I can’t be the only one that hears it, the hum-hiss of a well maintained HVAC system. One of them big boys that does the work of keeping a silo or a rich man’s spider hole or a continuity-of-something bunker non-hypoxic. Well, trust me, there’s a white noise you won’t miss until it’s gone everywhere in the North Null Site bunker that shouldn’t be–the one that hid the “treasures” the People’s Republic took from the wreck of a Yanqui plane.
I see and perceive a little bit of everything, it seems. I am. I am in-and-of-all. I see that bunker and it’s cousins like a string of pearls, wrong, like daisy-chained latrines strung laterally through the multiversal-sewers. I see between pages and perceive around corners and catch a glimpse of what-might-be in a glint of sun through the trees.
I think I’m Bird Man, no I know that I am Bird Man.
*
Reader Ulysses ate the-thing-itself. Nobody consumed the flesh of the great fungus that weaves under and through most things on Ignatius. He gagged and wretched too, for the thing tasted like rot incarnate. Brimstone and shit and broken tooth and a little of that sweet rotten fruit. The transformation–not transfiguration or damnation–begins before You-You is done wrestling the wretch-fruit down his throat.
Having stomped off for a man tantrum and a cigarette or five, Ulysses found his way back to Sanctuary’s remains rather quickly. Maybe he shuffled fast, or maybe the Island ‘folded’ to speed his way as the old timers used to say. Maybe the Ignatian Leviathan exhaled and her ribs came closer together and the path got shorter for a man walking over her. Who is to say?
Rosa’s story gave no guidance. Rather, the fungus called out–sang the song interstitial–and called to the host most compatible with its purpose. Since Nobody passed by earlier, the thing had been singing a distress call and siren song medley. Ulysses heard without hearing. He ate fungus flesh. Here he is writhing on the floor and turning an unnatural shade of bruised and rotting blue and purple, as if he were being beaten quite badly from within.
*
Back up the trail a spell, up in the peaceful boughs of two old Methuselah trees, most of the rest sleep peacefully as one can in such circumstances–all tied to the tree and clipped to a common safety rope. Rosa either tied or checked every knot herself.
June put her spine on the tree’s to sleep sitting up, Todd’s muscled bulk straddling the same big branch, head on his wife’s pillow-leg. Rosa is above Lucas and snoring loudly, though she warned the man (real sinister like): “I’ll be watching you all night. Sleep tight.”
Someone did watch Lucas. All night. One set of eyes belonging to a teenage sociopath. Don’t worry, this isn’t where I tell you what “broke” Cal. We shall not pull back the veil to the ‘trauma realm’ to explain the monster because she’s not a monster. She knows what she is, parents the same.
* CAL-CENTRIC FLASHBACK *
I know this, because it’s in her file. Right there. Bullet point in the executive summary: ‘diagnosed sociopath.’ A-series authors get to fall through to EOT and sword fight and adventures. I get to have a big nose and look out a window while I write, but Archives sends me detailed psychographic profiles, thick dossiers on people and rich histories of the odd places and whole worlds I work with. Life is not fair, but it ain’t all bad.
Todd and June aren’t bad people. In Yanqui terms, they’re “contractors” and rather gentle and violence-averse compared to colleagues and competitors. Each parent, secret agent dad and femme fatale mom, blamed themselves in turn for the daughter-diagnosis: “It’s like trauma, the pain I’ve taken and the hurt I’ve given. Like it found it’s path like water till it pooled in me.” Todd’s wife wore surprise at the poetry until the man she married gestured toward his balls. “Like that pain collected and I poured it into you.”
June would use that memory often to chastise herself when she wanted to carry the blame. Genetics. Not destiny, not at all, but the ink it’s written in. There’s the paper and the vocabulary of the author and the language being used and the voice of the one reading the text aloud to consider, but yeah genes are the ink of destiny. That’s great if your text is typo free or they’re all the kind the eye sildes by and ignores, less so if the typo breaks some bit of you you’re gonna end up needing or worse, marks you as broken to others.
Cal didn’t kill critters or anything like that. She did plan a particularly brutal reprisal on a middle school bully that ended with the kid having to learn to walk again. And if you giggle cheered at that, I want you to picture Momma Rosa’s most judgmental “Teacher Face” and how much you have disappointed her.
