his heel. As he watched, several thin, fragile looking, white filaments began to furl up and around his toes.
Still unable to think of anything worthy of teaching to the Encyclopedia Fungus, Dave looked up at Roger and Lindy and began to say, “I can’t—“
But right at that moment, he experienced a markedly different sensation. An internal one. It was as if the fungus was accessing his memories independent of him. It pulled the file from Dave’s brain marked “History of Computing”, but didn’t open it. Yes? It seemed to ask. Permission required to access data.
“Permission granted,” he said aloud, and relaxed to allow the fungus to retrieve the data.
It was Dave’s last day at Pleurotis Gnostica Reserve.
He’d ended up staying quite a bit longer than expected—almost a week, and early tomorrow morning he’d be heading back home. Roger and Lindy Ray had been kind enough to offer him the loan of a military-style folding cot, a sleeping bag and some other camping gear, and (both to save money and to be closer to the Encyclopedia Fungus) he’d camped out every night under the stars in the pavilion clearing. Every day he’d visited with pleurotis gnostica, uploading knowledge about processors and fiber optics and binary code and the Turing test.
Today, for the first time, he would try his hand at downloading. It had taken him awhile to work up the courage. Roger described it as “more intense” than uploading, and Dave had had enough intensity—of experience, of emotion, and of transition—in the past few weeks to last him quite awhile. But he’d decided that today was the day to take the plunge, knowing that it would be his last chance before leaving for home.
After a breakfast of oatmeal with dried berries and walnuts mixed in (he’d stocked up on groceries in town), he hiked the Reserve’s network of trails to a certain patch of p. Gnostica that had become his favorite over the past few days. Once there, he took a seat on the dew-damp ground, removed his boots and socks and settled in for what he hoped would be an educational experience.
He was unsure, at first, of how to do it. Lindy had told him to just ask a question, but the question he tried to ask (“how do you work?”) produced no answer. He waited a few minutes and tried again, still with no luck. Finally, he realized he must be asking the wrong question. The fungus needed specificity, just like any operation performed on a computer. So he refined the question. The reformulated version was “By what method doespleurotis gnostica retrieve data through mycelium-to-skin contact?”
A rush of images engulfed him. A human foot—his foot—loomed enormously in his mind’s eye, held motionless, as strand upon strand of mycelium unleashed themselves in a whirling dance across the skin. Then the image began to magnify, zooming in so fast that Dave experienced a mild sense of vertigo. Soon he was being shown gigantic hair follicles and sweat glands. These widened into a panorama of skin cells, squashed together like balls of soft clay, their nuclei quivering like gelatin, the whole conglomeration criss-crossed by fuzzy, white fungal strings. The magnification slowed considerably as the image focused in on one individual cell, plump and pink and aqueous. A mycelial thread seemed to have found purchase on the cell, and was gripping it at two distinct points.
Now the fungus switched tactics, letting Dave’s mind’s eye off the microscopic tour bus and showing it a visual analogy instead. An analogy based, Dave could tell, on some of the lessons he’d given the fungus during his visit. At the two points of contact with the skin cell, the threads grew arms and hands. The surface of the skin cell itself became an array of files, like on a computer’s desktop. The hands drew a file entitled “Animals” and opened it to show Dave images of many different types of animals—leopards he’d seen on the Discovery Channel, crows fighting over scraps in his driveway, a whopping sea bass he’d caught on a fishing trip once, the dog he’d had when he was a boy. Attached to each one of these images was information that Dave experienced as spoken narrative, in his own mental voice, skipping quickly from topic to topic.
The Encyclopedia Fungus closed the “Animals” file, and then reopened it. This time, instead of images, there was what appeared to be information encoded in odd symbols—dots and circles and squiggly lines. This code must be how the fungus reformatted the information in order to metabolize it, he realized.
A new file was selected from the skin cell data array. This one was labeled “Humans", and it opened up to a photographic image of Kathryn, twenty-two years younger, dressed in her wedding gown, her eyes smiling. A wave of pain enveloped him, and he fought the urge to disconnect from the fungus. More images followed: a bouquet of red roses, a man and a woman yelling at each other, a grandmother cutting into an apple pie, a small girl hugging a kitten, his own mom tucking a miniature version of himself into bed, his own little brother returning home from the war, paralyzed. Once more, the file closed and reopened. But this time, instead of the cryptic markings that had represented his knowledge about animals, there was just a fuzzy grayness, like static on a TV screen. The static faded into blackness, which Dave took as an indication that the fungus had finished answering his question.
