F O R A Y

It was late December and the office party was in full swing.

It had been a full-on mad year at the research institute. In a world sick of burst AI stories, Smart Nature was the new hot potato and funghi of all things had hit the news. A heady mixture of good and bad headlines about wild mushroom murders and new clever superfoods had sent reporters and bloggers foraging for earthy stories like truffle pigs.

Becks was one of them, a hungry investigative vlogger aching for a scoop about just what the Government's secretive and old Fungal Research Institute was up to on the island and somehow she'd managed to blag her way onto the premises and into the Christmas ball. A proper foray Becks reckoned. 

Disco lights were swirling round merry shoe-free dancers in the boardroom and a well-stocked bar had been set up in the kitchen next door, where woozy PhDs chatted each other up and the senior staffers loosened their ties and enjoyed the big buffet.

Everywhere the lamps were dimmed and Christmas lights were draped across the portraits of past Institute presidents, the official fun guys as they were known; doctors all and in the festive flickering glow looking more and more like the shaggy ink caps and fly agarics they'd prodded and diced for centuries.

Becks stared at them and wondered just how brainy you had to be to get to be president of a place already stuffed with brain boxes.

She had taken her pumps off and held them in one hand, a glass of bubbly in the other, her second, already feeling its festive fuzzing effect. 

In the twilight of the party no-one had really noticed her being there and besides, partners had been invited so she could have been any one of them. 

Despite the finger foods and champers going down a treat and the choice of disco dance music surprisingly good for stuffy boffins, Becks hadn't found a single story to sink her teeth into. 

Not for want of trying either, she'd engaged in several monotonous conversations by the fridge and the photocopier with a few tipsy scientists, but nothing meaty came out of them, except a new stain on her skirt from a creamy mushroom vol-au-vent. 

Just a load of old morels keeping HER in the dark. No hint of clever puffballs or death cap dinners. Deffo no magic. Not a damn spore.

Sensing the chances of her much-needed scoop fading away and the whole trip to the remote island complex being a potential waste of time and money, Becks decided to throw caution to the wind, sneaky off from the ball and explore the rest of the Institute.

Having filched an access key card from a drunken dancer's jacket, she put down her empty glass, mentally refused another and set off down the dimly-lit corridors of the Institution, leaving her shoes on someone's desk. 

"I'm Cinderella!" She giggled.

Pausing at the first door she hesitated.

"C'mon Cinders, this is just what vloggers do. We go and find the story!" She told herself and the vastness of the building began to dawn on her, corridor after corridor spanning our from the party, now a faint thumping noise in the distance.

No-one had seen her slip away.

As she tip-tied down corridors, the titles of funghi began to appear on the lab signs like:

DEATH CAPS

AGARICS

BRACKETS

STINKHORNS

INK CAPS

These gave way to specialisations like:

TOXICITY

BIOMES

HORTICULTURE

SUPERFOODS

And at the very end of the farthest lab wing:

INTELLIGENCE:  VERY RESTRICTED ACCESS

Becks's curiosity was piqued.

"Intelligence? very restricted access? What the hell are they doing? Brainy porcini?"

She swiped the door lock and bingo! Luckily the drunken dancer had been someone high up.

She was in and the big door automatically closed slowly behind her. 

It was dark. Very dark, save for a dim green glow at the far end of the lab.

"Damn this darkness. Still, I suppose they are just mushrooms and no doubt get fed a lot of bullshit! .... Just like me!" She chuckled.

There was no light switch anywhere, so she made her way gingerly to the green glow. She could sense deep tanks all around her, the boxy shapes becoming more visible as she neared the sickly light. There was an earthy smell too, like humus or compost and maybe ..... iron.

When she reached the glow she could see the large tanks, which were indeed filled with some organic substance, which Becks guessed was a growing medium of sorts. She gently touched the surface of one and it felt crumbly between her fingertips, with some underlying stickiness too.

Remembering she had her phone, she cursed her dumbness and switched on the torch.

Shining it at the nearest tank she could now see that the substance was a kind of red and not green. It glistened in the white light as if it was wet. Throughout the material ran thousands of thin white strands interconnecting with each other, as if a huge cobweb had been spun inside. All the strands seemed to lead to the denser centre of the tank, where she couldn't see. 

Staring closer at the surface Becks swore that something moved.

"Fuck!"

She recoiled in disgust and shone the torch around her.

"Don't be alarmed".

The voice made Becks jump even more and she let out a scream.

Shaking, she spun round and shone her torch in the direction of the voice, which was where the green glow had been.

"Don't be afraid", repeated the voice in a sort of softly-spoken, almost filmy way.

Becks steadied her phone and standing in front of her was a tall man dressed in a white lab coat. He wore glasses and had thick dark hair. His hands were in his coat pockets and the green lamp cast an eerie verdant glow over his subtle, if not child-like, face.