“We’re going to build a fence around this.” Is what Todd said. Mom nodded brutal agreement, and Cal came into the family business on an ‘age-appropriate’ learning curve.
Cal is not a monster. She’s a person of a neurotype that has to work really hard to empathize and who will most likely metastasize-monster without guidance and a self-imposed code. She is a person who imposes her boundaries in the name of self-regulation. Except when she doesn’t.
* NARRATIVE NOW *
Cal didn’t ‘wake’ to Lucas little half-an-escape attempt. She watched–was watching–the whole night. Listening too. She divides attention well, ‘operational asset’ (thanks dad). And while the rest slept, Cal leaned on Methuselah’s massive trunk above the Consortium man she had determined really had to die.
Cal observes as Lucas works to eject the sock gagging him. A perfect little pocket of moonlight illuminates the man in tight pants as he takes teeth to the binds at his wrists. The same binds that seem to want to loose, that slide by unseen aid and what sound suggests is a blade.
Turn to peek, too-late, and he’s doing the swing-precarious. Lucas dangling by his footwear and Rosa’s talent for tangling things. Cal wraps her legs round the bough like its a balance beam, and tumbles-jungle-jimmy graceful, winds up upside down and face to face with Lucas.
She’s got a knife smile behind the actual knife that gleams in nature’s nightlight.
“Cal! No!” Rosa woke, and mom and dad’s rapid fire remonish-rants: we talked about this, can’t ‘go rogue’, we don’t kill-to-kill, what if he knows shit we need, kid? In unison: Think. All while the dangling stuffed suit lunges for the knife and slaps at the young-sociopath leaning just out of reach.
Rosa speaks: “Cal, I don’t want you to empathize with him. I’m not asking that.” Good. He is shit. Complete shit. “Absolute agreement. I need you to see the big picture, blood on the leaves will…” Cal cuts “bring the birds. Baby, what did you do?”
“I did him like Mussolini.”
*
The ergotism (or something like it) afflicting Ulysses accelerates. Convulsive, every muscle shiver-locking, clatter seizures and the vomiting–what seems more than a man could possibly hold in his guts. Nobody shits himself. There is no “royal road to knowledge”, Reader. Ulysses shits himself mightily. That’s when the visions begin.
Ergot will make you hallucinate on its way to killing you. Whatever they call the fungus that falls from Puffin asses and weaves itself through Ignatius, it offers sacred visions on its way to killing you. The mushroom brings illumination most profane–the cost is always your life.
Reader, we thought you were informed, You-You is not “the One” but the one human most compatible in range of what was left of the Oracle. And the thing will consume the man’s mind and body in equal measure on a timeline determined by probability–little dice made of nucleotides. That’s what sets the clock ticking, draws the sword on-a-thread over Nobody’s head. Something deep in You-You’s genes that the mushroom can use and the Consortium deciphered (and guard viciously) determines compatibility.
One in a couple million? A few hundred million? A billion? I don’t know, but the man actively shitting his drawers on the charred floorboards is not ‘the one.’
Ticking clock. It’s now a question of what Ulysses can accomplish while there is still a ‘one’ in him–a person and subject separate from the tangle and poisoned-malevolent hive mind he’s plugged into (being consumed by). Turns out he can do quite a lot for nobody.
*
Adrenaline wearing off, Cal climbs upright to listen to the wave of bird rage, the little flap-paddling on the deadfall. Comical if you don’t know. The sick kid’s expression turns on a dime. Dark and stormy. She’s working over the bindings around Lucas ankles and looks like she’s about to cry. Not remorse cry. Everything all at once cry.
“Cal? What are you doing? Don’t feed the birds. Don’t make the bad the worse.”
“Might as well now!” Here come the tears. She starts hacking at the knots securing what remains of the Consortium man to the tree.
Rosa has a hand up pleading ‘stop’ to mom and dad. It’s teacher-and the parents accept it for now. “Cal. The birds are coming. “I get it. It’s not shame. It’s not really regret. It’s rage.”
“You want to see fuckin rage?” Watch it young lady.
