Thirty One

Fyndraxis knew a bit about mushrooms. What people normally refer to when speaking on the subject, is the fruiting body. The fruiting body of a mushroom is the delightful little toadstool that peacefully occupies the forest floor, or the portabella caps that they find trapped behind cellophane in the produce section of their local supermarket. These familiar forms are merely what the mushroom presents to the world when it needs to go about the business of reproduction.
As we can all attest to, reproduction is an important thing that does take up a significant amount of time and effort, but in the grand scheme of things it really isn’t all that much. While we may think about the subject extensively, the actual act of reproduction takes up very little time at all. We spend the rest of our days going to work, or eating, or playing video games. Mostly, not the actual act of coitus.
So what do mushrooms do when they are not reproducing? For the most part they day trade in the sucrose market. You can see evidence of this by going outside, finding the ground, and digging up a clod of dirt. Holding this dirt together, you will probably see the pale roots of some plants. If you observe even more closely, you will see even paler, even finer structures that look a lot like roots. Unlike roots though, these are not attached to plants. This is the mushroom sitting at its desk shooting off a quick email or stapling something at its day job. What you are seeing is Mycelium. These are fine structures that snake their way through the soil connecting plants up in a giant network.
Once attached to the root of a plant, the Mycelium hooks directly into the circulatory system and starts trading sucrose and information. While this could be a strictly parasitic relationship, the Mycelium knows better than that. It could steal all the sucrose that it wants, draining the plant dry and moving on to the next. This is a short sighted business strategy.
What it does instead, is act as a middle man between plants that either have a surplus or a deficit of sucrose. This benefits all parties involved. The local plants don’t have to worry as much about soil chemistry or solar angle of incidence. They just let the mushrooms know if they need some sucrose, or if they have an abundance of it, and their needs are met. The mushroom, in payment for this valuable service, takes a little bit off the top in the form of a commission. They have been at this for over a billion years.
The prevailing scientific consensus states that evolution takes place without thought or direction. If we think of all life on earth collectively, it could be regarded as a single genome. Every species that uses DNA to pass traits to successive generations is in this club. That’s every single species on the planet. Hell, even viruses are in the club, and they aren’t actually alive, we think. Thus, every species is part of this greater genome. Therefore, every species is just a different genetic strategy to do one simple thing. Make more DNA.
The mushrooms, as was demonstrated by Fyndraxis’ interaction with Mycellus, were not satisfied with random chance being the captain of their genetic destiny. It seems that at some point, while mushrooms were quietly going about their business beneath the dirt, they had a moment of self realization. In this moment, they had become a global connected consciousness. A giant brain that connected just about every living thing on earth. Like any conscious being, it has a couple of things on its proverbial to do list. Namely, eat, reproduce, and out compete anything that tries to horn in on its territory.
Complete global domination was out of the question for the mushrooms. If everything on earth was a mushroom, they would not only be competing with themselves, but also doing all the work. They would have to turn sunshine into sugar, a job so boring that only plants and algae would do it. There would be no dead things to feed upon, except themselves. So, in a stroke of genius, the mushrooms settled on the strategy of being the middleman. Buy low and sell high and all that. They connected up the entire world and skimmed a little bit off the top. They invented free market capitalism about a billion years before John Locke’s species grew thumbs and decided to take over the world. Over a billion years or so, that little bit really adds up. This planet belongs to the mushrooms, we just live on it.