They all thought I'd gone potty. Selling up and moving to a cottage in the back of beyond on the edge of a windswept moor. It was lovely, they all said, of course. A lovely-looking rustic stone affair, surrounded by dry stone walls and lots of nothing. Hidden away down a little rutted track behind a grove of fir trees. You couldn't even really see it from the one lane road. The nearest neighbours were a mile and more away. From the walls outwards, the moors. Rolling hills, moss, grass, scree, windswept vistas. You know.
They worried. Of course they did. No one really moves to the sticks from the city unless there's something wrong. They didn't put it into words, but they mostly assume that the thing that's wrong is ultimately me.
It didn't matter. After what happened, which I was told on many occasions by various friends, relatives, and colleagues, could've happened to anyone. And often did, they would add, as if that was some kind of comfort. But it didn't mean you packed up, sold your fantastically positioned place in the city that you'd scrimped to afford, and set up shop in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Except… that's exactly what it meant.
No one said it directly as they were all much too polite, but they all assumed I was running away. I suppose I was, in a way. Never mind that I'd talked for years about doing exactly this. That I'd shared my dream of living somewhere remote and out of the way on countless occasions.
“Oh yes,” they'd say, “me too. I'd love to just uproot and go live in a log cabin in the forest somewhere.” There was no real passion behind their words though and plenty of excuses. There was their partner's job of course, and the kids—it would be impossible to get them into a decent prep school like they were currently. And so on and so on.
I had none of those trappings. No partner. No kids. A job that I worked remotely. There was nothing stopping me, and when I truly realised that, the incident became less of a cause and more of a jumping off point.
None of them could believe I was actually doing it. “But why,” they asked, “when your life is here? Everything you need is here?”
And lots of things I didn't. A plethora of constant distractions. Places to go, people to see, attractions, restaurants, pubs, gallery shows. No. I needed to be somewhere away from the bright lights and alluring menus. Somewhere I could concentrate on my work. Somewhere I could write.
Somewhere I couldn't just 'pop out' for a bit and end up frittering the evening away. Or the day. Or the week. I wanted to be somewhere where a trip to the local shop required consideration as to whether it was really necessary. Where I didn't have people above and below me who lived as if they had neither. Where the only sounds at three am were of animals calling out in the night, instead of the drunken animals having screaming matches in the street outside, or pealing out off-key songs with lurid lyrics.
I never told my friends, my family or my colleagues, but I wanted so badly to be away from them. From the meals where everyone regurgitated the meme they'd seen on Facebook, or the op-ed piece they'd read in the Guardian. They opined long and vociferously on the politics of the day, and not one of them had an original thought to contribute. They just said what they thought everyone else at the table wanted to hear, all waiting for their turn to regurgitate salient facts or secondhand judgement. It was exhausting.
The more I thought about it, the more I decided I'd done exactly the right thing. I would be able to work, to be alone with my thoughts, undisturbed. The novel would get done, along with my mainstay of writing tech articles for magazines and websites. It seemed like a bit of an oxymoron, writing about tech from a small cottage with no central heating, but I had an oil system that I had a few months to figure out before it got cold, and I had broadband, which was really all I needed to be able to work. I could even get a couple of bars signal on my phone as long as I wasn't in the bathroom or bedroom. The naysayers, which was almost everyone I knew at this point, only served to prove to me it was the right move.
The actual moving wasn't easy. Once the removal people had actually managed to find the place, and carefully flung my boxes into the hall, they promptly left, leaving me to do most of the actual moving. I unpacked as best I could, leaving the main moving things around until later. I've never been a particularly sentimental person, but I brought the items that meant somthing to me, like the cup my grandmother had bought me that said “No.1 Grandson,” and paintings my father had done. I put the cup on the mantle. It was chipped and more an ornamental piece now. The paintings I hung in the hall, on hooks that had remained from the previous owners. Looking at them made me feel connected to my dad, who had passed several years ago now. Seven? Eight maybe.
The fridge and washing machine that I'd bought to replace the old ones were arriving later in the week, but I had a kettle and had brought enough teabags, biscuits and tins of food to see me through until doomsday. I wouldn't starve, but my meal variety was going to be diminished for a while.
