August 10 2127.
Valencia started crying. She reached for a napkin from the holder on the table.
She blew her nose and cleared her throat before beginning to speak, “Sorry. That was the last time I saw my parents and cat. Honestly, with them shutting us down like that, I wouldn't be shocked to find out my parents had been told I'd died in the line of duty. OCP was like that.”
“So to clarify, they sent you back down the same day you found it?”, I asked, trying to change the topic.
“Yeah, exactly. They turned us off like taking the battery out of a toy. Once under they'd installed the PhD information. This time, it was slowly added, though. At least that's what it reads by in the file dates.”
Valencia rubbed her temple, before continuing, “Maybe it was harder to source the data files for the ROM. They probably had to edit out as much information as possible to make the PhD “ours.” Either way, they boxed us up and shipped us down there.”
“Rub it in. They just gave you your doctorate, while I'm interviewing you for mine.”
Anger flared within me. All the work, all this time. The heartache, the pain, and the stress.... And she got it for the low, low price of being shunted into an underground lab.
“I had a couple of clarifying questions. Just for my notes.”
“Shoot, Mr. Taylor.”
I took a drink of coffee, and asked my questions, “The first question I had was, what exactly is an arcology? You've said the term a few times, and I just wanted to know. The second was, what exactly did you mean by “bio-network cables?” Like, were you using tree roots?”
“Kind of, but let's put a pin on that for a second. To answer your first question, an arcology is just a construction where the ecology and architecture are in harmony. The Arcology in question here was a megastructure mixed with an anarcho-technocratic commune of mad scientists. They had decided the solution for wanting to touch grass was to bring grass inside.”
I almost asked for clarification on what she meant by “anarcho-technocratic commune, but decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Once again, trying to change the subject, I asked, “You were talking about that bio-network. What was it?”
“Oh, yes! So, I was to work the first couple of months down there with Dr. Antonova. She and her team grew a fungal wire that connected all the electronics.”, Valencia said, as if it was something I would recognize as both normal and not insane.
“OK, so a fungal network... How did that actually function?”, I asked.
“Alright. Hold onto your hat, because this one is a bit of a doozy. The short story is, they discovered how to use the electrical signals in the fungal roots of mushrooms to send binary. The long of it is, they created a mycorrhizal network between the flowers and trees planted in the arcology. This network of cables provided nutrients to the plants throughout the facility, while also facilitating the communication of terminals”, she said, pausing to take another drink of coffee, “They'd also been using those flower walls as video displays. The shifting colors of the flowers were programmable displays, and each flower was an LED. They used them to advertise new art projects.”
“Huh. So what, was there several places where you funnel in nutrients for the Innernet to work?”, I asked, having a bit of a laugh.
“Yeah, pretty much”, she said, matter-of-factly.
“And the flowers were billboards?”
“Kind of. They used them for all sorts of wacky things. My favorite thing they did was use them for a status marker for network equipment. Just an entire wall of happy, red roses. If a cable broke down, or one of the nodes went down, the roses would turn blue. They were sad.”
Now she was the one having a laugh. I massaged the bridge of my nose. She had to be fucking with me, but the earnestness... She showed me fucking war footage from another officer. I had no choice but to accept her story to be close to the facts.
I sighed, then asked, “So they made flower based displays.... for advertisements?”
“Kind of. The real use was be nodes for the networking cables to go between. That central shaft was full of plant life due to the nature of the labs. It was effectively a tree, and that central shaft was the trunk. Information, materials, people, etc all flowed through the veins.”
Valencia went in for another sip of coffee. She discovered that she'd effectively emptied her cup and went for another.
While pouring, a thought must have come up, because she asked a question, “Ya know what's funny?”
“Hmm?”
“So, you know how I referred to Mr. Pollock?”
“Yeah. You never used his first name short of that first introduction.”
I leaned in, curious as to where this was going.
“Yeah, so years after all this... I poured into the ROM to see what was hiding in the firmware. They fucking had every executive's preferred titles. Just one or two mandated terms of reference. This one guy..... oh what was the damned name.... Mr. Fulton. His entry calling him either that, Big G, or Boss. They acted like children, using their power over us to force us into using nicknames they made up. At least he didn't make us use “Head Honcho” like another exec did.”
“Head Honcho?”, I asked, laughing.
It took the two of us a few moments to recover from the pure insanity of the names.
Once recovered, Valencia continued, “God, I almost got off track. The point is, is that OCP made those changes to our underlying OS in our heads, but... They never gave us our jobs for down there. They left notes in our shoes.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
My eyes went wide, and it took a few seconds to respond, “Excuse me?”
It was all I could say.
“I know, right?”
“How did they expect you to do your job?”
