When she woke up, she immediately sensed that something was wrong.
She stumbled out of bed, went to the window and looked outside. Her heart almost stopped: it was even worse than she had expected. Chaos was unfolding all across her communities. She was seeing and feeling people running headless around the streets, panicking from the incoming influx of screaming noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Where the hell did it come from, she thought against the unbearable throbbing in her head that made it almost impossible to concentrate. And then, in a sudden pang of realization that almost hurt her physically, it occurred to her: the Meta Myzel. It had actually arrived.
She pushed herself away from the window and while holding her ears, rushed down the staircase to severe the connection to the Meta Myzel – or was it already too late?
It had all started a few weeks earlier. Back then, in the heart of her city Solarfurt, her myzel had flourished amidst the ethereal glow of bioluminescent fungi and friendly myzels of neighbouring cities, creating a sanctuary for dryads, fungis and human allies that thrived to embrace the essence of nature and harmony. But with news that echoed across the diverse myzels of the Fungiverse, suddenly everything changed: the arrival of a new myzel was announced. Rumour said that it consisted entirely of steel and wire, completely different from the organic fabrics that the rest of the Fungiverse was built on. It was planned to span over the whole globe, connecting more people than any myzel before it.
The announcement brought forth a tumultuous wave of emotions and feelings in the Fungiverse and so also in Tessa’s myzel. There were those that completely opposed the idea and others, who welcomed its arrival. In the course of this, the Fungi-Pact was formed: an alliance of myzels that would refuse to make any connection with the looming myzel. But Tessa, as the leader of the biggest myzel in the Fungiverse, the GreenTech myzel, refused to join, because she feared to lose too many members, who wanted to be connected to the new myzel; a decision, that she would later regret.
Eventually, the day came, and it exceeded all expectations. An overwhelming influx of posts surged in, straining the resilience of the myzels precautions and defence mechanisms from one second to the next. First, it seemed like the myzel’s defences were doing alright. While the first barrier against too many posts was blown away almost instantly, the second barrier held for the moment, but then, the detection of poisonous imaginary collapsed, and it followed the second barrier. After that, it was only chaos.
As she saw her communities descend into utter confusion and dismay, she didn’t bother long and ran straight away into her cellar, where she kept block-mushrooms for emergency purposes, devoured a super-block-mushroom and blocked out the entire meta myzel from her home myzel at once. Hopefully, it wasn’t too late.
She stepped outside and tried to talk to people from her myzel, but it was still hard to concentrate and understand each other, because the other myzels she was connected to, were still in chaos, shouting in panic and confusion all around her. By now, Tessa’s emotions swirled like angry demons within her, raising a fierce determination to protect what she held dear. As the leader of GreenTech, she had invested her heart and soul in creating a haven for myzels seeking refuge from the chaotic waves of the cold web the humans had built. The intrusion of Meta felt like a personal betrayal, an assault on the security she had found in the Fungiverse and that she held sacred. Even the bonds that once held her myzel together strained: some members had already decided to join the Meta Myzel or hopped over to other myzels.
Walking through the luminous pathways of her city, Tessa grappled with the emotional toll of the conflict. She, unlike her friends, carried the burden of the entire community on her shoulders and while they could just join another myzel, she would truly loose her home. It was too much at stake and slowly, it was getting to her, she felt panic rising in her throat, at any moment expecting the unbearable noise to go off again. It was all too much. She needed a place to think.
And so, in these darkest moments, Tessa quickly decided to leave her own myzel unprotected for the moment and to try to join one of the myzels that had joined the Fungi-Pact.
But this proved to be harder than expected as the Fungi-Pact-myzels had temporarily even blocked the myzels that had not joined the pact, which included Tessa’s myzel. They were therefore beyond her own senses reach. In increasing panic, she ran around the city, reaching out to friends and even her estranged family and finally, she found a person that knew someone that could get her in the pact.
She strolled through the dimly lit streets until she arrived at the designated address. Upon reaching the doorstep, she hesitated for a moment before rapping on the door. A peculiar woman answered, draped in a lengthy coat with fingers adorned in witchy, elongated nails. While Tessa typically revelled in the mysterious and eccentric, an unsettling aura prickled at her fungal senses.
Despite her instincts urging caution, Tessa chose to embrace the risk. She followed the woman inside and she led her into her kitchen, where bowls of ethereal, blue-hued soup bubbled. In a moment that felt deeply surreal, she presented to her a purple glowing mushroom, which was the colour of the pact, with beautiful curling lamellas and intricate symbols inked in patterns around its stem. She hesitated only for a moment. And when Tessa ate it, her fungal sense was transported and suddenly she found herself in one of the myzel that had joined the pact. She had done it. A sweet silence finally laid itself on Tessa’s ears and she just calmed herself for a moment, not speaking with anyone as she left the woman’s house with insecure steps.
As she searched for a spot in Solarfurt to rest, she noticed that slowly, leaders of other myzels that she knew were joining the pact’s myzels, too and eventually, she said hello to one or the other, even meeting some old friends. She met again Typhon, the human man from the Earthland myzel and Eury, the radical human-dryad from TerraForce, with whom she had fought a renegade myzel not so long ago.
