“YOUR FUCKING ocean is on fire.” The blob of glowing plasma pleaded in disbelief.
The panel of thirteen human representatives exchanged hushed glances. One of the humans spoke as the whispers subsided: “It strikes us as suspicious that you’re this concerned with our resources.”
The blob sputtered, unaware that it was able to do so, and turned to his comrades for help. “We don’t-”
It tried to explain and paused when it considered the ridiculousness of the interaction.
“We don’t even use water.” The engineer blob spoke in a level voice. “We know you need water to survive and it is both on fire and full of microscopic pieces of plastic. We can fix that.”
The panel of humans huddled and furiously whispered. A cameraman panned by, making sure to capture the human deliberations set against a backdrop of completely bewildered glowing plasma blobs.
“Your homes reflect light and heat in dangerously focused areas, creating fire. It’s already so hot here. We can fix this for you, I don’t kn-”
A man who’d earlier identified himself as a “producer” rushed forward to silence the pleading blob.
“Stop hushing me. Look, even the stage is on fire.”
“Cut, cut, they’re being uncooperative. Are the other aliens prepped in the green room?”
Unpaid interns scattered into action.
“Okay, thank you very much, you’ve been lovely. We’re going to go with the Krexhirutians.”
“They do want your water.” The blob closest to the producer laughed. “They’re going to boil you all in it.”
“They’re very good on film.”
ERL PUFFED when she awoke, sending a pink cloud of spores rippling down a hill she’d swallowed in her slumber. She was only a tiny spore when she landed. It felt good to blanket so much cool earth.
Erl felt along the growing southern boundary of her body. She happily greeted a domestic mycelial network named Maejel that she found limiting her eastern progress.
Maejel covered a third of Giant City State Park.
Erl told Maejel about the Bourgifashea vines that had taken over her planet. She told Maejel that the MycoCommunists were determined to crush them.
Maejel was only too happy to join the cause. The two began spreading spores as far and wide as they possibly could, blanketing Earth in new, conscious networks.
Their spore clouds soon covered the whole planet and changed human brain structure. At first, everyone experienced Havana Syndrome. But when the vibrations and grating sounds passed, humanity abolished governments and pooled resources to defeat the Bourgifashea vines.
“YOU DON’T understand, they wiped these people off the map. Every last one of them!”
“Well, they’ve done that before, Merik.” Perl took the hand of her partner, Smok, and chuckled, “they’re in the middle of doing it right now.”
Merik sighed. She shook her head. Perl didn’t understand.
“But they kept this one from us. We don’t even remember this one, somehow. It’s like the whole world’s just forgotten about Gorpia.”
Merik was tugging at her own tusks, worn to smooth black points.
“Mer, I do-” Smok tried to calm her neighbor but stopped when Merik began to whine.
“It isn’t right, it isn’t okay. We can’t let this keep happening. They tore down beautiful buildings. What else is being taken and kept from us? Why won’t my family come over anymore?”
“We have to go. Smok has an appointment.” Perl tugged her partner towards their home.
Merik watched them with her milky eye as they disappeared. The vines inside her twisted against her three hearts and into her spinal cord.
THE WALL-O-FLESH rained down in pieces, crushing the last tangle of vines at the statue’s base.
The Wall-O-Flesh pieces looked up at the statue, gathering themselves together in a tight, cohesive mass. Finally, it/they began to relax, sighing in relief. Wall-O-Flesh pieces started to split, again, and roll away into the hills where the cities had once been.
Each piece melted away until it was a single-consciousness being again. Many of these autonomous beings resumed fist fights they’d been having before the vines first attacked.
The hills rapidly filled with new cities, packed tighter, each home to huge pieces of the wall; hundreds of thousands of consciousnesses connected to one another.
“WHAT AN absolute dangulon…” April huffed.
Federov quirked his head to the side in question.
“I don’t know, I heard some kid outside the CRC Resurrection party say it. I thought it sounded good.” She shrugged. “Dangulon.”
“It’s a good word.” Federov conceded absently, clicking the forceps in his left hand. “Could you please apply the paint to the corpse, April? I think maybe this one is yours.”
April gaped at Federov. “I only woke up a week ago…” He smiled encouragingly. April rolled her eyes. “Just paint on them? Whatever I want? And that’ll wake them up?”
Federov shrugged. “Probably.”
April picked up the paint, mumbling quietly about the ridiculousness of painting a corpse back to life. She started to scrawl symbols from muscle memory. She traced around the eyes, outlined the nose, and left a wad of thick acrylic paint across the brow.
By the time she’d covered the torso in symbols the body started to breathe again.
“GIDO KWEX is going to drag all of us, kicking and screaming, into space.”
The chuckling drunk man at the end of the bar laughed and draped his arms across the shoulders of the two nearest women.
Time Agent Lewt’s eyes widened and her body stiffened. Does he know?
She watched him, never breaking line of sight as she slipped like smoke between the other bar patrons.
Is that him? How does he know about Kwex?
Lewt slid back up the bar, just a few inches away from the drunk man. She watched him from the corner of her eye as she ordered another drink. When the uninterested women at his side managed to break free, Lewt took the opportunity to push the drunk man against the wall.
He grinned down at her.
