Mycelium Ex Machina (Chernobyl)

[Kaelan]

It was long after midnight when Kaelan first stumbled across the article, some obscure piece of fringe research buried in the unindexed corner of a forgotten academic database. The screen glowed pale blue in the dark of his bedroom, casting a cadaverous light on his face as he read, lips parted in breathless silence.

Radiotrophic fungi, the paper claimed. Black, spore-heavy, and thriving on ionizing radiation. It grew in the husks of things long dead: reactor walls, collapsed turbines, and as this paper described, within the hollowed, bone-white corridors of Chernobyl’s sarcophagus. A fungus that consumed death itself and called it nourishment.

Kaelan leaned forward, fingers twitching over the holographic keyboard. Photos accompanied the study—false-color imaging of a thick, pitch-colored growth pushing out of the reactor chamber like coagulated tar, fibrous and slick, pulsing with a hideous vibrancy. The idea gripped him with talon-like fingers:

What if it could change things?

What if it merged with the local wildlife, rabbits, foxes, wolves, and mutated them, not merely into sickly, broken things, but into creatures enhanced, biologically rewritten by radiation and rot?

He envisioned it then, eyes glassy: a new species born from decay, black-eyed and deathless. A fusion of natural instinct and the mutagenic dark.

And somewhere deep in that treacherous mind of his, a plan began to form.

It took longer than he liked to secure clearance, even with Paragon’s pull, a web of forged credentials, scientific white lies, and whispered promises of published papers in reputable journals. He presented himself as a benign researcher specializing in adaptive mycology and post-nuclear ecology. The oversight committee—tired, bureaucratic, distracted—approved the proposal with a stamp that echoed in his memory like a coffin lid closing.

Still, he could not shake the sensation that excited him, crossing into something the earth had long buried for good reason.

The flight to Kyiv was long, uneventful, and drenched in fog. He spent it staring out the window with a growing anticipation blooming within him.

The next morning, an old military van carried him north through the withered countryside, where entire towns lay in ossified stillness, abandoned decades ago, their windows blind and broken, their doors hanging open like the mouths of dead animals.

Chernobyl emerged not as a place, but as a wound in the land.

They arrived at the edge of the exclusion zone just after dusk. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and a dull, bruised twilight cloaked the trees. Forests here grew too fast, too thick. Some trees had bark split open like infected flesh. Others leaned at strange angles, warped by the invisible hand of radiation. Birds did not sing. The silence was alive, vibrating beneath the skin.

Kaelan stepped from the vehicle, his boots crunching over broken glass and soil that smelled faintly metallic. His breath misted in the cold air, though the weather was unseasonably warm.

A dosimeter hung at his hip, ticking softly like a heartbeat.

He stared at the horizon, where the reactor dome loomed over the trees—ancient, vast, and shrouded in scaffolding. A modern sarcophagus encased the old one, but Kaelan swore the very structure breathed.

A handler, a man in a gray suit with sunken eyes and a voice like paper, escorted him through the outer gates. “You will remain within Zone One,” the man said. “You are not to approach the core or enter restricted tunnels. Do not remove your mask. Do not touch the wildlife. Do not speak to the locals.”

“Locals?” Kaelan asked, surprised.

The man did not answer.

They passed a field where flowers grew too large, their petals black-veined, slick with morning dew even though it was nearly evening. A fox watched him from the edge of the brush, its eyes glassy and wrong.

Kaelan clutched the strap of his pack tighter. Somewhere in it was the sterile container meant for fungal samples.

You came here for samples, he reminded himself, but a twinge of nerves began to creep up his spine.

But Chernobyl had its own voice, and even now it whispered to him from the reactor’s shadow. The black fungus was waiting. It always had been.

And he had come, like a pilgrim to a rotten altar, eager to partake in its communion.

But tomorrow, with the sun, he would explore more. In the meantime, he spent the night in the shack of a shelter.


((This thread is open if anyone is interested.))

[Nazariy Moroz]

The dog was not right.

