Though, Lucy noticed, he didn’t go so far as to form any kind of appendage to help with the fight. As they dragged him away, his form remained that of a standard microbe.
What did I expect, for him to sacrifice his own safety for someone he just met? He’s probably relieved he’ll be able to do his job after all when they kill me.
Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t going to let that happen.
As the guards dragged her towards the slope, Lucy made her plan. The Bug-Man was the biggest threat here, so that’s what she focused on.
She knew she couldn’t match him for strength. Even if she upgraded her membrane as much as she could, she didn’t think she would get his damage reduced to where she could stand up to it in a true fight. Those pincers had been fast.
If she was going to avoid them, she would need to be fast as well.
It was a risk to take an upgrade she wasn’t familiar with, but it was also the only way she could expect things to go any differently.
She checked her banked points, and saw that she had 25. Just enough for the Flagellum.
Which would give me more options, she figured. Aka, running the fuck away if Bug-Man shows up.
The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she should even be planning to fight him at all. Unless she could Evolve beforehand, she didn’t think she stood a chance.
They never went over microscopic decision-making, even in grad school!
The Flagellum seemed like a good compromise. More speed meant more possibilities, and right now,she wanted to keep her options open.
It would hurt not to replace her cilia, but they just didn’t make sense right now with a better option before her.
And she might be able to escape wholesale if she bought the Flagellum now and booked it. There was still no buzzing from above, and it would take time for the guards to follow her out of the pit.
Her brief confinement with the herd had been more than worth it, and she could always come back to the sulfur-rich area when she was stronger, now that she had the energy to travel again. There was the fungus to consider, but surely she’d have an easier time finding the right enzyme to deal with it in the relative solitude of the tunnels.
As she went with the guards and planned out her upgrades, Lucy had a horrible realization about the nature of the fungus within her.
She saw it first with “Claude”, the stationary microbe Rikorlak had pointed out earlier. The old, wrinkled organism had been knocked from its position near a geyser when the guards had stormed down to arrest Lucy, who had given the incident no thought other than a brief pang of sympathy.
Now, other members of the herd had gathered around that particular geyser in a dense group. Rather than just going around, Lucy’s guards seemed determined to force their way through, their pokes and prods eliciting small streams of yellow molecules from the microbes.
Up close, she could understand them for the moans of pain they were.
Partway through dispersing the gathered organisms, one of the guards grunted, and gestured with a pointed arm to a small microbe that had apparently been deliberately hidden by the others.
But as another guard came forward to separate that microbe from the herd, Lucy had already noticed something strange about the old organism knocked down near the geyser. She moved closer to it as the guards bobbed around.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
She saw that it hadn’t been knocked over, not completely. In fact, it couldn’t be, because a thick, fuzzy stem protruded from within its cell body through its membrane and into the ground near the geyser.
Claude hadn’t been immobile out of age or apathy, the organism was tethered to the ground by…
The fungus.
More specifically, the fruiting body of the fungus.
Lucy felt a sick sensation begin to build in her cytoplasm, and she did her best not to look inwards at her own fungal freeloader, which presumably at some point would sprout out of her in the same way, rooting her into place wherever she stood.
It made sense to her now, the strange business of fungi inoculation and their relationship to the microbes.
The fungi uses us to reproduce, draining the energy of our bodies to build up enough spores.
And when the fungus was ready for its host to die and for its spores to spread around the area, it calmed its microbe host even as it sucked them dry and prepared to kill them. At first she wasn’t sure why the fungus released the calming chemical only when the microbe tried to communicate, but then she thought of the moans of pain from the other microbes, and realized that they probably mostly communicated with each other when they were in distress.
So their cries for help act as a signal for the fungus that the microbe is weak enough…
She took a closer look at the stem protruding from Claude’s membrane, and saw that it bore a striking resemblance to the matted tendrils that carpeted the sulfur pit.
It’s the same, she realized, only this one is still alive.
She looked out at the pit, at the thousands of overlapping root-like structures that covered every single square micrometer of the ground. If she’d had a mouth, she would have been sick.
Up close, she could see that Claude’s shriveled membrane was pierced through with filaments of the fungus growing inside.
“It happens to all of us, eventually.”
The voice came from a microbe nearby who had been captured by the guards as well, the one who had been hidden. The speaker’s membrane was on its way to becoming a fierce, vibrant red, a far cry from the dull grey-green of the other microbes.
“Talking speeds it up, but, well…that doesn’t always seem like such a bad thing, does it?”
Before Lucy could decide if she should respond, one of the guards seemed to notice that Claude’s body was tethered to the ground. It gestured angrily, and another guard came over, sawing at the thickened stem with a bladed appendage and then hauling the microbe’s corpse away like some sick corpse-balloon at a nightmare parade.
The last of the puzzle pieces clicked into place for her then, as the guards finished clearing a path through the crowd and started forward again, this time with the red-membraned organism in tow as well, unstruggling.
They don’t eat us, she realized. They just use our bodies to grow their…mushrooms, or whatever.
The fruiting body the fungi used to reproduce wasn’t a mushroom, but it was different from the tendrils along the ground, which were really just the leftover bits. The tasty part, it seemed, needed a host organism to grow in, and the larva-like creatures had adapted to take advantage of that fact, keeping the docile microbes in one place where the fruit of the fungus could grow freely within their bodies before they were harvested like ripe fruit plucked from the vine. They didn’t even have to do the killing, just the herding and harvesting.
Lucy tried to concentrate back on her plan as they moved along. The knowledge that the fungus inside her was likely getting ready to spring its own trap did nothing to ease her mind, and complicated her plan for escape.
She needed to sit down and experiment more with enzymes to destroy the fungus, but she would never have the chance to do so if the doctor recognized her.
Alright, escape it is. Fuck this place!
She would just have to hope that the fungus stayed dormant long enough for her to make it out.
Then she looked at the small, defeated microbe with the red membrane, the one who had spoken to her, knowing that it would only hasten death.
Could she leave them and the other microbes behind? And what about Rikorlak? The guards didn’t take him, but he didn’t exactly seem like he was the most responsible—
“You’ll never take me alive, bug-brains!”
As the small procession began floating up the slope out of the pit, Lucy saw a large shape swim past her.
She looked closer, and saw Rikorlak, with a fin-shaped appendage extended freely into the water as he used it to swim right by her, followed by a trio of spear-armed guards wriggling gamely after him, and one with a net just getting up from where it had been knocked over.
Lucy winced, but figured given how much he’d already been talking today, one sentence probably wouldn’t make too much of a difference in the fungus’ growth for Rikorlak.
She wasn’t sure if he was doing it to help her or if he was making his own attempt at escape, but she found herself heartened at his…
Bravery? Stupidity? Complete lack of concern for his own safety?
It was a scene of chaos now as guards tried to chase after Rikorlak and at the same time shuffle away Lucy and the red-membraned microbe.
It wasn’t much, but it was tough making friends at the bottom of the ocean, and Lucy was strangely touched. Put in Rikorlak’s position, she would have been strongly tempted to act like nothing was wrong and let the guards finish the job.
Simon must hire some real softies down there.
Lucy sighed, and readied herself to fight.