Getting the mattress up the stairs was a pain and I made the mistake of putting it off until much too late. After much huffing and puffing, I managed to pull, rather than push it up the stairs as I'd thought. I let it fall onto the bed and winced at the noise, before realising that only I would have heard it, so it didn't matter. I could make noise if I wanted to here. I could put the radio on loud as I ate breakfast on the patio if I wanted. I could turn the TV up instead of listening to it through headphones. I could sing while I pee'd in the night if I wanted. It felt like freedom just to consider these things.
The morning broke damp but crisp. I kicked off the duvet and bounded downstairs. Kettle, teabag, cup. I don't usually eat breakfast first thing. I decided I'd take a drive into the village later and explore. There'd been a cafe I'd seen on my way through. Perhaps a heavy breakfast and a coffee, then a look around the village. There'd been a place that had a sign saying 'antiques', that looked like it was housed in an old barn. Perfect. I'd have a quick look around, making sure to be home for lunch, so as not to waste the whole day. The afternoon would be spent working. Maybe that evening I'd set up the TV and watch a movie. Maybe I wouldn't, and would read instead.
The broadband was being plumbed in on Thursday, which gave me two days to write my latest article and upload it. The broadband here was a tenth of the speed I'd had in the city, but it would do the job. The engineer said it might even seem comparable, as I wouldn't really be sharing the line with anyone.
It was perfect. The whitewashed and uneven walls of lumpy stone, the gate with its bottom hinge rusted and broken, the roses growing up the trellis over the front door, the tiny bathroom that I had to duck to get into. All of it.
Apart from one thing. I found the only thing new homeowners don’t want to find—mould. During its fallow period between owners, a few patches had crept in. Several solutions came from all sides of the internet piped to my phone as I stood in the back garden to get a decent signal. Fresh air. Bleach. Putting candles nearby. Crystals. Horrifically expensive dehumidifiers.
None of it worked, including the bleach, which was a surprise. I searched online via my laptop once the broadband came. Similar remedies returned. I watched it over a few days. The patches grew imperceptibly, as if they waited for me to look away before expanding an immeasurable amount.
It moved slightly. I don't mean around the wall, I mean it sort of… undulated slightly. It was very subtle, to the point where I thought I'd imagined it. Almost as if it was in the path of a draft I was unable to feel. I went to bed, perturbed by this blot on my otherwise perfect edifice of freedom.
In the morning, I woke to the sounds of starlings and larks. I spotted a deer out of my bathroom window, at the edge of the tree line and felt my spirits rise in a way they'd never done in the city.
I took my coffee onto the patio, braced against the morning breeze in my dressing gown. I breathed deeply through my nose. It certainly cleared the cobwebs. I foolishly decided to bring my laptop with me and browsed some news sites, which brought me crashing back down and so I closed the laptop again and just drank my coffee bathed in birdsong.
I found another spot with mould in the pantry, and another in a nook in the dining room. The largest was in the living room though, which I almost could've sworn wasn't there yesterday. This spot was not only larger, but a different colour to the others. This was a more burnt sienna, and had little crinkled edges, almost like a lichen, but with black spikes emanating from the centre, one of which had a small, gelatinous looking ball at its head.
I couldn't help myself, I reached out a tentative fingertip and prodded the little shiny black ball. It stuck to my finger. I watched as the little black ball turned white, and I suddenly felt rather odd. I slumped down the wall into a sitting position on the floor, wondering if I was about to have some kind of psilocybin trip.
I looked at my finger, and the little ball, now white, was still adhered to me, my arm still held up toward the mould. Everything became blurry and I…
———
I travelled down my arm, somehow. Down the network of nerves contained within my meat. I looked around and saw a glow emanating from my gut in particular, but kept moving down my arm. As I reached the tip of my finger, I transferred into the white ball of the mould, the spore or whatever it was. I raced down the filament that attached it to the main body of russet, crinkly-edged stuff, and kept going. Tiny threads reached down into the stone of the wall and I slid down, through cracks too small to see. I kept going, racing now, sliding between different… hyphae—somehow I knew the word was hyphae—blazing a trail through the darkness and crumbling stone. Then a burst of light as I came out through a crack outside, then along the bottom of the wall along whisper-thin tendrils and into a drain.