While all of this unfolded in her mind, Tessa had laid herself on a bench in the park, one of the only places, where no other people were running around headless, although she didn’t know why. Apparently, they didn’t like parks anymore. It was probably all because of Meta Myzel’s glooming influence … but she remembered herself that this wasn’t the time for brooding over social problems. Her myzel stood in flames. She closed her eyes again.
They had arranged themselves in a private room in the PinkSharknado myzel of the rainbow collective, a movement that had warned from the Meta Myzel from the beginning and now seemingly wanted to profit from that. But Tessa gave them some slack, after all, it was not the time for political considerations now either.
Together with the other leaders, they crafted strategies to counter the Meta-Myzel’s influence, determined to preserve the authenticity of the Fungiverse. All the while the battle, both emotional and digital, raged silently on around them.
As each leader shared a brief update of the recent events and the current state of their myzel, she soon found out that the other myzels defences had fallen just as quickly as her own. In response, they decided to fortify their defences in an unison act, by building and erecting giant spore protectors across neighbouring communities and all over Solarfurt.
And so it was done.
Soon it was possible to walk among the familiar myzels again without the load chatter of millions of humans in one’s ear that screamed into the void of their own loneliness. But the data-flood had also taken damage to the communities in the myzels. It was unbearable for Tessa to admit, but the Meta Myzel had offered to “upgrade” the other myzels with their reckless technology and many called for exactly that.
She couldn’t deny the emotional toll this had on her – watching her cherished community torn asunder, Tessa shed a few silent tears: friends had turned adversaries, and the once-unified myzel communities now stood divided. And every time the Meta-Myzel’s promises tempted some myzels to turn on their old friends, Tessa felt the sting of betrayal thinking of all the years they had worked so hard to build this place together. And even her own myzel, GreenTech, the bastion of natural harmony, faced internal strife. The Meta-Myzel’s digital threads reached into the very core of her myzel, threatening to replace the organic connections with artificial allure. And the clashes within Solarfurt even mirrored the turmoil in Tessa’s heart, because she, too, caught herself thinking to save her myzel by joining Meta. Was change inevitable, she thought by herself, were they the future? Her own uncertainty frightened her and at the same time, it proved to her that now was the time that she had to work harder than ever for her cause.
Alongside Eury and her girlfriend Lamella, she attempted to bridge the widening gaps inside the communities with dialogues and town hall meetings, and in many cases, succeeded to calm the waves of uprise for the time being. It was like germs of resistance began to fly through the air in their luminescent beauty again, illuminating a path that they hadn’t been able to see before in the dark.
Together with the spore protectors, they managed to gain ground against the Meta Myzel and move their communities out of the protective shelter of the Fedi-Pact and back into the stiff influence of the Meta Myzel. There, they hoped to win back some members that they had lost to the Meta Myzel. And even so this proved to be a tough, up-hill game, they had found their stance again. Once they established ways to manage and channel the incoming influx, a sense of stability returned to their interconnected world. Tessa, Eury and Lamella, fuelled by their unwavering commitment to their community and the effectiveness of the spore protectors, became ambassadors of the free myzels of the Fungiverse. They inspired myzels across Solarfurt and other neighbouring cities to resist the Meta-Myzel’s seductive pull, helped them to setup their own spore protectors and even visited myzels that had joined the Meta Myzel to convince them to thwart their promises to Meta.
With increasing success, they became adept at navigating the so-called complexities of the Meta-Myzel’s digital expressions, namely their stupid, one-senseonal, so-called “memes”, thanks to which they could now fight them with their own weapons. They created a wave of protest within their own realm, whose members recognized each other by their glowing mushroom emojis in their profiles. It even made it into the news: “David against Goliath: Fungiverse Myzels take unexpectedly strong stance against Meta myzel”.
The Fungiverse’s free myzels became a bastion of strength, with the Fedi-Pact myzels as a resort to plot and collaborate in case of emergency, and gradually, critical discussions ventured completely beyond the safety of the Fungi-Pact again and eventually even influenced the discussions within the Meta Myzel. The possibility of an alternative to the Meta Myzel was soon appreciated by people all over the world and even if they didn’t join, they had gained their sympathy.
Slowly, the tide began to turn. Myzels who had once been swayed by the Meta-Myzel’s promises started questioning its true intentions, some chose to disconnect, finding solace in the embrace of their fellow myzels and some even joining the Fungi-Pact. The germs of resistance began to spread and multiply through the Fungiverse and beyond. Soon, the worlds democratise had found their grip, too and together, they now in turn tried to apply their influence on the meta myzel and to weaken its power and influence on all aspects of their lives.
However, the Meta-Myzel, irritated by their sudden resilience, grew bolder, too, trying with its inexhaustible resources to lure myzels into its enticing embrace. It built flying data-mushrooms that could dock at solar stations all over the city, a reaction after resilient fungi-punks had destroyed parts of the Meta Myzels giant data centre in the middle of the desert. It sought to convince myzels to join its digital realm and find shelter under its tantalising caps, attempting to weaken the influence of the Fungiverse and break away any boundaries that were still laid onto it. The boundaries where those of the state’s law and those by its surrounding eco-system of the other myzels but which from its own view, both only weakened its growth. And because it hadn’t until now made significant progress there, amidst the ongoing struggle, the Meta-Myzel, wielding its power and wealth, sought to weaken the Fungiverse’s influence through new features and innovations that threatened the environment of many a local community.
