It Gets Worse If You Pick At It

by Laura DeHaan

The M-ROV rocked slightly to the incessant slapping of soggy palms, the whistling moans of former colleagues turned fungal creatures making the aluminum chassis of the vehicle vibrate. Sprawled in the driver’s swivel seat, Swaby let himself sway to the rhythm, too exhausted to fight the curious lullaby. He gripped his helmet and gave it a twist, unlocking it from his exosuit. He took it off and let it dangle from his gloved fingertips. Ploog, leaning against the exit hatch, did the same. A khaki-coloured haze hung in the air, the hot sweat of fear and exertion.

Ploog took in Swaby’s mien. “We’re going to make it,” she said.

Swaby forced his eyes open. “For how long?” he said, the usual harshness of his voice glazed to indifference. “The relief team’s dead. We don’t have food or water—” An alert pinged on the console and Swaby raised an eyebrow. “Or oxygen, in a few hours.” An unexpectedly coordinated strike made the M-ROV lurch and forced Swaby and Ploog to flail for balance, helmets clattering to the floor. Swaby swore explosively, and like an overstimulated toddler he retreated into voiceless shaking.

Ploog stooped by the exit and toed her fallen helmet. COMMANDER, it proclaimed childishly. Commander to fifteen artists from various fields, civilians, people who had trusted in the rote routine of Mars missions and had vied for the chance to experience four weeks of life on the planet, to become inspired by its landscape and produce beautiful works of art.

Trusting people, like shy Laudati, who worked his stammer into his poetry and was now hurling his mutated body against the front of the M-ROV, making it shudder like a wounded beast. Confident people, like Kohut, who mixed her oil paints with Mars dust and was still sentient when she ran into the relief ship’s drop zone and let herself be burned alive rather than let the fungus overtake her mind. Soloo, Krauka and Boddicker: literary giants, lovers, and rivals; now a collective spongiform mass in the mess hall. All the others whose brief orbits into Ploog’s life had been whittled down to insensate moans, the stench of rot and the squish of heads between boot and ground.

Outside, Laudati pressed his face, soft and ravaged, against the windscreen, leaving behind an ochre ooze. His remaining eye burst open, revealing brilliant orange stalks within. Swaby watched critically, as though comparing it to the special effects in his latest blockbuster movie. “Disgusting,” he murmured. “I would rather die than become a brainless mushroom.”

Ploog stopped her idle movements. “And if you weren’t brainless?” she said.

The very casualness of her question spiked the paranoia that had built up over the past twelve hours of chaos. Swaby jerked upright, hands grasping for a weapon, a shield, a miracle. After a panicky moment, his eyes became as empty as his hands. “Of course you were one of them,” he said dully. “Classic b-movie bullshit. I’ll bet you were the first one infected. Trying to fool us with your insistence on quarantine procedures. Well, you messed up. You’ll never conquer Earth, you fungal freak. We’re stuck here on your lousy planet, and this hellscape is all you’ll ever know.”

“I’m not interested in conquering Earth,” said Ploog. “Mars is my home.” She glanced at the oxygen gauge as its warning chimed again. “We have a little time. Would you like to know more?”

Swaby narrowed his eyes and at last thrust his chin out in assent, a hard-bitten producer to the end. “Talk to me.”

The bulky exosuit, unnecessary for Ploog’s survival, cocooned her in a sweaty embrace. She felt the tickle of her mycelium reacting to the humidity. “I came to Earth a long time ago. One of your previous research teams brought me back, though they didn’t know it. I was microscopic then. This,” she gestured to herself, “is the most recent and most successful incarnation of what I needed to be on Earth to bring me home.”

“You’ve already invaded Earth.” He had no energy to add bite to his words.

She shrugged. “I’m a passively invasive species to Earth, and humans are actively invading Mars. Would you like to argue semantics with me until you’re,” and she smirked, the first gesture of hostility he’d seen all month, “blue in the face, or shall I continue?”

“What more is there to say? You grew up big and smart and inveigled your way into a command position back to Mars with a bunch of hapless buffoons. Well done. You could have made it here without us. You could have joined any other routine mission and ‘wandered off,’ and I’m sure someone on Earth would have been momentarily sad for you, but instead you killed us—”

“Do you think I was a killer mushroom before humans arrived? What, do tell, was there for me to kill here? Rocks?”

Swaby bared his teeth. “So, you were mad at humans, so your species evolved into something that could kill humans when we came back, and you chose poets and painters because we’re easy prey!”

Ploog’s expression was impossible to read. A tremor flickered under her left eye. “Could you focus on my narrative for a moment, rather than yours?”

The audacity of the request made him snort, but his verbal ammunition was spent, and he gestured at her to continue.

“I did not ‘evolve to kill humans,’” she said, the heavy gloves clumsily forming air quotes. “While I was growing on Earth, a blight infected me on Mars—”

Swaby blew a wet raspberry. “You were growing on Earth, but you were infected on Mars,” he scoffed.

