INVADERS {PART 1}

Day 3

Location = EARTH

Time = XX/XX/2020

Mind = UNSTABLE

The year 2020 Earth has become hell. On the day XX, A great threat arose on humanity. A fungus known as Ophiocordyceps capable of controlling the mind of ants evolved to become capable of controlling humans. Overnight all around the world huge spore cloud were launched. A Million people got infected by this and a billion got affected and everyone asked the same question is this the end?

You wake up in a laboratory trying to find a cure. Your thoughts are put on halt by the sound of your friend. Your friend tells you that you need to have a look outside. As you taking look at the screen, your mind gets clouded by dread. The people controlled by the fungus are gaining intelligence the fungus has already become capable of speech

You hear an announcement from the leader of a group of people controlled by fungus. That they only have one goal self-propagation and dispersal and whoever tries to stop them will be eaten alive or infected. The whole lab goes into panic modes. You see two guards attacking the group with a light machine gun. The guard manages to kill three fungus-infected humans. But as they are about to kill more the fungus release spores using the veins and arteries. One guard gets infected and another one is turned is spore bomb who explodes releasing millions of spores.

You call a remaining guard to go outside and fetch a body. They disagree. So you decide to go with them. There are a lot of bodies right in front of the blast door. After wiping the sweat from your head. You make a simple but effective plan to use hazard suit to go outside while a guard will provide covering fire and you will try to get the best sample possible.

You tell them that you have the advantage here. As the spores can't enter the hazard suit and you have more firepower it will be pretty easy. You are proven wrong when the infected humans start to destroy the cameras. You are amazed and shocked at the same time that how in just a few hours they are getting smarter and smarter.

But now everyone has made their mind to help you as it is the only way to protect humanity. You start to prepare to go outside. When the blast door opens you rush outside straight toward a body of a dead human. But as running toward it, you see the body is changing in some way. You stop about 10 feet (ca. 3 m) away. A member of your team runs straight toward the body and yells at you to move. But as he reaches to pick the body he realizes that the body is releasing concentrated acid. That is an instant melt in the arm that he used to pick the body.

The spores enter his hazard suit from the open part and infect the member of your team. It leaves everyone shocked and vulnerable toward attacks from infected humans. Your whole team is wiped in seconds only you are left alive. You make your way toward blast door. But in your way are 10 infected humans.

You quickly take a sample of spore and grenade belt from the dead guard. That never got a chance to use it. You use two grenades to clear the way and save the remaining. You see only one infected in your way you toss a grenade at it. It manages to catch the grenade and runs toward the blast door.

It again manages to amaze you how smart a mindless fungus can be. You enter the laboratory using blast door to see how much damage it caused the are relieved to see it only bend it a tiny bit. You close the blast door and tells the people inside to start decontamination. You decontaminate your hazard suit and yourself. You are sad and happy at the same time sad because all of your team got wiped out. But happy because their due to the fungus sample their death will not go in vain determined to make the cure you enter the testing facility.

Inside the facility, You used a special microscope to julienne infected ants into slices that were just 50 nanometers thick—a thousandth of the width of a human hair. You scanned each slice, compiled the images into a three-dimensional model, and painstakingly annotated which bits were an ant and which bits were fungus and concluded that when the fungus first enters its host, it exists as single cells that float around in human bloodstream, budding off new copies of themselves. You found that these single cells start working together. They connect to each other by building short tubes, of a kind that has only ever been seen before in fungi that infect plants and ants. Hooked up in this way, they can communicate and exchange nutrients.

In the end, you conclude that they have use spores in the air to communicate with each other on the host level. It's quite inefficient but only way for fungus to communicate. You worked on this for months your lab is getting power through solar panels. You found that it's quite easy to stop the spores most fungus and molds are heat-sensitive and destroyed by heat treatments at temperatures of 140-160 °F (ca. 71 °C).

You open the blast door. The infected rush inside the lab. But you are already prepared for them. You light up a torch and place it under a fire detector. Hot water starts to sprinkle the infected scream in pain and dies. The spores are also killed. You start the sprinkling system around the lab. Most of infected and spores are eradicated in instant. The spores start to move away. However, you run out of luck and hot water.

Seeing this as a chance a huge cloud filled with spores and infected rush toward the lab. Out of nowhere plane with a sprinkler. Start to sprinkle water over the wave of infected. The whole cloud is gone in an instant. You take a deep breath and exhale. But one only a single infected managed to survive and bits the hazard suit off from your arm.

You get infected. You lose control of your body and fall into the depth of your mind. You see your self in the third person. As the military rushed in to help you. You attack them. They pin you down. A scientist in hazard suit looks at you and says that you have saved them, and he takes a look at your face and shoots you in the head mercifully. An unknown explosion occurs and throws your body away from the room. You see your body getting burned by the flame.

Yet where you are now you see yourself and are unaffected by what you saw because now you are at peace all the human emotions are lost. You are no longer who you were. You see around yourself and see nothing. But darkness leading to empty void you close your eyes and remind your self that this is not the end.