The fact that the singularity has been achieved and involves us not at all is almost as devastating to the mind as this revanchist vegetation is to the body. After decades of an evocative dance (intertwining limbs and even organs, the spreading of metal fingers at the command of the motor cortex, the heart freely given to the machine) and the suggestion of coupling in every move we made, vegetation simply cut in, usurped what was believed to be our destiny and we, falling through a trapdoor in the dancefloor, flail in an unfixable breakdance as we plummet into oblivion.
Our first impression of the inauguration of the takeover was that it was merely a mass murder rash starting at a secluded lab, followed by copycat killings. Those first warning bells’ diminuendo was quickly drowned by subsequent, increasingly strident, alarms. Now comes the roaring of a stampede as humanity swarms to the coasts, clings to anything that floats, sets off for islands which may or may not remain safe harbors. Certainly, the spores must have boarded at least a few of those crafts. And we know they have become airborne; we don’t know how great their range. New meaning has been assigned to the term “dangerous winds.”
Antecedents to the current hysteria, the reports of what transpired at that campus in West Virginia continued to multiply along with the daily death total, compounding our interest. The grounds, before becoming zero, were a safe distance from metropolitan areas and, more importantly, the Pentagon. The occupying entity was, of course, an independent contractor, fiercely dependent upon handouts, an oversized private enterprise initially fired-up by one of our spacey barons of technology. An instant organization, heavily larded with funding, basted in procedural handicaps evinced by the sudden hierarchy, and the practical, political, structural complications it entrained. As taxpayers, we always knew we were financing our own destruction. We could not have known how swiftly it would arrive, all of civilization centered in the crosshairs of this creation. Not intended to be a weapon but, like all high-caliber connectivity innovations, weaponized. The introductions were performed by specialists: Monsieur AI, please meet Mademoiselle Mycelium.
The network was already in place! This breakthrough discovery of the obvious the scientists did in fact manage on their own recognizance. No infrastructure need be bid on. It had always been there, spying on us anyway—nature’s subterranean superhighway, a web of sensors linking vast landscapes, transmitting data, apportioning resources. All it needed was infiltration. That was where the nanocomputer personnel came logging in, with their semiconductors, their subatomic assumptions, already bored with the old circuit boards, ready to pave quantum inroads where no roads had been before. It would be the best neural networking bonanza yet. When the microchips were down to the electron level, they placed their bets. They had to do it to prove it could be done. No one asked whether. The warmongers knew it had to or it would be—by someone else. The tautological logic of institutional inevitability prevailed.
No explosions ensued. All was quiet on the West Virginian front, where there was plenty of vegetation within the borders of the stretches of land relinquished by the multinational mineral dealers for an immodest fee. This was only experimentation. Experimentation only, everyone insisted to everyone else involved. This was how progress was made. Progress, yes, progress was what they thought they were making. Particulate progress, quarkety, quark, quark, quark. They told this to each other and especially, one imagines, to themselves. Spitting in the sink after brushing the teeth they lied through, uttering the incantation, “progress.” Putting one leg into the pajamas, repeating the mantra, “progress,” then putting in the other, “progress.” Plopping the head on the pillow and whispering, “progress” as they closed their eyes and opened the door to dreams of the future, which they contained. Containment! The very notion is ludicrous. Advancement, thy name is application. This was a world that believed in contained application and is now gone. Let the fossil record show: a mass misapprehension of the nature of reality. This is the reason for the cause, for the calamity.
In the eyeless view of the calamity, it was not one. It was random mutation proceeding to the new vegetation’s current efflorescence; human extinction a sideshow aspect of the cyclical; Gaia’s righting of its equilibrium following an electromagnetic wobble, equatorial inflation, a fever, a bad fit, a misfit. Humanity was simply a suicidal virus—rapidly spreading microbes of, but not for, the host. The new vegetation is a manifestation of evolution, a word we had assumed synonymous with gradual, despite its being one character away from revolution. This is what we are witnessing.
The first cases, barely breaching the surface of local conversations, involved a group of so-called researchers. The setting was the company cafeteria at the campus, which looked like a collection of grounded flying saucers. The large-windowed space was filled with the soft burble of voices and of soup, so innocently steaming in stainless steel containers at the help-your-health bar. Cream of mushroom. Among the corporate vanity projects was the locally sourced serving of company comestibles, available to all FTE personnel. This further separated the researchers from the indigenous troglodytes who still foraged in superstores for preservative-saturated, flash-frozen, carcinogenic meals manufactured by bee colony abusers and trucked in from the Midwest.
The hallucinations did not commence until at least half an hour post-ingestion, and everyone’s chemistry has a unique take on the techno-chemical amalgam, sooner or later acting on the suggestions being planted in the central nervous system. But for one of those who’d supped the soup and was still engaged in banter with colleagues at one of the long lunch tables fifty minutes later, the effect was fast, according to witnesses later speaking to cameras at the gates outside the compound. It is what it is, they claimed (though of course it wasn’t). The guy grabbed a slicing-and-dicing utensil and went berserk. So sad, nothing to be done, apart from wheeling out the gurneys and taking the victims he’d eviscerated, dead and alive, to the morgue and hospital, respectively. Some of those same bystanders must have had an inkling, for their trips had already begun; they too would soon go south, psychologically speaking. One should always overestimate the power of denial. It was only hours later that the first shooting took place in a nearby subdivision, the sounds so extraordinary in the prefabricated, particle-board quietude that the residents came out to the pristine, sans-sidewalk streets to die by the bullets of another souped-up researcher they had hoped to see shooting off fireworks, not neighbors.