The inside of her exosuit grew warmer as she fought to contain herself. “Corporeality doesn’t define me. One unit of humanity is a human. One unit of me is me.”

Nerves already stretched to breaking, Swaby felt a brief ecclesiastical moment of terror. Like a kraken rising from the depths of murky memory, a Bible verse intoned: whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers, you did to me.

“Are you God?” he said, devoutly.

Ploog sighed. “No. Try to keep up.

“Some piece of trash your researchers left behind created an illness. The infected parts of me would break away and die. For a while I’d hoped that you people would bring a cure, but even if you had, I didn’t have any way to access it. On Mars I’m a network, not a biped with thumbs. This incarnation was purpose-grown for Earth. I tried so many times to get on the roster for a mission, but getting to Mars is….” She trailed off, and this, now, was an expression Swaby did understand.

After the funeral, hiding in the bathroom with the faucet running. The fire marshal assured him it had been an accident, as though the loss would be easier to bear viewed in the vein of a poorly timed joke, as though it was just a minor inconvenience that he could never go home again.

But part of her WAS home, Swaby argued.

And countered: While it burned.

He waved her story on, trying to look unmoved.

A light began to blink on the dashboard, flickering urgently. Swaby unlocked one of his gloves and laid it on top of the distraction.

She knew she had his attention, and she fought to keep her gills from unfurling. “When I made it to the habitat, I had access to the samples and labwork that had been left here by the previous missions, and I eventually figured out what had to be done.” She paused, weighing her words. “What happened to the others wasn’t my doing. The blight spreads through me, but it’s not of me. The infection is the same, it just affects us differently.”

“It was Laudati who infected us, wasn’t it,” said Swaby. “When he insisted on going on that damn moonlit walk. Fucking poets.”

“No. It was Soloo and Wong.”

“Soloo and Wong! She couldn’t keep her damn nose out of—” Swaby clenched his jaw. “How’d you know? Mushroom powers?”

Ploog felt every footfall of every human who ever stumbled across the broad back of Mars. Every turn of the tread of the M-ROV, every tool that slipped from a hand onto the quietly living soil. On its own, the sickness spread slowly. With the addition of the transmogrified artists, mobile vectors spewing their diseased spores, every second of the past twelve hours had sent a minute shockwave through the network of her self, each shockwave rippling into a still emptiness whose borders she couldn’t define. How long does it take to dig half a hole?

“Yes,” said Ploog. “Mushroom powers.”

After the hours spent in accusations and finger-pointing, there was a grim satisfaction in knowing who to blame. “You could have said something,” Swaby sniveled.

The contents of her abdomen shifted. “I did say something. Multiple times. You all shouted about how you were civilians and not under military jurisdiction and about the oppression of independent thinkers throughout history.”

More lights flashed. At least three alarms were going off, cascading into each other. He drew a breath and felt a flap of mucous quivering in his right nostril, the waning air drying the tube of his throat, aware, so aware that soon enough those tiny blips of personhood would still. “You figured out what needed to be done,” he said. “So, what is it?”

“I need you alive.”

A soft-spoken recording that murmured warning in seven languages joined the growing cacophony. Swaby laughed. “Good fucking luck.”

“I don’t need you human, I need you alive. Uninfected. As a growing medium. If I alter your physiology, you can survive on Mars. Changed, yes, as a Petri dish, yes, but you. Can. Survive.”

“How does a fungus even grow on Mars—”

Ploog lunged at him then, one sudden violent second before she threw herself back to collapse against the hull. A ragged scream of frustration burped from her chest. “You’re still trying to categorize me by Earth standards,” she raged. “Even now, after watching your colleagues turn inside out without spilling blood, seeing buboes sprout and burst in the space of minutes, even now when I am screaming I AM AN ALIEN—” She tore at the locks on her gloves and threw them off, unlatched the chest piece and peeled it back. Wavering white filaments pushed out from her skin and distorted the outline of her torso. “And you think ‘fungus’ is accurate.” She stepped out of the lower half of the exosuit, her legs sliding smoothly, bonelessly from the assembly, the stems expanding in diameter once freed from their synthetic prison. “I wish you could have fallen in love with Mars,” she whispered out of the gills that frilled her face. “When I saw what you all were creating, I thought maybe some of you had. The sketches, the paintings, the music—I wish I could read music! I wish you could have seen what I saw, when I saw you see Mars.”

She loomed over him now, a mass of caps and gills. Swaby couldn’t remember falling to his knees. The bright, colorless sky flamed through the M-ROV’s smeary windscreen, setting Ploog’s nooks and crannies ablaze. She wasn’t God, but she was magnificent.

“How,” croaked Swaby, “how would you change me?”

There was a tickle in his throat when he spoke. He coughed. It persisted. He coughed harder, his neck muscles bunching, diaphragm spasming with the effort of dislodging the sly little tickle that teased and tormented and finally exploded into a shower of teeth. Not cubes of enamel, but the shaggy speared teeth of a mushroom.

“I would do it as soon as we were safely inside the M-ROV,” Ploog said gently, as another cloud of spores puffed softly from her pores.