Bloom

ZERO: Sometimes They Get In This much we know: that the Innensburg bloom began with a single spore; that Immune response was sluggish and ineffective; that the first witness on the scene, one Holger Sanchez Mach, broke the nearest emergency glass, dropped two magnums and a witch's tit, and died. Did he suffer? Did it hurt? Conversion must have taken at least four seconds, and we can probably assume it started with the feet. These things usually do. By the time the Response teams began arriving, the bloom was some ten meters across, and two meters high at the center--a fractal-jagged bubble of rainbow fog, class two threaded structure almost certainly visible to those unfortunate enough to be standing within fecund radius when the fruiting bodies swelled and popped. Twenty deaths followed almost immediately, and another hundred in the minutes that followed. There were cameras and instruments on the scene by this time, windows on what can only seem to be separate events, each holograph showing a different fleeing mob or collapsing building, each soundtrack recording a different cacophony of whimpers and death screams and jarringly irrelevant conversation. I personally have collaged these scenes a dozen times or more, arranging the panic this way and that way, over and over again in the hope that some sense will emerge. But there is no sense in those first few minutes, just the pettiness and blind, stamping fear of the human animal stripped bare. And the heroism, yes; for me the central image is that of Enrico Giselle, Tech Two, pushing his smudged helmet and visor back on his forehead and shouting into a voice phone while the walls behind him froth and shimmer and disintegrate. "Class five! Class five! Drop two hundred and flush on my command!" At this point, finally, the city began to awaken. The Immunity isolated samples of the invading mycorum, sequenced them, added them to the catalog of known pathogens. Better late than never, one supposes, but by this time the bloom outmassed the city's Immune system by a factor of several million, and though submicroscopic phages gathered at its sizzling interface, now ropy with tendrils that sputtered outward in Escheresque whorls, the growth was not visibly affected. Fortunately, like all living things, technogenic organisms require energy to survive, and where the witch's tits had fallen or been hurled, pools of bitter cold had arrested the replication process. Not unusual, as any Response officer will tell you. And like organic lebenforms, mycora are also vulnerable to excess energy. Backpack UV lasers were proving effective weapons against the bloom, and soon the streets clanged with discarded chem spritzers and paraphage guns as bloomfighters concentrated on the things that worked. High above the city, the cavern roof came alive with UV turrets of its own. Machine-guided and wary of the soft humans below, the beams swept back and forth, charring trenches through the rainbow mist, the living dust, the bloom of submicroscopic mycora still eating everything in their reach and converting it to more of themselves. And to other things, as well, a trillion microscopic construction projects all running in parallel, following whatever meaningless program the mycogene codes called out. By now the fecund zone was half a kilometer across, riddled with gaps and voids in the outer regions but much denser at its core, a thickening haze that already blocked the view from one side to the other. Up to four stories tall in places, higher than most of the surrounding buildings, and it had begun to take on structure as well--picks and urchins, mostly, standing out visibly in the haze, their prismatic spines lengthening more than fast enough for the human eye to see. Some mycora eat lightly, sucking up building blocks like carbon and hydrogen while leaving the heavier elements alone, but this one was pulling the gold right off the streets, the stMcCarthy, Wil is the author of 'Bloom' with ISBN 9780345424655 and ISBN 0345424654.