The old teacher pleads to the parents with her hands again. “Cal, you lost control. You gotta get it back. Control over yourself. Right now. We don’t have enough water to wait out a week-long bird orgy” but the kid screams from her gut’s basement, slits the last binding and Lucas’ body falls to the dirt and gathering birds below.
Cal knows the old lady is right, but she’s riding the rage wave. Control is her aim. Best she can do is loud-long scream made of blood-curds from the basement beneath her bowels–sub-basement beneath her soul.
*
IGNATIUS–TIME IMMEMORIAL
*
The Ignatian Leviathan as seen from great height–a splotch of vibrant green in blue span of nowhere. Not one mark or mar, none of the scars that come with human habitation. No ships on Earth (any of them) worthy of the name yet for her to chomp on. This is Leviathan’s spawn (yes, that one). Any given instance of the oddly shaped island is just that: a large island. Seen for what she is, she’s a whale or a carp that span-sprawls the waters of 1/3 of the Earth’s in god’s ever-growing multiverse.
But we must not let ourselves be sidetracked by her divine and infernal nature. No, Ignatius is an island. She is more, but she is an island and you are not ready for the rest (and may never be). The trees and much of the modern wild flora are present, and the Puffins have only just arrived. The fungus, it was there first. We need a better name for that parasite on Leviathan.
The Consortium Man Supreme, He Who is Most Compatible, calls the thing “Mother”, but I refuse. That’s fuckin’ creepy. We’re going to call it ‘the shroom.’ No, I don’t know where or when it came from. Wrong question. How did a mushroom come to think? Better question. For that we go to the ghost of a sweaty archivist hovering cross legged over the primordial Ignatian forest.
*
There is a thing sometimes reduced to “the hard problem of consciousness” by certain kinds of thinkers. This phrase refers to the origin and emergence of “first-person experience.”
Look, they’re talking subjectivity. How a person comes to be a person or a unit or a mind–human, kepplerite, cryptid. How the self comes to know itself–how you became a ‘you’ (or know yourself a ‘self’). And some fuckin’ goddamn graduate student somewhere, who will never read this text, just felt a great pain. A disturbance in some field that permeates all life and thought.
There they are, in a crypt lab beneath some university building. Basement academic running on too-few calories and 5-bucks-a-year stipend in a newly subdivided discipline designed to box out uncomfortable philosophical and moral questions and a boner for the FMRI machine his daddy bought the university. That guy will tell you things like subjectivity are “just subjective” and will likely scream metaphysics. Fuck that guy and his daddy’s MRI machine. Consciousness is embodied, but it’s not reducible to the objectively measurable shit. Call me a metaphysician and we’re fighting.
Subjectivity is the meat of a philosophical problem of how people came to think of themselves as people. It’s a philosophical problem, not a daddy’s MRI machine problem. And before your ancestors or mine were smart enough to be self aware, before their brains could tell them much more than: “eat it”, “fight it”, “fuck it” or “kill it” (or some combination of those basics). Way back before there were words, just yowls of pain and anger or lust, that’s when Shroom learned to think.
*
We see what that perverted archivist wandered long-lost through time to find for us: looks like a fungus fucking a dead bird. This is why I don’t include archivists contributions raw, they do raw, nasty, archivist shit. Know what ghosts do?
They watch you shit. Yeah, have fun with that knowledge mortal. They’re constipated in the same way you can feel an itch or tickle or pain in a phantom limb. It’s the visceral shit in life they miss–the shitting and fucking and such. I told you, consciousness and sentience and selfhood are embodied concepts. All the big stuff that makes a person an animal-more-than-mere-animal–a self–is of the brick-and-mortar body as much as the soul. Papa Walt will set you straight: if the body ain’t the soul, where the fuck is it? Woven between the bits of meat and bone–a part apart.
Ghosts watch you shit. They also take shits on my narratives and my plans for great art. See what that archival fuckwit left me with? A dead bird on the forest floor that looks like its being fucked in its cloaca by a fungus. That is not what we are looking at. We’re watching Shroom, the great fungal hive mind come-to-become a mind.