“Well they sent four of us down, and Alexander was truly a great saboteur. He always fucking knew what to do at any given moment. Anyway, they probably figured he'd sniff it out”, Valencia explained.
Interrupting, I asked, “Wait.... That.... What if the note fell out?”
We stared at each other for a few moments, pondering why OCP did that.
“I think that answer I lost to time. Anyone who could have answered it has probably passed away from either the volcano, the linear nature of time, or from corporate justice. My guess is they were afraid of brain scans, since OCP loved to use them. Speaking of-”, Valencia's voice trailed off as she pulled a handful of memory chips from the padded box.
She placed a handful of them onto the table. The PCB's were all green or blue. All but one.
The odd one out was black in color. It looked more professionally made, and yet... It was... Well it was pulsing. Every few seconds small, nearly imperceptible cracks would shrink and grow. It was almost like a heartbeat...
“Where did that one come from”, I asked, pointing toward the strange piece of circuitry.
“Ahh, you noticed the uh... The black box. It's from James”, she said, pointing to the scientist with a metal jaw.
“What.... What happened to him? Why is it pulsing?”
“We interfaced with the mycelium network. We were ill informed on two things. The first is that they installed a black box in us to track combat data and to backup one's lifetime of memories. Every sense, every emotion, and every experience”, She said, dourly.
She picked up another napkin from the holder and wiped at her eyes. After drying them, she blew the mucous from her nose.
Once more, she continued, “The second thing we didn't know is that the goddamned bio-network cables were infectious.”
“Excuse me?”, I asked, jolting out of my seat in horror.
“Well... They swapped to the BN cables several decades into Ono Arcology Labs' life. So they already had that copper to replace, and from what I'd been told, some of the old parts of the lab was just... a massive pain in the ass to maintain. So the whiz kids down there figured out how to make an electrical cable that would eat and replace copper lines. After that, it was a simple issue of connecting network adapters to the lines and clearing out the copper pebbles.”
“Copper pebbles?”, I asked.
Valencia's eyes lit up, as she got back up. Asking me to wait a second, she went to that back room and began to search. After a few minutes of rustling, she came back with a lump of tarnished copper, maybe a centimeter across.
“I had to get my data port replaced because of this little bastard”, she said proudly, “Luckily most of the internal wiring was gold. Could you imagine had my eyes gotten a fungal infection? Anyway, over a few years the fungus ate away at the wiring connecting the data-port to the motherboard. Cheap bastards.”
I let this information turn over in my head for a few minutes. Valencia sat there, drinking her coffee. She seemed oblivious to the horrors she'd shared. I looked into the black void in my cup for guidance.
“The four of them hooked up into a fungal network.... They became part of the mycelium... Christ”, I thought.
Noticing I had stopped the interview, Valencia took charge and just kept talking, “We honestly thought this was all a great idea. We needed the abiliity to communicate and it wasn't like there was cell service. There was Wi-Fi, but without the adapters we made, there wasn't any way we'd naturally be able to connect to the network. Alex hacked the ROM to get the damned adapters working, but yeah. We created a Wi-Fi socket plug, and well... The fungal spores made the jump.”
“Couldn't you four just have like.... I don't know... gotten laptops? A tablet?”, I asked.
“No, there was really one computer on the network. It was a central mainframe computer, and all the computers in the facility were really just terminals you logged in with your key-cards. We thought we had secure peer to peer encryption that bypassed the mainframe”, answered Valencia.
“You are part fungus due to needing secure peer to peer communication?”, I asked.
“Yes”, was her only reply.
“That is fucking insane.”
“I would agree.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I'm still not sure... Compulsion, maybe?”
I couldn't hold it in anymore.
My head dropped into my hands and I groaned, “God, I have worked so hard to get this far.... And you just answered an insecure man's question to get a doctorate. And then with your degree, you went and created a fucked up symbiotic relationship with some Ethernet cable.”
“Hey, if it makes you feel any better, you can find my graduation date on the Western Institute of Technology's website. We were the Washington Jackrabbits”, she replied.
“This is bullshit.”
“Such is life, Mr. Taylor.”
I spent a couple of minutes recovering from this insanity. I got a glass of water, feeling a little wired after the caffeine.
“One last question, how long were you unconscious for, exactly?”, I asked, sitting back down.
“Oh, that's an easy one. I was asleep for--
（ ?ω?） I like thanking the reader!
( つ旦O
と＿)_)
（ ?◎?） slrrrp
( ?ノ ヾ
と＿)_)
（ ?ω?） Hmm, tastes like pwion disease...
( つ旦O
と＿)_)
（ ?ω?）
( つ O. __
と＿)_) （__(）?;.o：。
?*?:.?
_ _ ξ
(′ ｀ヽ、 __
?,_と（ ）? （__(）?;.o：。
Ｖ Ｖ ?*?:.?