It limped through the dormant grass like a marionette whose strings had been cut and knotted again wrong. Tufts of fur clung to its body in patchy bursts, as if molded onto raw clay. Its eyes, one blue, one too dark to be anything but diseased, watched Nazariy from a distance, unblinking, unafraid. Its pathetic nature somehow endearing.

It had found the half-empty tin of sardines he'd left beside the old turnstile gate near the amusement park, the one twisted into a rusted smile of forgotten joy. He hadn't meant to bait anything. It was just habit. A leftover instinct from another life.

He crouched behind the husk of an overturned bus and held his breath, watching the thing eat. No... not eat. Devour. It wasn't hunger: it was panic, like the meat might vanish back into nightmare if it didn’t get it down fast enough.

A sound rose in Nazariy’s throat.

It wasn’t a growl, not quite. But the air seemed to pull away from it, the way smoke pulls from a too-hot fire. The dog stopped. Sniffed. Turned its head.

That was when he saw it clearly.

The veins beneath its skin pulsed with something wrong. Not blood. Not natural. More like threads of shadow; moving against the flow of life. The creature froze, and for a moment, Nazariy thought they might understand each other. Both freaks in a place the world had buried.

Then he took a step forward.

The dog bolted.

It ran with that awful, lopsided gait. Bones clicking, jaw slack, meat falling in ribbons from its side like it was already halfway to corpsehood. Nazariy didn’t chase it. But he wanted to. And that scared him.

He stood there a long time after the dog had gone, hands balled in his coat pockets, staring at the place where it had been.
He could’ve fed it again. Tried to tame it. Named it something soft.

But he knew how that story would end.

He would touch it too much. Try to keep it close. And one day it would look at him with eyes that said I trust you—and he’d reach for it, and something inside him would twist, and the dog would gasp its last breath. It always did.

+++

It was dusk when he found the paints.


They were in a child’s backpack beneath the skeleton of a crib, in the shadow of an apartment tower cracked down the middle like a broken spine. Most of the tubes were dried, but a few still oozed dull color when squeezed.

He sat on the floor and tested them on the concrete. Red. Blue. Yellow. White. Enough.

The rocks came next.

Pripyat had plenty. Rubble, really. Shards of buildings, teeth of the earth pushed up through sidewalks. But some were smooth, water-worn from the flooded basement of a building that still had party banners hanging in the lobby.

Nazariy carried them in his coat like contraband. He selected each with care: one shaped vaguely like a cat’s head, another that felt warm when he held it too long. One that looked like a curled-up animal, sleeping.

He didn’t know why he did it, not at first. Not until he painted the first one.

A crooked smile. Two uneven eyes. Pink ears. It looked nothing like the dog. Or the cat he'd seen weeks before—a long, low thing with too many toes and a stub tail. But the rock was safe. Harmless. It would never rot in his hands. Never mewl or bite or beg.

He named it Pushka. Set it on the table of the apartment he’d chosen to live in. Fourth floor, room with an east-facing window, where the sunrise cracked the hilly horizon in radioactive gold.

The next rock was green with black spots. He called it Sasha. The third was grey and speckled—Babushka Irina, though he felt a little guilty naming it after her.

By the end of the week, he had twelve.

He arranged them in a circle on the floor. Sometimes he spoke to them in low tones. Not childish babble, but serious words. Updates. Questions. Apologies.

He wasn't lonely.

He was alone, which was different.

Loneliness begged for something to fill it. Aloneness simply was. Like fog. Like death.

But sometimes, when he woke in the middle of the night and the wind outside sounded like it was trying to remember his name, he reached out and touched the rocks. Just to be sure they were still there. That they hadn’t wandered off like the animals always did.

That he hadn’t killed them by mistake.

They were safe.

Safe from him.

+++

He never painted eyes that matched.

That was important.

Because things with matching eyes could see you.

And if they saw you, they might know what you were.

And if they knew…

Well.

He was still deciding whether that mattered.