Spores

by Ike Hamill

  Marie saw Tyler’s hands fidget on the steering wheel. She glanced over and saw him blush.

  “So those devices we configured are to…”

  “To document communication. Just follow directions and this shouldn’t take long,” Nelson said.

  Tyler turned onto a dirt road.

  By the time he brought the vehicle to a stop, she could only pray that any of the sensors had made the trip intact. The road had been littered with so many potholes that she was clenching her teeth to keep her jaw from rattling. Marie and Tyler unloaded the plastic bins while Nelson used some device to figure out exactly where they should go.

  Once the equipment was unloaded, Nelson and Tyler took opposite ends of an enormous tape measure. They stretched it out and it was Marie’s job to walk down the length. Every two meters, she bent over and stabbed one of the sensors into the ground. If the light went green, she had it in the right place. Any other color meant that she had to try again. When she got down to Tyler’s position, the two men adjusted the tape and she went back the other way, pacing and stabbing.

  It seemed like it should be easy work, but her back was aching before they had done three rows.

  An hour later, she had only worked her way through one bin of the sensors. Nelson told her to move to the second bin. Of course he didn’t need a break. All he was doing was standing there.

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” she said. All she wanted to do was lie flat on the ground for a moment.

  “We’re almost done. Four more rows and we can move onto our next site.”

  “Fifteen,” she said, walking away so he couldn’t debate the point.

  Marie placed her feet carefully in the dark. Below, across miles of rocky scree, she saw the lights of the town below. They looked like a strange, earth-bound cluster of yellow stars. Lines of lights stretched out from the middle of town—little flickering tendrils. She wondered if man’s network below resembled the network of fungus that they were trying to document up here in the foothills. Marie sat on a patch of grass that she could just make out from the starlight. It appeared soft compared to the gravel and rocks. It wasn’t really. The grass was a thin layer on top of hard soil. Marie laid flat and stretched out her back.

  The stars above were so bright that they seemed to press down from above, imposing on her personal space.

  Up the mountain a bit, she heard Nelson and Tyler conferring on some point. More likely, Nelson was berating Tyler on one of his many failings.

  A moment later, she heard a shout followed by excited voices.

  Marie pushed back up to her feet and ran to join back up with Nelson and Tyler.

  * * * * * * *

  (Organism)

  “What is it?” she asked. She saw the grid of green lights stretched up the slope. She was impressed by her own work. The grid was enormous and perfectly spaced. The mountain pasture was perfectly divided by the green dots that she had placed by hand.

  “Watch when he does this,” Tyler whispered.

  Nelson finished fiddling with his device and he hit a button. Sweeping from left to right, the lights of the grid extinguished, column by column. It was a fascinating effect, but neither of the men made a peep about it.

  A moment later, a faint white glow swept from left to right across the same giant patch of field. When they reached the far right side, the lights were gone.

  “Wow!” Tyler whispered.

  Even Nelson reacted, saying, “Amazing,” under his breath.

  “What does white mean?” Marie asked.

  “Huh?” Tyler asked.

  “Green means that the sensor is in the right place, right? Then, everything lit up white. What did those white lights mean?”

  “The white wasn’t our sensors,” Tyler said. “That was the rust ring.”

  Marie couldn’t make out his features clearly in the starlight. Nelson’s face was lit up from the screen of his device. He looked at her with wide eyes and nodded that Tyler was correct.

  “The rust ring? You mean the fungus? The fungus just lit up?”

  Nelson shifted immediately into his lecture mode. “There are plenty of fungi that demonstrate bioluminescent displays, mostly of order Agaricales. The light isn’t the important part. The important part is that they were responding to our communication.”

  Marie took a moment to process his statement.

  “They were responding to you?”

  “In a primitive sense, yes,” Nelson said. He glanced down at his device and then stalked off across the field.

  Marie turned to Tyler. “What were they saying?”

  She heard his mouth working, preparing to stammer out an answer. She was about to tell him not to bother, certain that his answer wouldn’t make any sense to her anyway. Before she could, he managed a response.

  “We don’t know. Our signal mimics one that they send when the organism is distressed by certain environmental conditions. Like, if there’s a flood—they hate floods—and the organism senses that it’s going to cut off a main branch of the body, then it might send out a signal to…”

  “Tyler!” Nelson called. “We have a few bad units in the northeast corner. Take the probe and get them substituted.”

  “Okay,” Tyler called back. He rushed off.

  Marie watched his shape disappear into the black silhouette of the mountain. This wasn’t at all the type of research that she had imagined Oliver doing. He had traveled for field work, but she had always pictured him squatting down with tweezers, collecting some rare fungus that only lived beneath the leaves of a certain type of aspen tree or something. Oliver had always been concerned with tiny things that could only be seen under microscopes. When he had first gone into the hospital, he had talked for hours with one of the nurses about the different types of fungi that only lived in the sewage systems of hospitals. Something about the drugs that were flushed away with the human waste caused strange growths down in the plastic pipes. The nurse had been fascinated—at least he had appeared to be. In retrospect, he was probably just humoring Oliver, knowing that he only had months to live.

