2025 Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Gerry crosses the weather deck and winds his way down the stairs to the main deck and his cabin, ready to resume the mediatronic hackathon. He muses about Christina along the way. Thinking of her seems to heighten his intuition, somehow.

He heard she likes to collect gaudy and highly impractical clothing in town, along with pragmatic tradeables like canned food and ammo. Her preference for night scavenging was a bit shocking at first, but she had told other crew members she came from the stars, and was most effective under them. That explanation seemed to satisfy.

Christina had taken up residence on the big boat only a few weeks ago, and Gerry has been creeping on her ever since. He doesn't quite know what he sees in her, not exactly his type physically and they have never even spoken.

As the ship's acting engineer, Gerry had been consulted about Christina's joining the crew of the Big Boat. He had been too busy with his research to participate in her onboarding interview via packet shortwave, but her social profile seemed solid and the other execs on the Big Boat were mildly enthused. They said she demonstrated unique survival strategies. Supposedly she had grown up around Jedis from the 3rd Earth Battalion, the mythic reboot of sparkly eyed psychic soldiers from the 1980s. He had long ago perused 3EB.us, the Battalion's trippy recruitment presence on the internets. . Were the grainy battle videos authentic, had the whistleblowers, (since terminated under mysterious circumstances), been on the level? Or was the elaborate and convoluted history just another op? A weaponized narrative to cow the gullible into fear and/or euphoria. Then again, UFOs turned out to be a thing, so who knew?

Gerry had slept through Christina's orientation, having crashed hard after pulling a double all nighter with the boxes. Boat people mostly kept to themselves anyway, he had rationalized.

His first glimpse of her was from high up on the weather deck. He had come up in the predawn with a flickery tallow candle to jury rig a wonky relay dish cable that was queering his telemetry of Sirius B. At first light, Christina had come lolloping back to the big boat. She was wearing a skimpy costume of polished leather and drifting lace in the morning chill and Gerry had wondered where or how she secreted her booty from the evening's foray into town. Despite her pounding, clockwork stride and inscrutable expression, she appeared utterly vulnerable. Perhaps the local marauders tagged her as she crazy or witchy and gave her a wide birth. Maybe she actually was.

From that day forward, Gerry only missed dawn on the weather deck if he was deep into or recovering from research.

He was weirdly compelled and attracted by her but at the same time, reluctant to approach or even meet her. Awkwardness was not really an issue for Gerry, so the singular manifestation of this crush was not only mystifying but mildly alarming. Was his intuition giving him a warning? Was she a honey pot? An agent from an enemy they didn't even know they had? Was he a willing moth to her mankiller flame? He watched, waited for clarity... and yearned.

He was also annoyed with himself or her. There was important work to do, this strange attraction to the kooky woman seemed to heighten his hungers across the spectrum. He was definitely onto something with the boxes and the mycelium, he could taste it. Which species next, what tweak to the protocols? The relief boxes were certainly not what they seemed, such grandiose infrastructure just to display ads for defunct consumer products. Yeah... no.

The breakthrough had come a few or two months back. During one of his foraging hikes to the big box electronics megaplex, he stumbled onto a cluster of relief boxes in the forest. The mediatronics on one box were displaying not ads but fractal static. The laminated hemp board surface of that box had been abraded by the back and forth of a tree branch swaying in the wind, and the exposed hemp board had absorbed rain and been colonized with mycelium. He had been trying to hack into the box communications network for half a year using mystic machines, code spells and such like with zero progress. He had never seen a mediatronic malfunction so spectacularly and remain active. Significant damage to the boxes usually resulted in total shutdown of all mediatronic activity. After some analysis in the field, Gerry brought that box back to the Big Boat. This eventually led to the discovery that the box network was modeled after the ubiquitous mycelial network, 'our global super duper computer' as coined by Psi Stamets. No wonder all his genius exploits tanked.

Did Christina fit into the box puzzle somehow? Again, he wondered whether such thoughts were useful or potentially fatal. He felt seriously out of balance and irrationally happy. Fuck it.