Mycelium Ex Machina (Chernobyl)

[Kaelan]

Kaelan watched as this local took the specimen pouch with a tenderness that sent an unfamiliar pang of guilt through him. Not because he’d done something wrong, but because the man clearly believed he had.

He opened his mouth to object. To explain the purpose of sterilized containment, but closed it again. No explanation would help. Not here. Not with this one.

When the stranger spoke again, “You zippered him,” Kaelan flinched inwardly. He felt the heat of embarrassment crawl up his neck despite the cold. His breath rasped inside the mask.

“Well, it’s protocol,” he mumbled, too softly to sound convincing. “Containment standards. It's not personal.”

The man didn’t argue. He just… accepted it. Forgiveness granted on behalf of a rock with a name.

Kaelan had heard of unstable people before. Colleagues who cracked under pressure, researchers driven mad by self-funded isolation, or the outright insane locked up in asylums (he checked into it for a while). But this was different. There was no static in the man’s eyes. No manic twitching. He wasn’t broken. He was… aligned. With something. Something Kaelan couldn’t see.

Then came the words that made his heart catch: “I know what you’re looking for. The black that hums.”

Kaelan straightened, eyes narrowing slightly despite his fear. He’d never described it that way. No paper ever had. Not even the old Soviet ones buried in half-redacted files. Hums? Fungi didn’t hum. They didn’t vibrate or emit sound, at least not in ways human ears could detect. Unless… it was a metaphor. Or a reference to spore dispersal patterns? Bioacoustic fields? Maybe electromagnetic feedback from radiation-rich environments?

The man turned and began to walk away, calling over his shoulder.

Kaelan stood frozen for one long, stupid moment. Every part of him screamed to let the man go. To turn back. Return to the van. Seal up the samples. Report the encounter. Leave.

But he also knew—knew in his gut, where real things live, that if he lost this thread, he would never find it again.

“…Wait,” Kaelan called, catching up before he could change his mind. “Yes. Alright. I’ll come with you.”

He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth, but didn’t take them back. As they walked, Kaelan found himself speaking not with confidence, but with the scattered rhythm of a man trying not to think about what he was doing.

“So, uh, what should I call you?” he asked, glancing sideways. “If you don’t mind me asking. I’m Kaelan. Dr. Kaelan Muller. Geneticist.”

Silence stretched. He filled it.

“You’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you?”

“I mean… I assume. You seem to know your way around better than the guides.”

“I didn’t even think anyone lived here anymore. Not legally, I mean.”

The words spilled out, stuttering and uneven. It was either talk or scream. They passed beneath twisted trees and into the shadow of the ruined tower blocks. Concrete husks with windows like open mouths. The air shifted. The damp bite of marsh gave way to the dry cold of still air. It was quieter here. Protected.

The man led him into a building’s broken shell, stepping through a doorway whose frame had warped into a permanent lean.

Inside, it was strangely preserved. Dust-coated, but dry. The shattered glass had been swept into a corner. Rusted cans and collapsed furniture marked signs of habitation, not recent, but not ancient either.

Kaelan’s Geiger counter, which had been ticking steadily for hours, slowed. He exhaled, shoulders loosening just a fraction. Radiation wasn’t gone, but the spike had eased. That comforted him more than it should have.

He slipped his pack off and rested it on a broken chair, flexing his fingers inside his gloves. His voice was calmer now, though still faintly tremulous.

“This is… safer than I expected,” he admitted. “I appreciate you leading me here. Really. If this is near where you’ve seen the colonies growing, I’d love to learn more. Even observational notes could be useful. Especially if there’s a correlation with local fauna or water lines. I’m interested in anything that seems to… interact with it. You mentioned humming?”

Kaelan offered a smile again: tight, uncertain. An awkward attempt at being friendly. “Just trying to understand what we’re dealing with, is all.”

[Nazariy Moroz]

He moved softly over ash-slick concrete, crunching once on broken glass, but he didn’t slow. When Kaelan asked for his name, he gave no response, only adjusted the pouch in his coat and continued on. At one point, he made a sound. Not quite a hum, not quite a sigh. As if dismissing a thought before it could form. When the tower loomed ahead, he paused briefly under its dark frame and tilted his head to one side, listening.

Then he murmured to himself, “Shayka’s awake.”

He stepped through the threshold of a former residential building and into the stairwell without looking back. His hand brushed the rusted banister once, then recoiled. He climbed in silence. On the fourth floor, he opened a warped door with both hands and stepped aside so Kaelan could enter. Inside the walls were covered in layered fabric, some strips dyed faintly with plant pigment, others sheer and unraveling. A threadbare couch with no legs sat low against the wall, propped on stones. Bones of rodents were arranged like delicate trophies along an old bookcase beside brightly painted stones in rows of six.

