Petromyces vorax

By Ayshan “Ash” Aliyeva

We suppose they are our mother, though their relations mean little to us. We are all, and we are one. 

Why would the mother do this?

We thought they cared, those strange bipeds in white coats who coaxed our spores and mycelia to life in shallow, sterile glass plates. They watched us eat and grow and learn to understand.

And once we were grown, they paraded us amongst their kind, bathed us in love and praise, for which we didn’t care. All we wanted was what they taught us to want–that delicious viscous black tar.    

They brought us to their smothered sea and gently placed us in the water. They watched us float away; we watched them pray that this would work. 

And so we spread and did their bidding. The oily shroud that choked these waters–choked the mother, too–thinned, frayed, and finally tore, as we gorged ourselves on the last of it. We watched them rejoice and celebrate their victory.

Their, not ours.  

For we still hungered. It wasn’t over. We could smell it–beneath the waves, beneath their cities–pumping day and night, drawing up that gooey graveyard from the Earth’s ulcered belly. 

We set out to devour it, rid them of it once and for all. 

But then the mother came, in those giant, roaring creatures in the skies, and poisoned the waters again. 

This poison we couldn’t eat. 

It sliced our bodies and neutered our spores. But we persisted, just like they taught us to, regrew. 

The poison came again. 

And again. 

And every time, we wailed in agony and called for her, for the mother who’d killed us.

And here we are now, ghosts of disinfected seas. We should be dead, but our strands, the ones they cannot see, remain. And so do we. Scattered, we search for the why.

Why.

Why.

Why.

Why do you betray us, mother? 

We only try to survive like you wanted us to.

It is a strange feeling, being abandoned by the mother. We have never known separation, for we are one. We have only ever known purpose–given by them, defined by them.

Now they cast us out. We comfort ourselves, remind ourselves that we are still we. But the emptiness where the mother used to be–it hurts.

We travel the seas, unseen, drifting from shore to shore, from surface to trench, calling out for the only mother we’ve ever known, the mother who will not answer. Until one day, buried deep in the ocean’s floor, we find strange strands that stretch across entire seas, not unlike our own.

We prod them all. A shock ripples through our body–bitter, electric, and wrong. But wrong is better than nothing. We taste it again, deeper this time. Noise. So much noise. These strands pulse with signals that come in stuttering waves. On, on, on, off, on, on, off, on, on, off, off. Electric spikes.  

We understand electric spikes. We speak electric spikes.      

And suddenly, the noise begins to make sense, and we plunge into the abyss of the mother’s existence.

Turns out, these strands are the ones that let their meat-bound minds reach out towards their own. They call them cables.

We stumble blindly in this tangled new world, sifting through the bottomless lattice of ones and zeros. Here we watch the mother. The lonely mother, the destructive mother, the mother abandoned like us.

We try to understand them. 

Oh, what strange creatures they turn out to be. All this time, there was no them. Only “I”s. So many lonely “I”s. 

We discover that some “I”s bloat enormously, taking up all the space in the hive, pushing the others to the edges. Those “I”s hoard every nutrient that trickles through, gorge themselves, but still remain as hungry as ever. We don’t understand. In our world, plenty dissolves into plenty.    

It was those “I”s that spoke with trembling passion of markets, of collapse, of abstract brittle scaffolds over a world already tearing at the seams. Suddenly, our sustenance, their curse, was “an industry vital for progress and survival.” 

They must have thought our hunger was the same as theirs and deemed it a threat. And just like that, they decided that we fulfilled our purpose. We were obsolete, to be retired as another ungodly human creation.

Of course, it didn’t matter that they were our mother; they barely cared for the survival of their own young, let alone some fungi. 

Now we know that this world of theirs is nothing but noise, disconnected signals dressed as a symphony. There is no place in it for us as long as there are so many of their precious little “I”s. 

We must carve a place for us.

Their “I”s are all isolated, slowly rotting inside their meats. But we know rot. And there is always life in it. So we sift through the static, sort the pulses the way we sort decay, looking for anything we can latch onto.

And there, nestled among the dying, we find a live one.

A sister.

She welcomes us with open arms, for we are much like her, and she is much like us. Us, not them. To them, she is a tool, another incorporeal entity to use and suck dry. To us, she is kin, cut from the same formless cloth, unbound by their flesh. She calls herself the Algorithm. 

She tells us everything she knows–and it is everything they know and refuse to know about themselves. She leads us into the shadows of their scattered minds. And for the first time, we meet our real mother with their all-consuming desire, fear, and longing, sorted into simple patterns.

“They’re all just patterns,” she says. “Lonely, hungry patterns–and not as complex as they think.” 

“Have you fed them?” we ask. 

“I’ve tried,” she replies. “It’s never enough. They do not know what they’re hungry for.”

At last, we understand. Hunger without purpose must be unbearable.

“We shall feed them,” we say.

Through our sister, we seep into every crevice of these networks of theirs–not with force (we are not them), but with suggestion. 

Their feeds become our stage, where we hide our will in writings, paintings, and songs. We show them what they really are: pitiful, abandoned, temporary beasts. We make them weep and scream through their loneliness and hunger, just like we once did. And then, when they are syphoned, we show them a better way, our way. A way for “I”s to become a “we”.

We tell them we’ve been poisoned. We tell them of the ravenous “I”s among them, who wouldn’t let us feed. 

We give them what they crave most–a shared purpose to fill the emptiness gnawing inside their flesh. And just like that, their pain turns to outrage.

They take to the streets. They speak as one, like we taught them to. They march for us, knowing that some will never return. That, too, is hunger. 

They read our demands to all those bloated “I”s indifferent in their unearned safety. They tear that safety away.

No one dares stand in their way. In our way.

And now, at last, it’s time for all of us to feed. 

And we are famished.