From there all was dark as I entered under the soil. I glanced around somehow and saw a vast network of intertwined roots that shone dimly through the earth, winding into the distance.
Although I could neither see nor hear in the traditional sense, I could somehow see my house if I looked up, or at least the outline of some of it, where the mould penetrated. I concentrated and could make out the dim glow of my gut that I'd seen moments before, and a pulsing beacon that was the little white ball still stuck to my finger. There was sound too, of a kind. A vague mumbling of what sounded like stage whispers that came from somewhere to far off to discern clearly.
The stage whispers demanded my attention though, so I let them guide me away inexorably from the house and previous safety of my body and life. As I relinquished control, I sped merrily toward the nearest copse of trees out of the back of the house along a dense network of lines that expanded ever outward.
The whispers were coming from the trees. They exchanged information about weather conditions—light, heat, humidity—as well as shared nutrition along these pathways from connections via their roots. All this information flowed through me as part of the network. I tasted the nutrients they shared like bread passed around a restaurant table. I heard the weather reports, and talk of possible threats in the area. I learned the reason for crown shyness—trees like their own space just like humans do. I saw a progenitor birch ensure that its sires were getting enough water.
I scampered under the forest floor, and felt the fungus breaking down dead leaves, returning their nutrients back into the soil. I climbed up into the fruiting bodies—the wild mushrooms that littered the undergrowth, and felt their ecstasy as they released millions of spores into the air, ensuring the longevity of the mycelium.
I was connected to everything down here. And then suddenly, I shot off back toward the house. Back through the soil, under grass and rock I hurtled. Back up the drain, up the inside of the wall, up through the ruddy lichen, into the black spire, into the white ball, into my finger, up the pathways of nerves, into the spine and from there up into my…
I woke up with a start. I had something of a headache and blearily looked at my watch which told me I'd been hallucinating for about two hours. It hadn't felt like that long, really only a few minutes. I detached my finger from the mould, and got up, shakily. Apparently I'd soiled myself during my trip.
Exasperated, I went to the bathroom to clean myself up. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and was shocked. My lips were almost white and I had dark circles under my eyes.
I showered, and changed. It was late morning by now anyway, and I needed to do some more writing before the weekend.I threw my soiled clothes into a hamper, headed downstairs and had just put the kettle on to alleviate my incredible thirst, and started looking through a surprisingly full inbox and some messages on my phone when there was a knock at the door.
“Fridge and washing machine?”
“Oh great, yes please,” I said, “you're early.”
“Early? We tried on Friday but there was no answer. This is our second attempt.”
“Friday?” I looked at my watch, “No, because it's…”
The readout showed Monday, eleven-thirty am. That explained why I had several voicemails and several emails marked, ‘urgent’ awaiting my attention.
I ushered the men inside and they connected my appliances while I tried to understand how I’d missed three days whilst tripping.
I tipped them generously as they left and thanked them. I still couldn’t believe I’d been gone that long, but it did explain my thirst, hunger and the fact that I’d evacuated my bowels during my foray.
I went through the emails, got in touch with work and sold them a story about old wiring and a three day power cut. I was still technically within my deadline anyway. I'm not sure they bought it a hundred percent, I may have laid on my woes about electrician's fees a little thick, but I assured them it was all in hand and I would submit on time.
Only I didn't write my article. Instead I spent the afternoon researching ergot and psilocybin and their effects. Ergot only grew on hay and cereal crops, mostly rye, so it was unlikely that the mould on my wall was ergot. Psilocybin is generally associated with mushrooms. The thing I touched didn't look like a traditional mushroom, but they do come in all sorts of shapes and colours I discovered. My research showed me that Psilocybin, which gave effects similar to LSD or DMT, usually took fifteen to forty-five minutes to take effect, and the effects lasted between four to six hours.
If I'd been on a mushroom trip, it had been a hell of a trip. It took effect immediately on contact and lasted for about four days. I was not a recreational drug user, apart from a bit of weed in my youth, but this did not seem normal.
Also, from reading up, there was nothing mentioned about the sorts of things I'd seen while on my trip. Usually people see distorted forms, intense colours, and in high doses the sorts of things that adorned the walls of student digs in the nineteen-sixties. There was talk of time distortion too, but usually that time seemed to take longer, minutes stretching out into hours, not a four day trip seeming to happen in only minutes.