Nazariy crossed the room and set the specimen pouch carefully on a flat tin tray beside the painted rocks.
“You’re loud,” he said finally. “With your words. You woke Shayka.”

He moved a crooked chair from the wall, then gestured.

“Sit.” He waited a moment before repeating himself more firmly than before: "Sit."

He walked to the window and pulled the curtain closed. Then stood still for a moment, head bowed “She’s walking close tonight.”

He turned.

“I’ll show you the black in the morning,” he said, voice distant. “After Shayka goes quiet again.”

Nazariy sat cross-legged on the floor beside the rocks and picked one up, twirled it, then held it to his ear. After a moment, he whispered to it.

Then he stared at Kaelan again, but said nothing.

[Kaelan]

Kaelan sat because what else was he supposed to do? The chair creaked beneath him like something arthritic and long-neglected, the legs uneven.

The room smelled of fabric and dust. The layered curtains held a dampness that clung to the walls, and the air was thick with the stale rot of forgotten things. Kaelan's eyes kept drifting to the bones, and to the painted stones lined up like quiet judges.

His fingers gripped the edge of his hazmat suit, trying not to look like he wanted to bolt. He told himself he was still in control. That he was indulging the delusion of an unstable man in order to gain access to something scientifically valuable.

“No,” Kaelan said immediately after being informed he had to remain all night. Rising to his feet, the crooked chair groaned and toppled behind him. “No, absolutely not.”

“You’re… Listen, thank you for your help, I appreciate the hospitality, really, but I’ve got the samples I need and I need to get back to my vehicle before dark and, well, it’s already almost..”

He stopped. It was already dark. Still, better to risk nightfall than stay in this… this nest with a man who whispered to rocks and blamed strangers for waking insane monsters.

Kaelan opened the door and descended the stairwell without waiting to hear any protest. The first breath of air outside the apartment felt cleaner. Sharper. The sour tension of the room fell away.

And then it happened. At the base of the stairs, just beyond the warped frame of the outer doorway, something was waiting.

It was not a person nor an animal. It filled the entryway with its shape: vague and wrong with too many folds and no symmetry. Limbs that bent, then unbent. Eyes, or things like them, glimmering like wet beetles on a pile of soft, breathing leather.

Kaelan stopped mid-step. The creature turned its head to look at him. Or some part of what Kaelan took for a head did.

He turned and ran back inside. But somehow, the creature was already there. Waiting for him. A wall of glistening pressure, blocking the path.

Kaelan pivoted, heart slamming against his ribs like it wanted to escape first.

He ran again: side hallway, another stairwell, maybe a back door. His shoes slipped on something sticky he didn’t want to identify. The building tilted around him as his hip hit the floor.

And still… it followed.

He reached a corridor boxed in by two collapsed beams, a dead-end.

And there it was.

The Shayka flowed toward him, gliding on limbs that didn’t step so much as rearrange the air. Its body was black, yes, but not like shadow nor like mold. Like smoke swirled with oil.

Kaelan stumbled backward until his spine hit the wall.

He whimpered, hands flying up in a feeble attempt to protect his face. A sob clawed up from his throat. “No, no, please don’t.. please.” Through the mask of his radiation suit, fogged up from heavy breathing, he could barely discern what happened next.

Its limbs unfolded. Slowly. One reached toward him, delicately, with a fluidity that defied bone and muscle. It touched his shoulder, and he shuddered, waiting for the horrible end to come.

And then it began to pull.

Kaelan felt the fabric of his hazmat suit stretch, then tear. Not with violence, but with hunger. Like the suit itself was being inhaled.

A soft tearing sound, not like cloth, but like paper shredding.

The suit began to peel away in strips, disappearing into the darkness. It didn’t touch skin. Didn’t pierce flesh. It only devoured the suit: inch by inch, thread by thread, from shoulders to knees, until only ragged flaps clung to his shivering frame.

He was left in urine-soaked thermal underlayers, clutching the remnants, too stunned to scream.

Shayka’s body pulsed once, as if satisfied.

And then, without drama or sound, it turned and vanished into the shadows.

Gone.

Just… gone.

Kaelan was frozen, breath coming in shallow bursts, chest fluttering. His knees gave out. He collapsed onto his side in the dirt, shaking on the floor.

It took him nearly five minutes to force himself up. His legs didn’t want to obey. His body was a puppet with cut strings. He stumbled through the dark, scraping his hands on rusted railings, bruising his shin on a concrete step.

When he finally reached the fourth floor again, he didn’t knock.

He just opened the door and stood there, half-dressed, face pale, hair slick with sweat.