The Mushroom Wars

Prologue

First it was the bananas. Listening to the Old Fools you'd think they were like ambrosia, but I don't much trust their opinion on anything. Still though, the history books are clear. The first Daughter of Gaia was Fusaria, and she was gentle. Too gentle.

She slept in the rainforest. She was one of the youngest, most innocent, Daughters. A Brazilian logging company burned scars into the earth for cattle disfigured by millenia of torture and forced breeding. When the fires and fumes from ancient trees reached her home, she wandered out of the forest and into the arms of a Brazilian banana magnate.

We're taught to be thankful for that. Like some kind of grand cosmic mercy that she found a partner to love her. That of all the nonsense we thought made us special, it was really our special brand of love that tugged at the heartstrings of the gods. Like human love is so beautiful that Fusaria couldn't bear to kill us off in droves.

Bullshit. I've met Daughters. I know that they're not nearly so noble. I figure she did the same that everyone else did at the time. She figured that one of the other Daughters of Gaia would wake up before things truly got bad and she languished in rancid opulence just like the rest of those Old Fools.

Ironic really, that she'd fall for a banana man. So it went slow. They sliced off pieces of her and she attacked their monocultures. First she took the Gros Michel. Smarter minds might have stopped to reflect, but our ancestors dreamed of paving the world. One fat berry meant nothing.

She watched us for decades. She watched us pass from ignorance to complacence. She watched the damage we did to the earth with casual disregard. She watched us marching toward our own destruction, the waking of her sisters, like a parent waiting for a child to burn their hand on the stove.

Her children weren't nearly as kind.

They grew up hearing tales about why their mother was put on this earth. What she represented, and just how far humanity had fallen. They attacked our agriculture. They spread out across our staple foods and feed crops, striking the capitalist engine of factory farming. They came for our corn and our wheat and our soybeans, wiping them from the land with exotic blights.

If they chose, they could have snuffed us out in a generation. Crippled our supply chain so badly that we'd die to war over the scraps. The Daughters of Gaia though... they feel time differently. Guess we should be glad for that. Took nearly fifty years, but they wiped out the moronic and destructive agriculture of our ancestors. Split the world in two. Lovers and fighters; scientists and madmen; the worthy and the spiteful.

Of course, they were attacking the monocultures. The more crops you grow together, the less it spreads. Some Old Fools were smart enough to figure that out. Others chose to fight the symptoms with fungicide and poison, which worked for a time. I hear that inside the Fart Bubbles it still works.

I never saw the value in all that tradition. Never understood the people willing to die for some imagined sense of what it meant to be human. Especially when that path is a burning tunnel to a dead end. I suppose some people will walk to the ends of the earth just to see it end with their own eyes.

Next were the sisters Santana and Sirocco – Daughters of wind. They slept deep in the aquifers of North America and North Africa. They stuck close to the arid wastelands, apparently relishing in the same unique sense of irony.

The Old Fools were greedy though, heartless. Even sucking water from the ground in a desert wasn't enough for them. They pushed explosives into the ground, stretched obscene concrete canals across hundreds of miles, and handed over as much of this planet as they could to the barren kingdom of sand.

Santana and Sirocco would describe themselves as tricksters, but the history books have decided to instead portray them as vengeful. I've heard plenty of Old Fools tell me that if Fusaria had known which of her sisters would wake up she would have given us stricter warnings, she would have acted faster to help us avoid calamity.

Personally, I think it's a load of shit. Some left over delusion from the Judeo-Christian worldview that says we belong at the center of the universe, and that deities hold humans in some kind of regard. Fusaria is still around. If she wanted her sisters to be gentle she would have done... something by now.

So the sisters stretched out, crushing our aquifers to dust and sucking water from the land and the air. They'd turn whole cities to tinder, then spread the flames with their laughter. When we fought the flames with water, they turned the earth to sand and desert.

By 2100 humanity was in shambles. In my eyes the Old Fools had already proven us unworthy of salvation. We were down to 3 billion people worldwide, with more squatting in abandoned buildings or stuck in tent cities than not.

Honestly though, the worst part of it all was just how few of us the Daughters actually killed. They were too slow, too lazy, too merciful to snuff us out. No, they just kicked the hornet's nest. We did all the rest of it ourselves.

Then the record gets a bit fuzzy. Most believe Klata was the next to wake, out of the permafrost, but nobody is sure. By that point it was already too late. We set this ball rolling centuries ago, and without human stewardship our lives became poison under our feet.

Pipelines burst, buildings collapsed, acrid waste dripped from abandoned human edifice and soon there were more than we could keep track of. Nobody knows how many there are today, and nobody even knows which Daughters of Gaia are still around, or which are growing their families. Hundreds, thousands maybe.

Humans on the other hand... well we're down to the dregs. Millions of us left maybe. There's no countries any more. At least not in any way that matters.

There's the assholes that live in the fart bubbles – descendents of the even bigger assholes that built them. Then we've got the cowards and the bastards living out of the Broken Memories. The ones too afraid to walk away from the only life they've known, and the ones that survive by leeching off of them. Traitors and sycophants joined the Daughters living in inbred entourages of servitude.

Finally, there's the wanderers and the stoners stuck in the Open Wastes. They're the ones too ornery or too high to make it into one of the other groups. Clearly, I'm a wanderer.

My mother used to tell me that it wasn't too late. She'd tell me bedtime stories that wailed about everything that was lost. She told me that our generation - the hapless sacks born into this godawful mess - could save it.

She whispered the same lie that generation upon generation whispered to their children. With just a little more will, a little more technology, a little more gumption we'd see that salvation was at hand all along. We could lull the Daughters of Gaia back to sleep. We could succeed where every prior generation had failed. We could save humanity.

Frankly?

I'd rather not.