  Marie took a deep breath and let it out. A few more weeks of this and she would be free. She knew that she would find peace if she could only fulfill Oliver’s last dream. She had to believe it. If she couldn’t believe in that, then she had nothing left to believe in.

  “Marie!” Nelson yelled. She arched backwards, letting her back stretch out one more time before she responded.

  * * * * * * *

  (Destination)

  “Good news,” Marie said, handing the ticket to Nelson. “You were upgraded to first class.”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded at the paper ticket. Normally, Marie just emailed the boarding passes to Nelson and Tyler. For this one, she had shown up early at the airport to check him in at the counter. She didn’t want him to see that she had paid in cash to upgrade his ticket. It was worth the money so she wouldn’t have to sit next to him on the flight, but she didn’t want him to know how much he had gotten under her skin.

  Nelson was called early to board while Marie and Tyler waited.

  She gave him one final wave before he went down the tunnel to the plane.

  “Last trip,” she said to Tyler.

  She could hardly believe that her work was almost over. The months had dragged on and on even though they had been the busiest of her life.

  “I’ve enjoyed getting to know you,” he said with a smile. He barely stammered at all with her now. Nelson still managed to make Tyler stumble over every word, but when the two of them were alone, Tyler spoke fluidly with Marie.

  “I hope you have a better boss for your next research project,” Marie said.

  “He’s okay. He’s a jerk, but he’s okay. He’s doing important work.”

  “He doesn’t think so,” she said.

  They stood as their row was called for boarding.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anyone who is that insecure, clearly doesn’t believe t
hat their work is important.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Take it from me then,” she said. She held out her phone so the gate attendant could scan her boarding pass. “There’s a reason why calm, confident people are attractive. When they believe in their own work, they don’t feel the need to lash out at everyone else. He seems to be fairly intelligent. If he’s not letting his work stand on its own merits, then I would take his word that it’s not capable of doing so.”

  “You don’t think?”

  They walked through the tunnel towards the plane.

  Marie lowered her voice, just in case it carried down the metal tube.

  “Again, it doesn’t matter what I think. He’s telling you what he thinks in the way that he treats the people around him.”

  When they passed through first class, Nelson was already settled in his seat with his headphones on. He didn’t acknowledge Marie and Tyler as they passed. Their row was empty. She prayed that the airline hadn’t had time to fill the seat vacated by Nelson. Marie parked her bag there, hoping that it would somehow ward off the possibility that a smelly stranger would claim the seat between her and Tyler. When the plane finally began to taxi out to the runway and then take off, she sighed.

  It was such a small victory. The last few months had been filled with endless invasions into her privacy. They had traveled from state to state, staking out dozens of patches of invisible fungi. Their quarry was underground. Sometimes, Tyler would point to a random mushroom and claim that it was part of the organism that they were studying, but more often than not, there was nothing but a random field or a patch of forest. After stabbing little electronic devices into the soil all day, and then waiting around for Nelson to take his measurements, she would return to a tiny hotel or motel room and wait for the inevitable knock on the door. Nelson always had busywork to fill the time before bed. Marie hadn’t had a second to herself.

  “What are you going to do?” Tyler asked, leaning over to be heard over the engines.

  “Huh?”

  “You told me that you used to work on affordable housing? Are you going back to that?”

  Marie shook her head. “No, I need to find my next thing. I’m in an odd position. I want to make a difference, and I don’t have enough money to really make a difference on my own, and I don’t seem to have any skills that really make me an asset in contributing to someone else’s effort.”

  “You went to school for geography?”

  “Cartography, actually. I have an undergrad in math as well.”

  “What do people with math and cartography degrees usually do?”

  “Look for work, mainly,” she said. “I’m not passionate enough about either of those things to deal with sitting around an office all day, you know? And, like I said, I can’t seem to find any kind of position, volunteer or otherwise, that will let me do something meaningful to help the world.”

  “Maybe go back to school? You could get an MBA or accounting degree. Then you could help non-profits, right?”

  Marie rolled her eyes and sighed. “I’ve had enough of school. And, right now, as far as I’m concerned, academics can go straight to hell.”

  Tyler looked hurt by that.

  “Present company excluded,” she said with a smile.

  The plane’s engines droned beneath them for a few awkward seconds.

  “Did you say that you’re looking to study animals next?” she asked.

  Tyler shrugged. She didn’t think that he was going to add anything, but he loosened up after he thought about it for a moment.

  “Actually, I wouldn’t mind getting on a project with a charismatic megafauna aspect to it, you know? Something big and fluffy that has a personality.”

  “You don’t find fungi conversation to be fascinating?” she asked with a conspiratorial smile.

