by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
Ensign Mike knew something about themself that no one else aboard the Wanderlust knew. It wasn’t that the other officers couldn’t have known — the information was right there, stored in the Wanderlust’s computer banks. That’s why Ensign Mike knew. But it was such an arcane fact, totally irrelevant to the mushroom’s day to day life, totally irrelevant to who they were… Mike hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. Mike didn’t even think about it.
But Mike did know it.
It was just a fact. A small, irrelevant fact. Lost in the sloshy sea of all the other facts that Mike knew.
Mike knew a lot of facts.
But suddenly, it seemed like a very, very, very important fact, and Mike kind of wanted to keep it secret.
Mike wanted to forget the fact and never, ever, ever think about it again. Mike wanted to expunge it from the Wanderlust’s computer banks.
But did Mike really want to keep this small, unimportant, totally irrelevant fact secret as much as they wanted to save Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s life?
Mike had to think about that for a moment. Because this minuscule, ridiculously random fact had suddenly taken on a lot of potentially heavy emotional weight.
Like the kind of weight that carries the burden of having participated in committing genocide. Potentially.
Or maybe… maybe it was nothing.
Mike wasn’t sure. But Mike was sure, looking at Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, that they loved the rabbit too much to risk making the wrong choice. So, Mike had to share the fact that they wanted to hide.
“The mycelial flesh used for supplementing and upgrading Tri-Galactic Union computer banks is grown and cultivated in a processing factory on Mars,” Mike said, their voice hammering forward relentlessly like a heavy rain that won’t stop no matter how much you want it to, no matter how soaked you are down to the very bone. “But it’s not originally native to the Solar System. In fact, it’s not native to the Milky Way galaxy at all. The very first, original cell samples were found frozen in a comet…” This is where Mike stumbled, their voice stuttering like rain breaking as a strong wind hits it. “…the comet was traveling from the direction of the Tetra Galaxy.”
No one spoke for a long time, or at least, it felt that way to Mike.
The toadstool had so much knowledge in their mind about how people acted and behaved — memories of books, movies, television shows, memoirs, actual historical correspondence between real people, academic articles about psychology. So much data. So much information. But when it came down to it, Mike had only live about a year as an actual person, and the toadstool had found that all that data could only prepare you so well for real life interactions.
Besides, none of that data was about Sidiians or society in the Tetra Galaxy. Mike had known next to nothing about the Hyphaic before these last several few overwhelming hours. Which had been filled with more data.
But data isn’t the same as wisdom, and right now, Mike was feeling their lack of wisdom like an ache that filled their body.
Would Dr. Eol blame Mike for the Hyphaic? Would she call the other members of her ship’s crew and have security officers come to arrest Mike and throw them into some sort of jail cell?
What would a zero gee jail cell be like?
Would Vossie blame Mike?
If Vossie did blame Mike, would he also forgive them?
“Are you saying…” The rabbit sounded very uncertain of the words he was saying. “Are you suggesting…”
“I think I’m the same species as the Hyphaic,” Mike said.
“That’s absurd!” Vossie exclaimed. “Why would you even say something like that? Just because you’re from the same branch of the taxonomic tree of life and from the same basic direction as the Tetra Galaxy? That’s a huge leap! That’s a massive, completely unfounded assumption!”
The strain of the situation was clearly getting to the rabbit. He couldn’t retain his composure in the face of so many stressors any longer and looked like he wanted to grab ahold of someone and start kicking them with his long back feet.
Mike wanted to calm Vossie down. But Mike also wanted to save Vossie’s life, and that meant the toadstool couldn’t walk this back. Because Mike was pretty sure that they were the only one with any chance of saving Vossie, and that involved looking unflinchingly at the truth.
Maybe Mike should have waited to have this conversation back aboard the Wanderlust, where Dr. Eol wouldn’t have been involved. Mike still didn’t know how she was going to react — so far, it had been with stony stillness, simply observing the conflict between the sick rabbit and the mushroom who was a walking, talking incarnation of a plague that had wiped out planets’ worth of her people.
But Mike had wanted her to hear, because she was the expert. Dr. Eol probably knew more about what Mike was — or so the toadstool was beginning to think — than they did about themself.
