Yesterday, 10:07 PM
CHERNOBYL, ZONE ONE – LATE MORNING
Kaelan was sweating before he’d even stepped out of the transport van, though the air was cold and thin. A fine mist hung over the Zone like breath held too long. The sun, diluted and milky behind a veil of cloud, offered no warmth, only light. It bleached everything: the ruins of the worker housing, the exposed skeletons of cooling towers, the broken remains of playgrounds left behind like the bones of children.
Today, he was permitted into the deeper areas of the exclusion zone: Zone One proper. Not into the reactor itself, thankfully, but close enough that the map they gave him was marked with red zones. The radiation would spike unpredictably, the handler had warned. They spoke in metrics and millisieverts, in exposure windows and decay rates, but all Kaelan heard was closer than comfort allows.
He tightened the straps of his respirator, adjusted the hood of his bio-suit, and moved carefully through the remains of the facility perimeter. His Geiger counter pulsed at irregular intervals—fast, then slow, then fast again, as though the earth beneath him breathed in radiation and exhaled menace.
Kaelan’s goal was modest: he didn’t want heroics. He didn’t want the famous chamber or the molten relics still glowing beneath the sarcophagus. He wanted the edges—the forgotten, dripping, borderline spaces where entropy reigned. He followed the old utility lines, their casings rotted and curled like burned skin, until he reached what had once been an underground pump station. Half-collapsed, sunken into the marshy ground, it looked like a mouth waiting for something soft to crawl in.
He descended slowly. The metal stairs moaned under his weight, flaked with rust and something darker: lichen, or blood, or time. Inside, the air was damp and metallic, warm with unseen heat. His Geiger meter ticked faster. Good. This was the kind of place that might play host to the fungus he sought: Cladosporium radiotolerans, or some hybrid yet unnamed.
Mold clung to the walls—green, yellow, even violet. Not the thick black bloom he’d seen in reactor images, but still strange, misshapen things. Filamentous growths spiraled outward in fractal arms, fuzzed and fibrous, as though they’d started reaching for something and forgotten what.
He scraped a few samples with gloved hands, sealing them in sterilized tubes then muttered notes into his wrist recorder. “Colonies present, but inconsistent in pigmentation. Possible micro-evolution. Unknown saturation. Not the core strain.”
Disappointment settled into his stomach like a cold stone. It wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t enough. And then he heard it.
A sound from above—too heavy for the wind, too soft for machinery. Wet paws on ash-covered concrete. Kaelan turned, heart stuttering, hand on his Geiger counter like it might become a weapon.
At the edge of the crumbling entryway, haloed in the white sunlight like a specter, stood a dog.
It was long-limbed, underfed to the point of appearing skinned in places. One of its front legs was longer than the other, bent wrong, and it moved with a jerking, almost human gait. Its left eye was brown. The other was a milky blue.
The dog stared at him.
Kaelan froze, breath thick behind his mask. His instincts screamed at him to move, but his limbs felt locked. The dog did not growl. It did not bare its teeth. It simply watched him. Then, after a moment that stretched too long, it turned and loped away—back into the ruin and the green-shadowed brush.
Kaelan remained motionless for a full minute.
Then, carefully, he turned back to his work. He told himself the thing was just a dog. A feral stray. Perhaps half-blind. Mutation was not uncommon out here. There were files on it. Statistics. Nothing mystical about it.
He took three more samples—some from a slick pipe overhead, one from a patch of yellow-veined lichen growing in the shape of a handprint.
Still no sign of the black fungus.
But spores were spores, and what they became under stress... well, that was the point of experiments, wasn't it? He sealed the samples, turned off his recorder, and started back toward the surface.
Behind him, in the murk, the Geiger counter began to tick again—faster now.
He did not look back.
Kaelan was sweating before he’d even stepped out of the transport van, though the air was cold and thin. A fine mist hung over the Zone like breath held too long. The sun, diluted and milky behind a veil of cloud, offered no warmth, only light. It bleached everything: the ruins of the worker housing, the exposed skeletons of cooling towers, the broken remains of playgrounds left behind like the bones of children.
Today, he was permitted into the deeper areas of the exclusion zone: Zone One proper. Not into the reactor itself, thankfully, but close enough that the map they gave him was marked with red zones. The radiation would spike unpredictably, the handler had warned. They spoke in metrics and millisieverts, in exposure windows and decay rates, but all Kaelan heard was closer than comfort allows.
He tightened the straps of his respirator, adjusted the hood of his bio-suit, and moved carefully through the remains of the facility perimeter. His Geiger counter pulsed at irregular intervals—fast, then slow, then fast again, as though the earth beneath him breathed in radiation and exhaled menace.
Kaelan’s goal was modest: he didn’t want heroics. He didn’t want the famous chamber or the molten relics still glowing beneath the sarcophagus. He wanted the edges—the forgotten, dripping, borderline spaces where entropy reigned. He followed the old utility lines, their casings rotted and curled like burned skin, until he reached what had once been an underground pump station. Half-collapsed, sunken into the marshy ground, it looked like a mouth waiting for something soft to crawl in.
He descended slowly. The metal stairs moaned under his weight, flaked with rust and something darker: lichen, or blood, or time. Inside, the air was damp and metallic, warm with unseen heat. His Geiger meter ticked faster. Good. This was the kind of place that might play host to the fungus he sought: Cladosporium radiotolerans, or some hybrid yet unnamed.
Mold clung to the walls—green, yellow, even violet. Not the thick black bloom he’d seen in reactor images, but still strange, misshapen things. Filamentous growths spiraled outward in fractal arms, fuzzed and fibrous, as though they’d started reaching for something and forgotten what.
He scraped a few samples with gloved hands, sealing them in sterilized tubes then muttered notes into his wrist recorder. “Colonies present, but inconsistent in pigmentation. Possible micro-evolution. Unknown saturation. Not the core strain.”
Disappointment settled into his stomach like a cold stone. It wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t enough. And then he heard it.
A sound from above—too heavy for the wind, too soft for machinery. Wet paws on ash-covered concrete. Kaelan turned, heart stuttering, hand on his Geiger counter like it might become a weapon.
At the edge of the crumbling entryway, haloed in the white sunlight like a specter, stood a dog.
It was long-limbed, underfed to the point of appearing skinned in places. One of its front legs was longer than the other, bent wrong, and it moved with a jerking, almost human gait. Its left eye was brown. The other was a milky blue.
The dog stared at him.
Kaelan froze, breath thick behind his mask. His instincts screamed at him to move, but his limbs felt locked. The dog did not growl. It did not bare its teeth. It simply watched him. Then, after a moment that stretched too long, it turned and loped away—back into the ruin and the green-shadowed brush.
Kaelan remained motionless for a full minute.
Then, carefully, he turned back to his work. He told himself the thing was just a dog. A feral stray. Perhaps half-blind. Mutation was not uncommon out here. There were files on it. Statistics. Nothing mystical about it.
He took three more samples—some from a slick pipe overhead, one from a patch of yellow-veined lichen growing in the shape of a handprint.
Still no sign of the black fungus.
But spores were spores, and what they became under stress... well, that was the point of experiments, wasn't it? He sealed the samples, turned off his recorder, and started back toward the surface.
Behind him, in the murk, the Geiger counter began to tick again—faster now.
He did not look back.
![[Image: Kaelan-Signature-1.png]](http://thefirstage.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Kaelan-Signature-1.png)