One achieves a certain equilibrium when one lives in a lightless pit, accompanied by the squeak and rustle of vermin and the slow drip of water from rock. The rats carried fleas and the fleas feasted upon me before they expired, before I rubbed out their puny existences. But these tiny devils had their banquet—while I drowsed, they sucked my blood, drowned and curdled in tears of my glazed eyes. And the flies.
* * *
Depending upon who I’m talking to, and when, the notion of re-growing lost limbs and organs, of reorganizing basic genetic matrices to build a better mousetrap, a better mouse, will sound fantastical, or fantastically tedious. Due to the circumstances of my misspent youth, I evolved outside the mainstream, avoided the great and relentless campaigns to homogenize and balance every unique snowflake into a singular aesthetic. No clone mills for me, no thought rehabilitation. I come by my punctuated equilibrium honestly. I’m the amphibian that finally crawled ashore and grew roots, irradiated by the light of a dark star.
I pushed my best high school bud off the Hoover Dam. Don’t even recall why. Maybe we were competing for the girl who became my wife. My pal was a smooth operator. I could dial him up and ask his quantum self for the details, but I won’t. I’ve only so many hands, so many processes to run at once, and really, it’s more fun not knowing. There are so few secrets left in the universe.
This I do recall: when I pushed him over the brink, he flailed momentarily, then spread his arms and caught an updraft. He twirled in the clouds of steam and spray, twisting like a leaf until he disappeared. Maybe he actually made it. We hadn’t perfected molecular modification, however. We hadn’t even gotten very far with grafts. So I think he went into the drink, went straight to the bottom. Sometimes I wonder if he’d ever thought of sending me hurtling to a similar fate. I have this nagging suspicion I only beat him to the punch.
* * *
The heralds of the Old Ones came calling before the time of the terrible lizards, or in the far flung impossible future while Man languished in the throes of his first and last true Utopian Era. Perspective; Relativity. Don’t let the Law of Physics fool you into believing she’s an open book. She’s got a whole other side.
Maybe the Old Ones sent them, maybe the pod people acted on their own. Either way, baby, it was Night of the Living Dead, except exponentially worse since it was, well, real. Congruent to Linear Space Time (what a laugh that theory was) Chinese scientists tripped backward to play games with a supercollider they’d built on Io while Earth was still a hot plate for protoplasmic glop. Wrap your mind around that. The idiots were fucking with making a pocket universe, some bizarre method to cheat relativity and cook up FTL travel. Yeah, well, just like any disaster movie ever filmed, something went haywire and there was an implosion. What was left of the moon zipped into Jupiter’s gravity well, snuffed like spit on a griddle. A half million researchers, soldiers, and support personnel went along for the ride.
Meanwhile, one of the space stations arrayed in the sector managed to escape orbit and send a distress call. Much later, we learned the poor saps had briefly generated their pocket universe, and before it went kablooey, they were exposed to peculiar extra dimensional forces, which activated certain genetic codes buried in particular sectors of sentient life, so the original invaders were actually regular Joe Six-packs who got transmogrified into yeasty, fungoid entities .
The rescue team brought the survivors to the Colonies. Pretty soon the Colonies went to the Dark. We called the hostiles Pod People, Mushrooms, Hollow Men, The Fungus Among Us, etc, etc.. The enemy resembled us. This is because they were us in every fundamental aspect except for the minor details of being hollow as chocolate bunnies, breeding via slime attack and sporination, and that they were hand puppets for an alien intellect that in turn venerated The Old Ones who sloth and seep (and dream) between galaxies when the stars are right. Oh, and hollow and empty are more metaphorical than useful: burn a hole in a Pod Person with a laser and a thick, oily blackness spewed forth and made goo of any hapless organics in its path.
The Mushroom Man mission? To liquefy our insides and