“Can we test my hypothesis?” Mike asked, somehow feeling protected by the clinical, scientific language. None of this was about Mike as a person — it was just about cells and DNA. Had Mike’s DNA originated from the Tetra Galaxy? Were Mike’s cells the same as what was infecting Vossie? If so, what could that teach them about Vossie’s infection and how to stop and hopefully reverse it?
The gecko blinked at being suddenly drawn from observer back into participant, but then she nodded brusquely. “Yes, if you’ll allow me to take a sample of your cells, then I can compare your DNA to the records we have of the Hyphaic’s DNA.”
Mike found it profoundly comforting that Dr. Eol was still asking for their consent. The mushroom wouldn’t have been all that surprised if instead she’d simply started treating them like a medical curiosity instead of a person.
It was stressful for Mike not knowing how much of a person they really were — how much that designation was permanent and immutable versus a whimsical kindness that could be withdrawn at any second.
“Yes, of course,” Mike said. “I want to do anything I can to help.” As the mushroom said those words, they realized just how far that might go… What if creating a cure for the Hyphaic required chopping Mike up, analyzing every last piece of their mycelial body? Did Mike really mean that they’d give themself up completely willingly? To save Vossie and countless residents of the Tetra Galaxy?
Mike supposed that would be the only right thing to do, if it came to it, but that didn’t mean the mushroom wanted to cooperate with facilitating their own death. Mike had only lived a year so far, and there was clearly so much more living to do. The toadstool hadn’t even had their childhood yet — whatever Ensign Melbourne and Korvax were planning, it was still in the future. Something to look forward to — after all of this. Because Mike had to believe there would still be an after.
Dr. Eol took a minuscule cutting from the end of one of Ensign Mike’s bushy mycelial beard hairs. It didn’t hurt the mushroom at all. She inserted it into a device that rapidly began displaying information on a screen in Sidiian; Mike’s uni-meter translated it into sequences of A, T, G, and C. Their DNA.
Once the device finished sequencing Mike’s DNA, Dr. Eol ran a comparison with all the sample sequences of DNA they had for the Hyphaic in their ship’s computers.
“There’s a certain amount of drift…” Dr. Eol said distractedly, still looking over the data. “But, yes, you are basically a match.”
The gecko looked up from the screen she’d been examining and stared at Mike in a way that the mushroom didn’t know how to interpret. Wonder? Horror? Pity? Hatred? Mike simply didn’t know enough about Sidiians in general or this doctor in particular to read her scaly, spade-shaped face.
It had to be shocking for her — to find herself looking at a version of her people’s plague that she could talk to. Had been talking to. Treating with them like they were a colleague.
Mike wanted to be a colleague. So, forcing themself to pull themself back together and move forward, Mike said haltingly, “Right, well, I… I wondered, because… I feel this sense of closeness to Vossie?” Mike didn’t want to be saying any of this, revealing anything so personal, but also, what if it was important information? “And it… it feels like more than a normal thing. Almost like something inside him… something different about him… something that changed since he started getting sick… is calling out to me? I thought we were just getting along better at first… but… now… I think it’s some sort of pheromonal kinships sense or something? I don’t know. I don’t know if it helps to know that. But also, when I tasted his cells–”
“Tasted his cells?” Dr. Eol interrupted to query.
“Right, yes, I guess I need to explain that,” Mike fumbled. This was hard. “Vossie had some sort of seizure when he first turned the neural implant on, and I can kind of, um, let my mycelial threads… um…” This was going to sound bad, no matter how Mike said it. “…infiltrate other people’s bodies, and I’ve only done it when I was trying to save their lives… and I didn’t know if Vossie was dying… but I tasted something that the neural implant was doing to him… something that tasted blue and metallic and really, really appealing, and Lt. Lee said it might be a subspace pulse? I don’t know what that is… but… is that… helpful? Can you do anything with that information?”
“The subspace pulse…” Dr. Eol repeated. “You like the… taste of the subspace pulse?”
Mike simply nodded their mushroom cap head. It was too embarrassing to say anything more. It’s weird to talk about having senses that no one else has and doing things that other people’s bodies can’t do.
The gecko doctor began typing things into her computer console and data flashed across the screen too fast for Mike to get translations of it with the uni-meter. Eventually, Dr. Eol stopped and looked up. “Yes,” she hissed, “that matches perfectly — this model of neural implant was the only one to use coral infusions in its bio-integration matrix. So it’s the only one that causes those subspace pulses — they’re supposed to be calming for the implant-user, but the coral cells broke down too quickly, meaning the implants required too much maintenance, so every other model uses synthetic alternatives that don’t emit that subspace pulse.”