In response, the Fungiverse, recognizing the need to counterbalance this growing influence, became more proactive. They, the myzels, united by their shared commitment to preserve their essence, devised strategies to showcase the richness of their organic interactions and fostering a sense of community among the myzels, while also starting bolder movements of protests that tried to foster certain political actions as both factions also had by now some contacts in the political machinery. It was an fierce arms race that was fought on technical, social and political levels, with each side attempting to outmanoeuvre the other in the ever-evolving landscape of the Fungiverse.
And while the free Fungiverse seemed to profit from being the underdog for now and seemed to gain the upper hand in the conflict, at the same time, it had to learn to control its own impulses and keep the conflict from escalating or even taking place within its own myzels. “If you start destroying your enemies’ homes, you will soon destroy each other’s”, said Tessa to her bold friend and leader of the TerraForce myzel, Eury. They were walking a truly thin line with their attacks on the meta myzels data centres and there were many forces that urged the myzels to crack down on their radical members, who were especially strong in the remaining radical refuges of the Fungi-Pact, in a way that it was increasingly becoming a problem itself. Some of them had never opened up their connections to the myzels outside the pact again after the others did, remaining in their state of fear and loathing against an enemy that they by now only knew from the stories that they told each other. And while little mushrooms were popping up all over the Meta Myzel’s realm, at the same time in our communities, anxiety grew as well in fear of actual violent attacks by radical members of the Meta Myzel.
The struggle for allegiance intensified more and more. Eventually, this resulted in a call from society and the state itself to everyone involved to calm down on both sides, making the struggle ebb away temporarily, only to later intensify again.
And as the dance between these forces continued, the united myzels of the Fungiverse evolved from a defensive stance to an active shaping of its destiny, pushing new boundaries of social interaction and collaboration. Already, the Fungiverse had more members than ever before and continued to grow. The myzels, resilient and determined, stood firm against the Meta-Myzel’s enticing advances. They all knew the struggle would continue, that the Meta Myzel was far from being only one myzel among many, but they vowed to stand firm. Tessa was as certain as ever: the united, free myzels of the Fungiverse had weathered this storm and they were ready to hold their ground again in the future without plunging the world into chaos. And so would her myzel, GreenTech.
And amidst the fight and overall anxiety, at least Solarfurt slowly began to heal. The Meta-Myzel’s grip weakened on the city, continuedly retreating from the city hall, the hospital and public libraries. If nothing else felt promising at the moment, at least this was a good sign.
And as the sun rose over Solarfurt and shed light on a new day, Tessa looked out of her window over her community and saw all the beautiful connections of the people walking below, just as it should be. In these moments, it almost seemed too good to be true … Well, she thought, just in case, she had still a lot of emergency mushrooms left in the cellar and the pact would always be there … if it didn’t radicalize further … in the distance she could hear the regular fire of the spore protectors, which still had to be turned on at all times … how long until they wouldn’t be enough anymore …
And then, another thought entered her mind, something that she had overheard on the train a few days ago: “Look, I like the Fungiverse just as the next guy, but the whole thing about resistance against the Meta Myzel … I find that hard to believe. At the very least, it’s by now a huge oversimplification. And all that stuff about the free myzels? You think most people give a damn what happens to their myzel? I feel bad for the poor woman maintaining mine, but no myzel lasts forever. It’s just a story. The so-called Fungiverse is already beginning to disintegrate. It’s transforming into something else. If it ever existed. The important thing here is in my opinion for our fungal senses to develop further. I’m even thinking of doing one of those therapies everyone is talking about at work.” To which the other person replied: “Oh certainly. But it’s a necessary lie. We need it for the moment and probably a little longer. But there will be casualties that’s for sure. Did you hear of this one myzel-leader who worked himself to death? They found him weeks later … no one had taken notice until the first problems showed up and when no one wanted to take over, his myzel just moved on to the next …”
She finally caught herself, went back to bed and closed her eyes, tried to fall asleep, tried to shut out the voices, smells and visions of her fellow community members and the irrational thoughts that something was off, something still seemed off … stood up and walked to the window once again, the third time this morning …
Everything seemed ok. Everything was ok. For now. And that was as good as it could get at the moment. And she needed the sleep. She couldn’t be there for her myzel if she didn’t sleep.
She went back to bed and after just a few more moments, finally, her mind slipped away into the sweet oblivion of sleep.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this story, please re-post it under #fungiverse, #fedipunk or #fungipunk, or create your own variant of the story if you want to. It’s free to use! Let’s spread the idea of the fungiverse through the Fediverse and beyond!
If you want to know about the Fedipunk-genre, check out this post: https://fungiverse.wordpress.com/2023/11/04/from-solarpunk-to-fedipunk/
Written by bluebbberry on October 2023, licensed under CC0 (no rights reserved)
Fungiverse Tales 