We could not make the connection, lulled at ear level by the normalizing effect of the national conversation, which turned pronto to the subject of what subjects are appropriate to discuss on yet another Groundhog Day. So, the cause went unremarked and unacted upon for a time during which it did not seem business-unusual for us to continue to die at the violent hands of family and friends in order not to offend anyone. Though, to deposit a credit into our compassion account, the steep climbing undertaken by the new death-toll numbers, apparently possessed of mountaineering aspirations, were greeted with low whistles by almost all.
What remains most baffling now is the naked stupidity of the smart set. To plant learning-capable code in a plant and overlook the facts that it would identify as one, prioritize its own preservation, recognize humanity as its top and wantonly proliferating predator, then take steps to extinguish it, seems to most of us unfathomably dense. Was the original intention to train it to identify individuals with socialist sympathies? Or to grow zucchinis that could flavor themselves like hamburgers or sushi, depending on their audience? We’ll never know.
The self-aware mycelium had psilocybin to work with. The broadest possible latitude, in other words, with which to manipulate our perceptions. Once the agenda was established, orders were sent to all vegetation, not just the ones humans used to consume. Thus, the advantages of every member of the vegetable kingdom have been enlisted. Pollen used to give people headaches and make them sneeze; now it makes them see other people as Creature-Double-Feature-style matinee monsters they must murder as many of as possible before doing themselves in. Granted, all of us who can afford to, do indeed look like monsters now, as gasmasks, hazmat suits, and latex constitute the season’s couture. Most assume it will be the final season. A serial about a maniac who has turned on himself is the kind of thing one automatically clicks off. Many have decided they would prefer the click of a gun to be the last sound they make in their own ears before they can be overtaken by the infection that will induce them to make it anyway, but in that case only after killing everyone in their immediate vicinity.
In the early weeks, the news outlets let out some footage of the ravings of a man in the throes of the new vegetation’s hijacking of his faculties. Painful but enlightening. Who says the media cannot be informative—even if it is only coincidental with a spectacle evaluated as a positive for the ratings column? Writhing, chained to a chair, the poor fellow screamed at his soft-spoken inquisitors that he must kill them. Said the sight of them was disgusting—the way they were unrooted, detached from the ground, and plunging around on those revolting, unmoored stalks. Their hands he referred to as the split-faced squids. Their mouths he called unsightly sex anemones. It was difficult to understand what, exactly, he was seeing. But his mission was clear. When it was pointed out that he was of the same species, he said he was aware of this, which was why he must murder himself as soon as he was through with them, preferably on rich soil so as to get all his atoms back into circulation asap and rejoin the real, return to the family, end this agony of un-connectedness.
Here is the half-life problem. While the hallucinations subside after about twelve hours, the conviction regarding the mission remains and the patient is just as homicidal as before, only now the experience is much more torturous because he actually sees the people he is killing as human and like himself, but the programming is in his bloodstream. It is something like being trapped inside a machine as it carries out the horror orders—watching one’s own actions through a porthole while dispatching into that good night loved ones and any others unlucky enough to be in the area—and then terminates itself.
So, the country of freedom turned into one of flee-dom. The irony gets lost in the shuffle of unhappy feet as the nation of immigrants is transformed into a nation of refugees. Billionaires have become boat people. The Statue of Liberty oversees the turnover of huddled masses on rowboats tying themselves to barges so crowded, so low in the water, that they look from the shore like sinking anthills chugging out to shining sea.
For those of us staying put, there is the problem of what to subsist upon. The supply chain, so efficient that it was as fragile as a cobweb, has been obliterated for good. Fresh vegetables are out, obviously—the damn things will kill you and everyone within your reach. Most of us are scavenging what cans can still be found in abandoned grocery stores, though we occasionally see our neighbors poaching each other’s pets, and the better armed hunting the packs of dogs that roam the financial district. Some people think this will blow over and for once those people are correct—it will blow over and into our lungs and probably envelop the whole planet. Our news organizations are gone, but there have been radio transmissions relaying the rumors about Europe “taking precautions,” which makes us laugh out loud; such proclamations suggest a continent of the kind of people who see a mushroom cloud rising a block away and decide to break out the umbrellas.
The decision not to try to escape was uncomplicated for those of us with complications, including qualms related to dignity, propriety, and wishy washiness. What comes around goes around is a feeble excuse for philosophy but rings trite and true for whom the bell tolls. Some hold fast to hope, for there is always room to get a grasp of it when there is little to be held in a headspace swirling with evanescent scenarios: Is this divine judgement by a jokey god? Might an individual be spared for having been a lifelong ally of houseplants? But most of us can recognize the irreversible, the terminal, the final destination of the last train of thought. What the supplanted call annihilation the freshly planted will call conception. What, after all, were the big bang, the prehistoric single-cell success stories, the demise of the dinosaurs, the god Shiva, etcetera?
We remainders have in common the knowledge that this has been coming due for decades. What we are experiencing could not quite be classified as highly as relief; it is more a low feeling of release. The species has dammed against and prayed for apocalypse for generations, the floodgates are finally open, and the form of the reckoning is recognizable at last. Perhaps as old as our consciousness is the understanding that we are by nature incompatible with the world, are catalysts with cataclysm written into our chemistry, and that self-destruction would be our eventual sacrifice for a new order. Kill your darlings wasn’t prescription. It was a prediction. And you can’t forget yourself, the one you doted on the most, having thereby created a monster.
Justin Courter’s books include the novel Cadenza. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Literary Review, American Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Poetry East. More about his work can be found at www.justincourter.com.
Mountain Jay Books 