  “Actually, I do,” he said. “I know it doesn’t seem like much when we’re standing around, waiting for the instruments, but I think that there are going to be really fascinating results out of this effort. We would have been a lot better off if Oliver was still here, of course.”

  Marie raised her eyebrows. As far as she knew, they were doing the work that Oliver had planned to do. She had read his notes on the experiments and the work that she was funding was supposed to cover all of the goals that he had wanted to achieve in the research.

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  Tyler seemed to pick up that maybe he had said something wrong.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, I think that this is precisely the work that Oliver would have wanted to do. I’m talking more about what his follow-on efforts would have been.”

  Marie swallowed. She couldn’t afford, mentally, to take on anymore fungus projects.

  “Have you heard of toxoplasmosis?”

  “Is that the one from cat poo?”

  “Yes!” he said, his face lighting up. “I mean, that’s how a lot of people get it. When it infects adult people, we don’t think of it as having really bad symptoms. But when it infects rodents, it’s a much different story.”

  Marie thought she remembered something about this, but she kept quiet. Tyler was engaging when he was interested in a topic.

  “If a rat gets it, the parasite changes the rat’s behavior. They lose their fear and they become sexually attracted to the smell of cats.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Exactly! Before you know it, the rat is running after cats and the rat gets eaten. That’s all part of the strategy of Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can only reproduce in cats. By driving the host towards the cats, it’s looking for a way to get to a place that it can reproduce.”

  “Come on,” Marie said. “It’s, like, microscopic, right? You can’t tell me that it takes control of rats and looks for cats.”

  “Think about it—it doesn’t have to grab the controls like it’s driving a car. The rat’s behavior is controlled by its DNA. All the parasite has to do is make tweaks to the epigenetic controls, and the rat’s behavior changes. If you give something like this a hundred million years to evolve, a really complex system can appear like magic. And there’s some research to suggest that it’s not just rodents that are affected. The rate of schizophrenia has increased throughout the ages on par with cat ownership.”

  Marie rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said again.

  “There are other parasites that take control of their hosts, too. There’s a worm that develops inside grasshoppers. When it’s ready to burst out, it needs water, so it drives the grasshopper to go swimming. There’s a flatworm that takes over snails. In order to get into the system of birds, it drives the snails to hang out where birds will find it and then makes its eyestalks pulsate so it looks like a delicious caterpillar.”

  “What does any of this have to do with Oliver’s research?”

  Tyler leaned even closer. “He was studying the zombie ant fungus. Down in Brazil, there’s a fungus that will infect and then steer ants. It makes them climb certain trees until they get to just the right height. There, where the temperature and humidity are perfect for the fungus, it makes the ant clamp onto a leaf and then hang there until it dies. When it’s ready, the fungus will burst out in the perfect place to grow.”

  “I thought this experiment was about fungal communication networks.”

  “It is. Think about it—we’re looking at giant organisms that can cover a square mile or more, right? With a body that size, there’s a strong likelihood that part of the organism will be cut off by a new creek, or a landslide, or fire. What would you do if one of your legs was about to be cut off by a guillotine?”

  “I would move it,” she said.

  “Right, but what if you weren’t able to move it? What if you were paralyzed, because you were a fungus?”

  “Then my leg would be cut off. I don’t understand your point.”

  “If there were important information—maybe stored in the form of genetic code—in that leg, you would want to communicate that inf
ormation back to the rest of your body if you found that part of you had been cut off.”

  “Huh?”

  “So the fungus sends up fruiting bodies—mushrooms—and those have spores. We think of them simply as reproductive organs, but what if they’re another way that the fungus uses to communicate over the wind when a portion of the body has been cut off.”

  “What does that have to do with parasitic infections?”

  “If the wind isn’t going in the right direction, then it would need to find another way to cover the distance. It could infect an insect, control the brain to move in the right direction, and then it would restore its communication network through a living host.”

  In a way, Marie felt relieved. Tyler believed in crazy things, and she could dismiss his ideas. This was the type of theory that Nelson would immediately shoot down if he overheard it. If Oliver had really believed theories like this, he would have never chosen Nelson as his research partner. Marie was relieved that this wasn’t some new wrinkle that she was going to have to take on in order to feel like she had done justice to Oliver’s memory. This was simply a strange conspiracy theory that had taken root in the brain of an overworked graduate student.

  “And that’s what Oliver would have studied next?”

  “I think so,” Tyler said. “I mean, he definitely studied zombie ant fungus, so I think he might have had it on his mind.”

  Marie nodded and smiled. She made a promise to herself—when she upgraded one of the tickets to first class for the trip home, it would be her own ticket.

  She leaned back in her seat, but Tyler kept talking. It was her own fault. She had wound him up and now she was going to have to listen until he wound back down again.

  “One of the most impressive parasites is the castrator barnacle. It attaches to crabs, and if it’s a male crab, it basically turns it into a female.”