Sixty Three

The cannibals had made their camp in the northern part of the valley, pretty much as far away as possible from the G village. This provided Bird and Fyndraxis with a long walk home to mull over the dark business that they had just transacted. Nature provided the perfect backdrop for this. The night was crisp and clouds dappled the sky. Though the air was calm in the valley, an upper level wind moved these dappled clouds in a great conveyor. This vast migration could be heard as the skeletal trees on the mountaintops complained of its passing. A shaving of the moon hung in the sky playing a game of peek-a-boo with anyone that cared to join in.
The valley was quite wide where they were. Years of summer floods had flattened it into an alluvial plane. The silt that they trod upon had begun life as the mountaintops that they could see in the distance. Eons of erosion and applied geophysics had transformed it from mighty boulders, into the fine rock flour that would remember their passing. Millions of years from now, when this silt had turned to sandstone it would bear a set of footprints and a curious trench to its left. Future archaeologists would be scratching their heads about a woman and her enormous pet ball.
Calculations would be made as to the size and weight of this anomaly. Pet theories and conjecture would be put forth to explain it. But the question would remain, where did this anomaly come from? Where this fossil was being laid down, all evidence of high technology was below it. The silt that was laid down every flood season told a story in layers, like the pages of a book. The deeper you dug, the further back in time you would be looking. Looking two hundred and fifty years into the past there was evidence of advanced technology. There were car parts, lost watches, old shopping bags, and general clues to daily life.
At some point in the fossil strata, this evidence of high technology had ceased to be. What is left after an event like that is called a boundary layer. When the dinosaurs got blasted out of existence, evidence of the disaster was recorded in the fossil strata. There is a fine layer of iridium and ash inside our planet. If you are familiar with the popular candy called the Jaw Breaker you will recall that it is made up of discrete layers of candy. Our planet is like a giant Jaw Breaker with an almost unimaginable amount of discreet candy boundary layers. These layers are laid down by normal everyday geological processes like flooding, space dust, volcanos, tectonic shenanigans and meteors. Each layer has a story to tell.
This shell of iridium is called the KT boundary. Inside this boundary layer you can find all sorts of dinosaurs. Outside of it, there are exactly zero dinosaurs because they all died from meteor poisoning. We know this because on Earth iridium is very rare, but in meteors it is quite common.
In the anthropocene (the age of humans), there is a clear boundary layer as well. There is a hard candy shell of microplastics. Inside this shell there is evidence of humans doing all sorts of human stuff. Outside of this shell there is a gap of about two hundred and fifty years, and then ample evidence of high strangeness.
Bird came to a halt and closed her eyes for a second.
“Uh oh,” she said, “Mycellus is coming for a face to face, and he doesn’t seem very happy.”
The silt in front of them began to issue forth fine mycelial hairs. These coalesced into arms, legs, and eventually a body. When the face was crafted, it appeared to have the frown of a man who had been roused from a restful sleep to find somebody taking a shit in his living room.
“Is this the sort of thing that you do with the ample leeway and discretion that I allow you to have?” He asked the pair. As he awaited an answer, Bird looked over to Fyndraxis in hopes of exchanging a knowing look, but being a sphere he was unable to do so.
“I needed materials,” Fyndraxis stated plainly into the black eyes that were currently expressing a rage that was the result of about a billion years of practice.
“Those materials,” Mycellus threw some air quotes up, “are the issue here. Ethical issues aside, you seem to be operating outside of your chemical reservation.”
“I don’t follow,” Fyndraxis had the distinct feeling that he had accidentally done something clever.
“The carbon, calcium, and other trace elements that you have commandeered are by all rights mine,” Mycellus was yelling. This was not a normal human yell, but something that shook the very atoms that they were made of, “the Wendigo are bad enough, but at least they have the courtesy to consume something that isn’t actively in the carbon cycle. What they eat is carbon that had been sequestered eons ago, things that slipped through the cracks. What you have done is gone right to the cookie jar and taken a great big handful of something that is mine by rights. The amount you took is not the issue, it is the precedent that you have set this evening that I cannot abide. Every living thing on this Earth is lent the use of these elements on terms dictated by me. I am already expending resources on your endeavor at great cost to myself and the only return that I’ve seen is betrayal”
“Whoa, whoa,” this was some classic capitulation from Fyndraxis, a bear had been poked and he had to run some damage control, “I think betrayal wasn’t really what we were going for here.”
“Frequently, idiots wandering around in the dark end up going places they don’t intend to,” Mycellus had stopped yelling, or whatever that cosmic horror had been, and had moved on to just plain old pissed off.
“Alright, I get it,” more capitulation, with some placation for good measure, “I’ll stick to Wendigo for my carbon needs.”
An idea struck Fyndraxis. Mycellus was disproportionately pissed about him taking a few kilos of carbon. He was witnessing a hissy fit. Mycellus was pissed about something else and when he saw what Fyndraxis and Bird were doing, he lost his shit.
Fyndraxis had been a human in his twenties for about ten years a really long time ago. In his experience people in that decade of life tended to go around and treat each other like garbage. They do dumb stuff and learn hard lessons because they just don’t know any better yet. As a result of this, he had been in relationships where the resentment and enmity was so thick and rich you could frost a cake with it.