"Who are you?" Stammered Becks.

"I am Dr. Weaver. This is my lab. I apologise if I startled you. I work the night shift".

"Why is it so dark in here?" Stuttered Becks "I couldn't see you!"

"Oh yes, sorry again, it's dark so the funghi can grow properly in their mediums. They do best in darkness with a little green glow to assist their ...... dreaming".

"Dreaming?" Blurted Becks.

" Yes, it's my word for the state they get into at night, when the mycelium are calm and best connected to talk to each other."

"Talk? Mushrooms can't t -talk!" Scoffed Becks, her interest in this whispering, odd boffin now sparked 

"Oh but they do Miss...?"

"Becks"

"Miss Becks. They do. In fact they clamour there's so much talking going on. It's like a telephone exchange in there, a data bank with tongues!" Explained the Doctor.

"Really? I didn't know that. So what are you actually studying here?" Inquired Becks fumbling in her pocket to set her phone to voice recorder. 

"We are looking at how the threads of the mycelium spread and co-exist with plants and animals, neither of which they are, funghi that is. They are something else, something older, something altogether more primeval."

Becks caught a strange look in Dr.Weaver's eye as he said this.

"Come Miss. Becks, sit down here and I'll tell you more if you want. It's quite fascinating once you see the scale and scope of the fungal internet".

The Doctor sat on a small settee for two beneath the green lamp and Becks joined him. She felt slightly off sat down, maybe a little woozy, which she put down to the earlier champers.

The green rays above Becks' head made her vision blurry and looking out across the whole lab it seemed as if all the big tanks were made of hazy moss like huge mounds in an ancient fairy-tale forest. 

"Yes, the wood wide web, as it's known, is a superhighway of organic strings linking everything underground. It can nurse, nurture, defend and protect the natural world. It can even think."

Weaver's words began to sound fuzzy as they flowed from his mouth in a mist of whispers enveloping her mind. She blinked and shook her head.

"Maybe he's hypnotising me somehow?" She wondered to herself, "Maybe he's a Prince and I'm really Cinders!"

She smiled as if she was dreaming.

"Think? Did you ... Say.. think?" Becks forced this out trying to sound normal but she was definitely beginning to feel decidedly drowsy under that sick-coloured light.

"Oh yes," continued Weaver in his mellifluous voice, "thinking comes easy to hyphae. That's the name you've given to the filaments beneath the fruiting bodies. It's walking that's really hard."

"W-walking?" Stuttered Becks, a sort of sweet country sleep descending over her like candyfloss, her eyes half closed and a warm feeling oozing across her feet and legs.

"Yes", replied the Doctor, almost hissing, "walking is a miracle humans and animals have mastered, a wonder you really take for granted. OK, slime fungi can move a bit, a sort of wet crawl I guess, but despite their heroic efforts, it takes them forever to get anywhere. Walking was the answer, the answer we've perfected in this lab Miss Becks!"

"I don't under .... stand," whispered Becks, now barely able to speak. The warm feeling had spread across her entire body and she began to feel her face heat up and her skin soften, as if someone had poured hot snow over her head and into her mouth.

"You will Miss. Becks. You will."

Weaver stood up and pointed the green lamp directly over the now comatose girl. He gently stroked her hair, the only part of her that hadn't changed. 

"We leave the hair you know, it's so much like us already", he explained to his guest, but Becks wasn't Becks anymore.

A layer of mossy fur and white strands had covered her completely from head to toe, a green, brown and soily suit of roots, which had climbed onto her legs gradually like a vine from the mat of thick mycelium carpeting the lab floor.

Doctor Weaver removed his white coat and trousers to reveal his own organic fruiting body of threads and strings, his face now reverting to it's natural fungal state. 

He stopped and whispered into the Becks-thing's ear hole.

"Stand".

The new Becks obeyed and rose from the earthy settee she had sat on, spare roots tearing away as she stood in front of Weaver.

Behind them more fruiting bodies were slowly rising from their tanks of moss and blood and stepping out to join the new member of their kind, their wooly footsteps squelching softly as they moved.

They all touched her.

They all kissed her. 

Feeling their fingers, the girl once known as Becks was now something else; a forest being, a humus child in a wild loom of intelligent dominion.

Her core remained, her mind, even her soul, but it was now changed utterly, composted and connected to the gazillion fungal threads, which spanned across the globe, in the towns, in the woods, in the jungles, in the oceans and in the trees. Even in the rain, a legion of dreaming spores pouring over the earth. It was their time.

Like millions more in labs everywhere sequestered to mycelium, that real AI, she was lain in her own tank to sleep, gain strength and join the ever-growing walking web: the sporing of another destroying angel secretly waiting to open her eyes and walk.