Ash and Dust

I woke up to a world of ash and dust.

I remember that the first thing I tasted was soil; my first breaths were ones of smog and tickling spores; the air was thick with petrichor; and I could feel every photoreceptor in my body tingling.

I awoke in a world where I was alone.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The first weeks of my life are but a blur in my mind, but I remember one day feeling my body begin to wilt as the nutrients in the soil around me began to deplete. The spindly roots that bound me to the soil beneath my lying body were stretching and struggling in vain to find sustenance for me, and I felt my energy fleeting.

Then I began to feel them. The pulses, coming from all around me. The neighbourhood of plants all around me were communicating with me through chemical secretions from their roots into mine, intertwining me into their complex network. They told me to move, to leave this smog-filled cavern in which I lay, for it was outside that I would find what I needed. Without any other option, I obeyed, and detached my roots from the ground so that I could move from the spot on which I had been born.

Suddenly, a million different senses assaulted me at once, cacophonies of chatters and sloshes and buzzes and crunches and brilliant, sharp light. Stumbling back, it took me a few days to gather the courage to venture outside again. 

The air was clearer. There was an interminable sky above me, and it was a lighter grey than the cave’s ceiling had been. 

And all around me was an urban wasteland.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but later in retrospect I came to know these plains of half-collapsed concrete skeletons peppered with glinting glass shards as the remains of a human civilization.

The sun on my leaves for the first time invigorated me, and the brightening and stiffening of my stems and petals brought me great wonder. 

I explored this strange landscape, vitality once more restored to my body, and found that it was interminable and isolated. 

I spent many years wandering these plains, my curiosity leading me on, pouncing on anything that sparked my interest; whenever I felt myself tire, I would extend my roots to the nearest underground plant network and read their chemical signals, learning where to find nutrient-rich soil and a supply of refreshing water. 

During these years, I found places. Demolished homes, collapsed offices, petrol stations. But most memorable is the place where I first found out about humans. 

It was the remains of a classroom, shattered wooden desks and a blackboard and video tapes and books. I became fascinated with the videotape and the machine that seemed to correspond with them, and after days of attentive experimentation, something clicked, and the screen on the strange machine blinked to life.

I watched.

I watched it again.

I don’t know how many times I watched it, but even today I can recall every single sound. I didn’t understand the sounds coming from it, didn’t know that it was a language. But I understood the pictures. The subject of every shot was a thing that I’d never seen before. 

A human, the tape called it. I repeated that string of syllables - ‘hyu - mann’, over and over for many days.

I became obsessed with these ‘hyu-mann’s.

There were many other tapes, including ones that taught reading and speaking this ‘hyu-mann’ language. There were books too, which I pounced upon as soon as I learned to read. 

I read and read and read. 

The knowledge overwhelmed me. I learnt of human history, their chaos and wars and carnage and pain and despair and disease and hatred and fear. 

Humans began to scare me. 

My waking mind feared these humans. According to the books, they had ruined the world’s climate for their own short-sighted greed, and many strange but beautiful creatures such as the ‘bear’ and ‘bird’ had died because of this, never to walk this Earth again. This made my heart ache, and I wept for many days. 

The books also read that, when the natural world was on the very brink of extinction, its saving grace descended from the heavens.

An asteroid crashed down to Earth, and turned humans’ unnatural order on its head. 

For this asteroid contained an alien superfungus, which, upon detecting the demise of the planet, stepped in to save it.

The superfungus fused to the plant life of planet Earth, spreading its neurons into the underground network of roots. After this, every plant on the planet began to grow at an exponential rate.

Nature had fought back.

Within days, human development had been brought to its knees. But the exponential growth did not cease - no, the plants conquered every soil until there was not enough room for any animal to exist. Neither human crops - the superfungus DNA was intermingled with every flora, and any human who consumed such plants suffered painful deaths as their bodies rejected the alien material.

Humanity began to starve.

The book mentioned a case of the super-fungus merging with human DNA, but finished abruptly after that. I deduced that this was what I was - a superfungus merged with human - that was the only explanation of my being able to survive in this new world inhabitable for animal life. Then I realised that the humans must have died out. This too created a lump in my throat, and when I tried to cough it out, it came with tears. 

Because even though I shook at the thought of humanity’s unrelenting greed, their wilful ignorance, their endless perpetuation of suffering, I felt sorry for them. 

They were stupid, fumbling animals, cursed with intellect and searching blindly for meaning in a meaningless world, whilst destroying that very world in the process. It was very, very sad. 

But there was one thing that humans had had that I wanted. One thing that they had recorded in their books that made my stems stiff with envy. 

On the cover of one of the books was an image of two humans, holding hands. 

Companionship, the title read. 

Humans had other humans that they kept close - ‘friends’ - and ones that they kept even closer - ‘family’. These seemed to be their only true respite from their misery and fighting and dissatisfaction. 

After many rereads of this book, I decided that I wanted a friend. Perhaps I could even be lucky enough to find a family.

Was I the only one of my kind? Were there other human-superfungi surviving somewhere, and would they agree to be my ‘friends’ or ‘family’?

I set off once more to find these answers that my soul craved. 

I believe that the humans had something special. Something better than the shiny rocks and scraps of cloth and ‘phones’ that they esteemed so fervently. 

They had community.

And if there’s one out there waiting for me, I am determined to find it.