The main symptom of a passive aggressive relationship like this was something that he liked to call the nothing fight. This is a fight that happens when somebody forgets to do the dishes, or neglects to call and say that they are going to be late for something.
What ensues is a knock down drag out shit fight that is disproportionate to the perceived injustice. Simmering resentment built up over years suddenly spills over the dam that has been holding it back. Fyndraxis got very good at spotting these sorts of fights and had a strategy to handle them in an almost reasonable way. You drill down to what the fight is actually about. That way, you can have one big fight over something real instead of a bunch of small ones over something that never really gets resolved.
“You can’t decrypt the Wendigo traffic can you?” Fyndraxis asked, this was a bold strategy, and could result in an unpredictable outcome. Mycellus’ eyes narrowed and he was quiet for about fifteen seconds.
“The task has proven to be quite daunting,” he had deflated a little bit and seemed to become more reasonable.
“Observe,” Mycellus said, and gestured behind him down the valley.
The valley itself lit up. The pale green glow that Mycellus usually affected was all of a sudden coming from every piece of land that they could observe. He had lit up his entire mycelial network as a kind of demonstration.
“What you see before you is a grand computer with a vast amount of computational power. This is my body. In this valley alone, I have the ability to process the equivalent amount of information that any pre-collapse desktop computer could. I have a world wide network of these. The processing power is many orders of magnitude greater than any supercomputer ever built by humans. And yet the solution to this evades me at every turn. I find myself confounded”
“Maybe we are going about this the wrong way?” The Daemon sword suggested, “you could be working on this problem for the rest of eternity and the Wendigo will still be able to go about their business. You might never figure it out. I propose a more dynamic strategy.”
“I’m listening,” Mycellus raised a single pale eyebrow.
“Do you remember how Google dominated the search engine game in the early two thousands?” Fyndraxis began his pitch.
“Yes, I am familiar,” said Mycellus, interested in where this might go.
“They were able to do this because they had a killer app,” Fyndraxis explained, “they had an innovative search algorithm that completely changed the way that we used the internet. What they could have done is put that technology behind a paywall and try to make money like Lexisnexis did, but they didn’t. They gave it out for free. People hate paying for shit, and the founders of Google knew this. They turned people into their product. Under the guise of free simple reliable internet searching, they not only placed ads in front of our eyes, but they also gathered information about the users and sold that too. We should just copy that business model.”
“I don’t see where you are going with this,” Mycellus confessed.
“We give my hunters to the humans,” this was another bold strategy, but the last one had kind of worked and Fyndraxis was feeling lucky.
“Are you insane?” Another bone shattering yell issued forth, this time from the entire valley, “I just saw what you can do with a small group of hunters. If you gave that sort of power to humans, they would destroy this planet and me along with it.”
“There would be rules. Things that hunters wouldn’t be allowed to do. They could only eat Wendigo. If we gave the hunters to the humans it would give them freedom to roam the earth and take out the Wendigo for us. It’s a win-win scenario. We make hunters a part of everyday life for them and as they repopulate the earth they take out the Wendigo in the process. It’s simple crowdsourcing. We use the Wendigo to fight themselves,” Fyndraxis reasoned.
“What kind of rules? we would have to be extremely careful about that,” said Mycellus, warily, and luckily not yelling this time.
“Yeah, we’ll have to sit down and work it out. I have some ideas, but I’m sure you probably have some caveats that I haven’t thought of,” Fyndraxis continued, his pitch may have just been coming in for a nice three point landing.
“Undoubtedly. Fifteen percent,” Mycellus said offhandedly.
“Fifteen percent?” Fyndraxis asked, puzzled.
“Yes. Cut me in for fifteen percent,” Mycellus saw a deal, “for every hundred Wendigo that you turn to Hunters, fifteen of them will be converted to their base elements and returned to me. I need to make this worth my while,” Mycellus may just as well have had a contract out to sign.
“Ten,” Fyndraxis offered reflexively.
“This isn’t really a negotiation, Fyndraxis. This would be an incredible risk for me. I will need a demonstration of this technology and all rules of its use are to be approved by me. Fifteen,” Mycellus said resolutely.
“Fine. I would like you to be involved in the drafting of the rules,” Fyndraxis requested.
“Liberty will speak for me in these matters, our interests are one and she will be arbiter in this endeavor. I will see through her eyes and know her mind. She will also know mine,” Mycellus had finished his negotiation.
Mycellus took Bird’s hand and she closed her eyes. His pale body turned to dust and drifted away in the light breeze of the evening. Bird’s knees gave out and she collapsed to the ground. Gossamer thin mycelial hairs grew from her skin and snaked toward the ground. She began to glow with a pale green light as mycelia grew from the ground and met the ones that she had produced.
The valley lit back up and seemed to pulse in lockstep with Bird’s heartbeat. She arched her back and turned her face toward the stars. When she opened her eyes they were jet black, and Fyndraxis could see the reflection of the stars and clouds in them. He watched the reflected clouds moving in their great conveyor and waited for Bird to breathe. When she did, it was the great gasp in of somebody coming up for air after diving far too deep.