Dave freed his feet from their mycelial binds and covered the patch with leaf litter to prevent the fungus drying out. Roger had been right. Downloading was intense. Physically, emotionally and sensorily.
Lost in heavy thought, Dave made his way back down the trail toward the pavilion.
So the Encyclopedia Fungus obtains its data directly from individual cells. How is that even possible? How can a skin cell contain knowledge about leopards or crows or Kathryn? Is that really what it was trying to tell me? Maybe I misunderstood. One thing is clear, though. The fungus can’t interpret human emotion, and it seems curious.
As he walked, he tried to imagine what life would be like if he couldn’t feel anything—no pain, no sadness, no uncontrollable rage. Well, I’d never have thrown that stupid ball at Jason Pulaski, for one thing. That would be an improvement. But there would be no gladness either. No laughter or contentment or love. Kathryn never would’ve filed for divorce, because we never would’ve been married in the first place. Suddenly, he was overcome with an inexplicable appreciation, the depth of which he’d rarely felt before.
Upon his return to the clearing, Dave was slightly surprised to realize that he was exhausted. Downloading really takes it out of you, he thought. He hauled his tired limbs over to his cot, set up in the shade of the pavilion. He lay down and closed his eyes. When he opened them again a moment later, a flash of color that was conspicuously not green stood out in his peripheral vision. He adjusted his head on the pillow for a better look. There, sprouting out of the grass next to his cot was a solitary, purple crocus. As he reached out a gentle hand to stroke its soft, nodding petals, the faintest whisper of a smile grazed his lips.
“Leaving already?” Roger’s gruff voice called from across the gravel parking lot.
Dave looked up, pleasantly surprised to see his new friend walking out of the woods. “Already?” he laughed. “I thought I might’ve overstayed my welcome.”
“No, no, not at all,” Roger assured him as he drew near Dave’s car. “Actually, I’d love it if I could persuade you not to leave,” he said.
“Well, I definitely plan to come back as soon as I can make it. First order of business is finding a new job.”
“Listen, Dave. I’ve been real impressed with the way you interact with the fungus. You’ve taught it things in a week that I couldn’t have taught it in a decade. If it weren’t such a crazy idea, I’d say you had a rapport with it. And with your background and the way your mind works, well, I think you have a unique insight into how this thing works. I’d like to offer you a position here at the Reserve. We need a good computer guy. And I’d like to have you around for ongoing research.”
“Roger, thank you,” said Dave, wanting badly to accept. “The thing is--I’ve got a divorce to settle, a house to sell, and with the housing market the way it is, that’s bound to take awhile. And who knows how I’ll support myself in the process. To be honest, I don’t think anything short of a miracle will get me back here anytime soon. But I’ll think about it.”
“Good. That’s all I ask.” Roger smiled through his scraggly gray beard. “You never know, a miracle could be waiting right around the corner.”
“Well, I better get going if I’m going to make it home at a reasonable hour. Tell Lindy Ray I said ‘bye.”
“Sure thing. Safe travels, and keep in touch, Dave.”
The two men shook hands and then Roger turned to leave, while Dave climbed in his car, started up the engine and began his long journey home.”
He had made it a couple of miles when his cell phone reception returned. He hadn’t checked his messages in several days, and now his phone’s annoying buzzer went crazy, sounding alert after alert after alert. He pulled over on the side of the two lane county highway and looked at the screen. “You have 32 new text messages,” it informed him. All from Kathryn, it would seem. He opened the first one. “Where are you?” it said. “I changed my mind. I want the house.”
Right around the corner, indeed. Dave laughed to himself as he turned his car back in the direction from which he’d come.
Thank you for reading!
This has been Part 3 of "Surfing the Myconet". If you missed
Part 1
and Part 2,
go check them out!
Hi! My name is Leslie Starr O'Hara, but I go by Starr. I live in the mountains of North Carolina and I write fiction, satire, humor, and the odd anarchist think piece here on Steemit. FOLLOW ME if you're interested in stuff about science fiction, writing, homeschooling, productivity, or just stuff that will make you laugh your britches off.
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