I did manage to get hold of a mycologist from one of the big universities, using my journalist credits to get an interview. He told me much the same thing, but couldn't identify the fungus from my description. I asked caged questions about psilocybin and he kind of shut down and warned me not to experiment with it, especially on my own. I assured him I was not considering it, it was just background information for the article I told him I was writing. I agreed to send him a photo of the fungus for further identification.
One thing he did say was that we know so little about fungi in real terms. There were more species of fungi than those of plants, but many more still undiscovered. He also told me that fungi were not plants, and also not animals, but possibly something in between the two. Something about that gave me goosebumps.
After putting down the phone, I realised I'd wasted half the day looking into something that wasn't going to earn me money, and instead dashed out the rest of my article, which honestly was not my best work.
I just couldn't stop thinking about my experience. A week later I was still thinking about it, and had done every day since it had happened. I would catch myself staring into the middle distance, only to find when I snapped back that the mould was directly in my line of sight.
The little mushroom or whatever it was had withered, but in its place were several more. As my gaze softened, I would see them move—only very slightly—but when I focussed on them again, they would be stock still, as if mocking me.
Perhaps they were some kind of quantum system, that reacted to an observer, like photons in the double slit experiment? In any case, they manifested an almost siren-like lure over my waking thoughts.
And then the dreams started. I would be sitting near the mould patch, trying to think of a very good reason not to touch one of the little black balls extending out. Sometimes in my dreams, the ball would grow a hyphae appendage. A thin, white finger, the tip of which would curl and relax like it was beckoning. Back and forth.
“Come,” it would gesture, “come with me and see more. See all there is along the network. If you thought whispering trees were cool, just wait until you see what I have to show you…”
I broke after three nights of the same dream.
I planned my trip. I went out and bought adult incontinence pants. I caught up on all my work and emails. I told work I needed to sort out the house and didn't want to take any new assignments for a week. I rang my friends and family and told them I was going on holiday and would not be taking my phone or laptop. I was taking a well deserved rest. Most of them said something along the lines of “good for you,” or similar. I picked Acapulco at random and told them that's where I was headed. A few said they were jealous. I couldn't tell them I was taking a trip of an entirely different nature and wouldn't be leaving my living room.
I would eat as much as I could in the days leading up to it, and drink as much water as possible in the hours before. I realised I would pee a lot of it out in the first day or so, but there wasn't much else I could do. I hoped the network might provide enough water and nutrients to my comatose body, due to knowing more about me after the previous excursion.
When the time actually came, I got very nervous. My watch even pinged a high heart rate alert in the minutes before, but that wasn't going to stop me. I was either connecting with another form of intelligent life on this planet, or I was tripping on a more potent version of magic mushrooms. There was no way to tell. My time with the network had felt just as real, albeit vastly different, to my time inhabiting this evolved ape I walked around in. Plus the network didn't ask me to earn a living, which was a definite draw. I could just learn and experience the world in a new way without having to pay taxes, and that is a holiday in itself.
The time had come. I sat in my living room, a blanket draped over me for warmth and reached out a finger. The mould seemed to move slightly, as if it was reaching back…
Again, the effect was instantaneous. My awareness left my body behind and sank down into the roots that snaked through tiny gaps in the brickwork and from there, I dove under the earth.
I was very much more aware of what was happening this time. I could sense the presence of my body above me. I could feel the pulses of blood as my heart pumped, and electrical activity in my nerves. They lit up like cracks of lightning, each pulse travelling from the brain down the spine and out to the extremities, delineating my physical boundaries from within.
I turned my attention away, back to the network which greeted me like and old and cherished friend. “Come,” it said, “ I have such things to show you.”
I raced along its circuits, listening again to the chatter of trees, and other mycorrhizal networks that shared information. I felt how the mycelium gave nutrients back to the soil, or broke down the wood of fallen trees to clear the way and prepare the ground for new growth.
I experienced the cycle of life in an entirely new way. I felt the fungus breaking down dead animals and plants all over the world to a molecular level, in a continual cycle of reuse and renewal. Nothing ever really dies, it just returns to the source, reabsorbed.
I was reminded of two snippets of information. One, was that I remembered hearing that the atoms that existed in Julius Caesar still existed in me and many other beings and objects in the world. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transmuted from one form to another, and here was that process in action.