Fast forward a week or two to the nitty gritty of decomposition. After-action analyze the chemistry and we’d find the residue of what did it, the trickery that makes consciousness first be: LSD. Some other narrator told you a while back, whole chapters back that the bird’s gut ecology makes LSD, just brews that shit like more-fun beer.
How, I know not, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. We need an air of mystery, and this little ditty runs on baroque brevity.
Reader, I’m sorry to have encouraged you to imagine–to join me in hallucinating–the image of a roaming fungal root doing unholy things to a bird’s remains. But that’s how the Shroom came to think: tripped balls crawling up a bird’s ass and accidentally learned to imagine itself a self.
And whatever culture, color, or creed you claim, human. Your ancestors didn’t flirt with sentience. They had a lot of sex with it. With sentience and each other. They fell through the doors of perception in whole-tribe fuck piles. I shit you not.
If this narrator were some archive-ghost pervert, I’d fly you a few thousand years forward and elsewhere to Olduvai and a ritual orgy at the mouth of a cave. Your great gram-gram many times removed and gramps-the-same took shrooms (not that one). Then they watched the fire do odd things to the cave walls. Last, they had freak nasty sex with each other (and a lot of other people). And that’s how you came to be physically and metaphysically.
Consciousness came to be, not from but as hallucination. Congratulations. You are hallucinating, signifying mud, mortal.
*
NARRATIVE NOW
*
Rosa hasn’t a clue what to do. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. The angst is there, all ‘weight of the whatever’ on her shoulders and brows and bones. The elder woman made of whip-chord is borrowing the expression of a woman named Florence from that photo Dorthea took of the migrants when the dust took everything Depression didn’t. “Migrant Woman.” You’ve seen it even if you haven’t. Readers, some of you have felt that expression the picture captures: the tempest roiling behind “quiet dignity.” Razor-guts. Quiet-screaming. All the things that Okie in the photo couldn’t say or express in front of the kids nuzzling her.
You are the ones who know what Rosa feels, and what pounds behind the furrowed brow. It’s math’s drunk cousin–ballparking. Sitting on a tree limb, staring at the fuck-piled Puffin orgy where Lucas body used to be. She’s guessing the number of birds in the piles and swarm-of-swarms. There’s a ratio–birds-present to days of their lives she and the not-Missionaries will spend bird-stranded in the trees.
Rosa reckons a weeks worth of birds, breaks down the forecast for the fam: “When you bled that boy like a hog.” Like Mussolini. “Just like that, dear. You made it worse. Drop Lucas, and you give them a snack. Bleed Consortium boy, and you give the birds a blood orgy.”
“What do we do?” Todd is large and muscled and action-flick capable. The man looks like a scared child hugging the old-past-old tree. June’s looking at him with something short of pity–it’s dignified cousin.
“We have three or four days of water.” She points at the writhing bird orgy on the forest floor. “That’s at least a week. We ration everything and get comfortable with the idea of drinking piss.”
“Negative. Nay. No. Nobody is drinking urine today.” Ulysses returned.
When nobody washed the shit off himself in a small stream, his bruised-flesh began to glow. Bioluminescence born of Shroom weaving between every bit of the man it will illuminate-consume. Cleansed, he girded his loins with a tarp. When the marked man’s feet found dirt and the birds came to claim him, Ulysses commanded them by will alone.
Now, the Puffins part and seem to bow low about a man barely recognizable. Every bit of Ulysses flesh is colored bruised–beat blue-purple from within. The brilliant bioluminescence glows from the same place and renders his so-very-slow-rot beautiful. Nobody’s chicken wings are gone. Mushroom muscle metastasized almost instantly into the form of an Adonis.
“Mother, the bird people live. Some of them. Let me take you to the caves where they shelter.” You-You speaks from far away, as if delivering his own words from great distance. “June. Todd. You’re here to fetch the nukes for the Yanquis, yes? You will have them. Come.”
The Puffins hiss and snip at some invisible boundary determined by the illuminated man. To the ‘Missionaries’ three, that’s what he appears: transcendent, transfigured, ascendant. Rosa knows he’s doomed. She follows her son the nightlight. All walk safely on the ground, Puffins about them like an honor guard, trying to find Leviathan’s spine–the hills and the shelter of caves and comrades.
*
END IGNATIUS 8
MORE TO COME