INFECTED
Asteroids rained down, destroying and distorting everything. The Eurasian continental plate had burst. Rivers ran dry or found a new bed. The Mediterranean Sea dried up and new coastlines rose. Volcanoes erupted. Deserts full of red dust spread. Then came a new Ice Age and astronomic death.
All of this was inconsequential compared to the horrors to come. Embedded in the asteroids, deep within its carbon bonds and iron crystals, was evolution in its purest form: The Primer. A mysterious substance that leaked from the craters years after impact. It rose as a black mist, embedding microscopic spores into organic matter. The spores unraveled and coiled in fractal loops around the very DNA of its host. Adding nothing, but instead rebooting its genetic code and opening alternative pathways to corrupt.
The Primer infected, rejected and optimized a new species.
It was the birth of Homo Degenesis.
Specters emerged from the shadows of each crater. Tortured creatures with pale skin stretched tautly across fist-sized tumors. Spikes jutting from distorted frames. Eyes sewn shut yet fraught with visions of past and future.
Better adjusted than the old Homo Sapiens and imbued with psychic abilities beyond all imagination, Homo Degenesis rose to the top of the food chain. He saw himself as part of the Earth’s consciousness, able to bring the collective to Humankind, to amalgamate the spirits. Many in one. Already, his claws reached for Mankind’s ankle – just one jerk, and it would fall from its throne.
But then, resistance arose. Mankind wasn’t about to give up its position without a fight.
SEPSIS
A few decades after the Eshaton, there is no life anywhere close to the craters. The Primer coated the glazed hills like a varnish. It persevered; fungi spores hiding within hollows. Sunken into the dust. Carried upon the wind and ash.
The infection had begun.
When humans first saw the fungal infection, they thought the earth itself was rotting. They called it “Sepsis”.
Years later, fungal tomentum blanketed the craters. Its tendrils had sunk deep into the earth and spun into a wool-like mycelium that spread out in circular bursts. As programmed by The Primer, the mycelium pumped nutrients to the surface until it reached a critical mass. The ground swelled, the surface rupturing as fungi sprung from the cracks into the open air. The fungi quickly blossomed, jutting out all along the ridges in rich, fist-sized cusps of white.
Within a day, these caps hardened and deteriorated to a dull gray. A skeleton of dainty veins emerged. The cusps, now brittle as autumn leaves, rustled in the wind. Spore clouds rose as they finally tore, dissipating and swirling into mist and then nothingness.
Over the next few months, the mycelium exhausted the earth and slowly expanded from the crater’s center. The dry, flaky ground crumbled in its wake and subsided back into the crater. Meanwhile, the mycelium kept growing, working its way farther until yet another fungal bloom. The cycle continued and the mycelium field grew, ring by ring.
After years of equal growth and erosion, spore fields are strewn across almost every surface in the landscape, each reaching hundreds of meters in diameter. Concentric valleys and walls have emerged like ripples from a stone dropped into a once still pond.
MOTHER SPORE FIELDS
The largest spore fields are kilometers across. The Sepsis hangs above them in veils, billowing in the wind like banners. In all probability, they have gone through more than one cycle. A new bloom begins in the center, and the mycelium keeps burrowing into the ground until it reaches nutrient-rich levels of earth. New rings form on top of old ones, deeper this time; the walls growing higher. The field’s concentric shape becomes more clearly visible. Cycle by cycle, the field expands.
Around the same time, the first magnetic anomalies emerge. Compass needles shakily point to the center. And with that, the transformation into a Mother Spore Field is complete.
BURN
A Mother Spore Field’s bloom gives birth to cusps of a dusty purple. The outer skin is tougher, so the cusps can be plucked without bursting at the slightest touch. Within, they carry the seed for forcing Mankind under The Primer’s spell. Those who inhale or ingest the mother spores are hurtled onto a journey beyond human comprehension. They traverse spheres of cascading color, and find themselves orbiting a resplendent sun made of the basest and purest emotion. Cold suddenly becomes bearable. Hunger is just a dying star within the brain’s neuron galaxy.
The mother spores are called Burn. They are a powerful drug, but most of all, they are a threat.
PHENOTYPE
Burn burns. Sinking through the pores of their skin, the spores enter the blood stream. Then like a shock wave from an explosion, Burn spreads and consumes, expanding its radius of infection out from the initial point of impact. The first symptoms soon begin to show. Tiny veins branch out, mingling with body hair and surfacing on the skin in red circular rashes. The rashes flake and flare as more lines break the skin, aligning and colliding to form distinct symbols.
There are seven known symbols that brand the Burned, each hailing from a different region. One is blossoming on the bodies of those from the Borca region. Another marks all those who grew up in the shadows of Franka’s pheromone vents. The same is true for Pollen, the Balkhan, Purgare and Africa. The symbols all vary in details, but in the end, they are all marks of the same origin and fate.
Medicine is at a loss. Even on an epigenetic level, their researchers were unable to identify the root of the symbols.Why does each region react differently to the Burn? If the symbols are not determined by genotype, the genetic makeup of the organism, then they must be reacting to the host’s phenotype and the genetic evolutionary traits unique to each environment and its native people. Yet could all seven cultural symbols stem from the same source?