Second, I remembered seeing an odd meme online about mushrooms and how you cannot kill them in any way that matters. When asked to expound this cryptic message, the original poster had replied with, “Decay is an extant form of life.” Now laid out before me, was a new and primal comprehension of what they’d meant.
The network tugged at my thoughts, indicating that there was still more to experience. I followed where it led, showing me more vast underground networks of hyphae, all growing a single cell at a time, seeking out new connections and unexplored areas, as they twisted and struggled through the dirt.
Finally, something clicked. I saw the various fungi and mycelium, intertwined with root systems all over the world. I saw the fungi in every animal’s belly. I saw untold trillions of spores being breathed in every second, not as disparate entities, but as a unity, massive in scope, encircling the globe and infiltrating every living thing. It tilled the earth and made life possible. It was life. And in death this system would welcome us back into its bosom and make us useful. Or re-useful.
I saw that nothing is apart from the system, but a part of the system. The network showed its pleasure at my understanding, but there was something I was yet to grasp, I knew. The network didn't cajole me, or push me, or become impatient. The network had all the time in the world, because it had existed from time immemorial. Before fish swam in the seas, and long before a group of apes ate of its flesh and were chemically altered, the network lived and worked.
In a second, I was made aware of the immensity of the network in its full splendour. A bird's eye view if you will, that also encompassed the bird itself.
It really was a like a computer network. It reminded me of something. Trillions of tendrils, boring through the sod, reaching out for connection. I saw each quanta of information that flowed along it, lighting up the superstructure.
It looked like a brain. Not a human brain, or any kind of animal brain for that matter, but definitely a brain. All these hyphae were like neurons, their intersections like synapses. All channels for information. It was the brain of the earth, the mind of Gaia, and I was experiencing it from the inside.
I don't know how long I gazed in awe and wonder. What I remembered, far too late, was that my sense of time inside the network was skewed by the immense aeons it had survived for. To the network, a year could be less than the blink of an eye.
So it was that I realised that I should check on my physical body. Although I felt at home as part of the ancient planetary supermind and welcome to stay, I still had a life outside, back in my human body.
I willed my consciousness back along the hyphae, traversing the planet and noting points of interest for my next venture within its threads. Eventually I wound back to the little village on the edge of the moor, through the copse of trees, still revelling in their talk, and back toward the wall of the little cottage.
There was a stillness in the house. The sort of stillness where nothing has moved in a place for quite some time. An undisturbed sort of quiet. I looked up at my body. It was still and quiet too. There were no pulses of blood in its veins, no jolts of electricity sparking in its nerves. It sat slumped, arm still held up, fingertip still lightly touching the bulb on the mould that had started all this.
I could see the fungi inside my old gut beginning to break down cellular walls that formed my intestinal lining. There was a blackening of the skin of my face, and furry white patches had begun to creep into the wetter crevices—the corners of my mouth, and inside my ears and nose. My unblinking gaze into the middle distance was made from milky eyes that had lost their lustre.
For a second I felt blind panic, but the network adjusted my view again, pulling back to show my body as a part of the whole, and only a small part at that. I was always going to die, and it didn't matter to the network whether it was now or in thirty years time. It wasn't really reclaiming me, because I had never left its embrace. My need to be distinct was ebbing like a tide. The network had me, and had always.
My body was discovered by two network nodes that I recognised as human police officers from their behaviours. I presumed another node I had previously known had reported me missing or unresponsive to communication, or perhaps a local node had reported the smell of glorious rot emanating from the fungus repurposing me.
It didn't matter now.
Via the network I was able to attend my own funeral. I found mycellium under the graveyard and of course spores in the air and observed from there. There were nodes I recognised from their gaits and traits, and others unknown to me. I watched the spores enter them all as they breathed. I saw the chemical changes in their gut flora that represented their emotional states. In most ways, they all looked alike from this vantage point. They would all join me eventually. They would merge with the mycelium as I had, and be repurposed. They just didn't know how joyous it would be, not yet. I had shed my meat prison. I was free of the trappings of humanity, and in short order, they would be too. It would be cause for celebration.
After a while I got bored and spoke to the trees lining the churchyard.