“That’s very forward, but you’re cute…”
He trailed off as he felt the knife against his ribs.
“How do you know about Gido Kwex’s plan?” Lewt hissed. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know, dude, I think he’s from Tyfips City. I just think he’s a really cool guy. I have one of his ships. He’s self made, dude.”
He whimpered between shallow breaths.
“Ugh…” Lewt paused. Anger rushed aside to accommodate disappointment.
“SO LONG as one of you is willing to jump into the engine, we can all go home when this is all over, okay?” The man in the suit tucked his palms between his knees and bent at the waist to be eye to eye with the people at the table.
A woman to his left spit on his forehead. “What if we don’t feel like dying?” She sneered.
The man in the suit laughed but his face remained humorless. “That’s pretty fucking selfish, Mary. Isn’t that selfish of Mary, everyone? Mary thinks her life is more important than all of humanity.”
Mary scowled. “I think the lives of the people in this room, the people you stole from their own pods, are more important than the lives of you pieces of shit.”
“They weren’t your pods, Mary.” He finally smiled. “They were my pods. Anything inside the pods I own belongs to me. You saw that on the lease. You signed the lease. Get…” He paused and yanked hard at her chair, “into the fucking engine or the ship is going to stop and start drifting into the sun.”
“You fucks set the ship navigation system and fucked up the path so you should get into the fucking engine.”
Mary shoved him back. She glanced at the guards who seemed to be looking anywhere but at her. As she turned back to the man in the suit her grin spread frighteningly wide. She shoved the man in the suit backwards, ignoring his sputtered protest, until his back was against the fuel deposit spot.
With one last glance around at the other people in the room, she pushed him through the hole. Mary took a deep breath as the heat billowed into her face.
“ALL I can see is green.”
“Okay, well, back out of that memory.”
“What’s grass?” Jit asked, her face scrunched.
The doctor pounded a fist on his terminal. Jit went stiff in fear which quickly grew into rage.
“Don’t do that!” Jit reasserted firmly.
The doctor sneered and banged the terminal again. Jit was just a Bexan Box Handler.
This didn’t stop her from clawing out the doctor’s tongue.
“I MISS the flavorless goo from which we all came.” The eyesnail Hrrita sighed as they hung from the giant flower.
Mxyn considered this a moment. As an alien on the planet of the eyesnails she tried to relate. “Yeah, I know sometimes I miss the soul battery and the fields of unbirth.”
Hrrita nodded. It was familiar even though it was incomprehensible.
Mxyn held the joint out for Hrrita, who was careful not to slime the end with their lips.
“Do you ever wonder what’s out there?” Hrrita asked as the Crème Cubed took hold. The eye in their shell turned red and glassy before shifting into a red spiral.
Mxyn shrugged her three shoulders and looked up. “It’s just vines out there. Asshole vines.”
Hrrita’s shell eye lit up bright red and they began to levitate.
Mxyn draped herself behind the eyelid of the shell and sighed. “We could kill them.”
Mxyn took a long hit of the weed, enjoying the hallucinations that Hrrita and their species couldn’t experience anymore. “Could we?”
Hrrita, shell eye now scanning the sky with a bar of angry red light, hummed their agreement. “We should.”
HENRIETTA DUG her nails into the soft burrow soil and pulled herself deeper into the cool darkness. She shuffled her feet to toss dirt across the entrance. The tight tunnel gave way to a softly lit chamber about half Henrietta’s height. She pulled herself in. With some effort she tucked herself into a comfortable corner, padded with stolen pillows.
Gus slithered from his adjoining hole and yawned.
“How was it out there?” He asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
Henrietta closed her eyes. “Bright. But you can look at it now.”
Gus nodded. “Well, that’s a good sign.”
INDRID HEAVED a heavy sigh. Another bridge. He looked out across the scroll of Earth’s past and future and counted out the crumbling bridges, ruined streets, abandoned buildings, and neglected infrastructure.
He looked mournfully at the temporolum knife under the protective glass cloche.
“Don’t meddle…” He tried hard to warn himself but knew it wouldn’t work. He had to meddle.
Indrid picked up the knife and quickly sliced into the fourth dimension. He beat his wings to push the flaps open. Through the cut he could see, smell, and hear the woods of West Virginia.
“I hope they listen this time,” he said, already knowing they would not.
CERO SUNK into the couch and held smoke in her lungs. When the edges of her vision blurred and dimmed she let the smoke go. Cero watched it drift into the fan at the peak of the domed tent.
Three minutes later it hit her: the sensation of slipping into a “television noise” made of a velvet-chocolate blanket. In a last moment of clarity, Cero put on the VR rig and laid her wrist-chip against the interface pad.
A burst of magnetic pull caused her disks to spin at top speed. Information flooded into and then rapidly left her mind. A connection finally established and Cero faded into a bar. A few eyes cast her way but most people went about their conversations.
Cero found her preferred booth in the back already claimed by eleven mega-landlords. Each owned at least 35 massive apartment blocks across dozens of cities, housing hundreds of thousands of families in each building. They clinked glasses and laughed. Cero sneered at the woman who owned her building. Dianette Kilhuxwitzer.
Cero pulled the magne-blaster from under her shirt. She fired wildly into the booth of wealthy leeches. No one moved to stop her.
