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Stephanie
lifted the spore print from its mother sheet with tweezers and placed it onto a
sterilized agar bedding within a small glass petri dish at her elbow. She
lowered its snug-glass lid and typed into a label maker.
(Amanita
Muscaria. Denali State Park, Alaska.
Lat.-
62.014/Lon. -154.808. 10/23/1988)
The label ejected and after approving of its position on the lid she slid the lozenge down a tapered
column in a hermetically sealed shipping container. It nestled amongst the
other samples with a satisfying hiss of air. Pulling her face mask down, she
slid back her chair and admired the rows of little chambers, each hosting thousands
of lifeseed in stasis, each of these capable of fanning out into the largest
living organism known to earth. Her accompanying notes sat beside the black box
in lines of her crisp, unembellished shorthand. She placed the notebook into
the container.
The
week's cataloging for the University had been completed the day before and she
was now free to help her uncle Jerry with a job he was commissioned for outside
of the college; collecting mycelia and spore samples from North American fungi
to be sent to the Svalbard seed bank in Sweden, a steel vault of flora spawn soon
to be sealed beneath two hundred meters of permafrost. Maybe a spore hatched in
my head years ago, she thought, spread its little tendrils through my moldy
brain, became a brain within a brain. It might explain the grotesque and alien visions of late: heads rived open with chiseled stones; rotting corpses animated with the phosphorescent
fire-fight of microbes at war. And, how about your just fucking crazy Stevie, the voice piped.
She
nodded, scratched her head, and stopped mid-yawn to lean in closely
to the shipping container with narrowed eyes. Picking up her tweezers she
reached into the rows of samples and lifted slowly. A large red fire-ant
dangled from the tines, pinned by its rear legs. She held it up to the light
for a moment as it struggled, before dropping it into a spare beaker on the table
and sealing the lid. Stephanie stood, closed the container, spun the sealing
valve, removed the remaining atmosphere with a small pump, then walked
across the room, hung her white smock on a hook, turned off the lights, and
left the lab.