“Coral…?” Mike asked. But as soon as the gecko doctor had said the word ‘coral,’ the toadstool had known — how had they missed it before? — the closeness Mike felt to Vossie ever since he’d started using the hand-me-down neural implant had felt exactly like the calm, comfortable, home-like sensation the mushroom had felt while floating in the coral garden on Spindle Reef.
Was that just because of the tasty metallic-blue subspace pulses? Or was it a reaction to the nearby presence of more mycelial cells like Mike’s own?
Mike told Dr. Eol about the coral garden on Spindle Reef and their reaction to it. After a little more research, the gecko doctor announced, “There is a significant correlation between planets with high populations of coral outcroppings and outbreaks of the Hyphaic.”
“What about Spindle Reef?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie asked.
Dr. Eol typed a few more things into her computer and then said in a soft, sad hiss, “The coral garden was a fairly new installation there… installed only a few years ago. Whereas most planets where they grow, they’ve been growing for hundreds or thousands of years. But also… there’s been a major outbreak of the Hyphaic on Spindle Reef just this month. The entire station has been deemed lost.”
Mike could hardly believe it, and disbelief showed plainly on Vossie’s rabbit-like face as well.
“I wonder how long it would have taken to discover this connection between coral populations and outbreaks of the Hyphaic if you hadn’t happened to visit that garden,” Dr. Eol said. Her forked tongue flicked rapidly. The gecko looked deeply troubled.
These were troubling topics. Even so, Mike was relieved that Dr. Eol seemed to still be viewing them as a helpful assistant. The mushroom dreaded the idea that they might flip in her mind into merely a helpful repository of Hyphaic-like cells to analyze. Or worse — a representative of a species that had been murdering her people.
But was the Hyphaic sentient like Mike? Did it have a sense of personhood or any goals? Or was it just mindless cells, more like the mycelial flesh still embedded in the Wanderlust’s computer banks?
The same kind of cells could be so useful in some situations… and completely deadly in others.
“Will this revelation help lead to a cure?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie asked. The rabbit had begun to look hopeful.
“It will lead to colonies and cities being moved away from coral dense areas,” Dr. Eol said firmly. “It will lead to prevention.” She shook her spade-shaped head. “I don’t know if it will help with a cure.”
Mike thought bitterly: it will probably also lead to coral reefs being destroyed. Because really, which is easier: move an entire city or just destroy the coral?
“For now, it means we should probably shut down the subspace pulses being made by Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s neural implant,” Dr. Eol said. “I don’t think it will reverse his condition, but it may slow the Hyphaic’s advancement through his system.”
“Do I need to take off the implant?” Vossie asked. The rabbit sounded strangely hesitant, given that he’d just learned it was the source of his illness.
“No,” the gecko doctor said, reaching out and placing one scaly hand on the side of the rabbit’s head to hold him still while working with the other hand to adjust his implant’s programming. She used a slim metal tool, and after only a few moments said, “There, that should do it. Everything else will stay the same, but no more subspace pulses.”
“Thank you,” Vossie said, looking relieved.
“We’ve been working for a long time,” the gecko doctor said ruefully. “I need to take a break and inform my captain about the progress we’ve made. Would the two of you like to return to your ship? Or would you be willing to accept our hospitality? We have rooms available and enough variety in our mess hall that you should each be able to find suitable foods to eat.”
“We’d be happy to stay,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said, and the rabbit genuinely did look happy about the offer. He was probably excited to learn more about Sidiian culture and try out foods made by someone other than Korvax. The rabbit may even have been tempted by the implication that he could have a private room for the length of their stay.
Ensign Mike could understand finding all of those aspects of staying here appealing. However, the toadstool couldn’t help thinking that right now they were still being asked if they wanted to stay. The same would probably hold true for Lt. Cmdr. Vossie no matter what happened…
But after Dr. Eol spoke with her captain, would Mike’s freedom of movement remain so certain?
And if this Sidiian vessel did try to claim Ensign Mike as some sort of prisoner of war, would Captain Carroway really try to get him back?
When the rabbit and toadstool had teleported aboard this ship, Mike had thought Vossie was the only one with an uncertain future.
Continue on to Chapter 16…