Mycelium Ex Machina (Chernobyl)

[Kaelan]

It was long after midnight when Kaelan first stumbled across the article, some obscure piece of fringe research buried in the unindexed corner of a forgotten academic database. The screen glowed pale blue in the dark of his bedroom, casting a cadaverous light on his face as he read, lips parted in breathless silence.

Radiotrophic fungi, the paper claimed. Black, spore-heavy, and thriving on ionizing radiation. It grew in the husks of things long dead: reactor walls, collapsed turbines, and as this paper described, within the hollowed, bone-white corridors of Chernobyl’s sarcophagus. A fungus that consumed death itself and called it nourishment.

Kaelan leaned forward, fingers twitching over the holographic keyboard. Photos accompanied the study—false-color imaging of a thick, pitch-colored growth pushing out of the reactor chamber like coagulated tar, fibrous and slick, pulsing with a hideous vibrancy. The idea gripped him with talon-like fingers:

What if it could change things?

What if it merged with the local wildlife, rabbits, foxes, wolves, and mutated them, not merely into sickly, broken things, but into creatures enhanced, biologically rewritten by radiation and rot?

He envisioned it then, eyes glassy: a new species born from decay, black-eyed and deathless. A fusion of natural instinct and the mutagenic dark.

And somewhere deep in that treacherous mind of his, a plan began to form.

It took longer than he liked to secure clearance, even with Paragon’s pull, a web of forged credentials, scientific white lies, and whispered promises of published papers in reputable journals. He presented himself as a benign researcher specializing in adaptive mycology and post-nuclear ecology. The oversight committee—tired, bureaucratic, distracted—approved the proposal with a stamp that echoed in his memory like a coffin lid closing.

Still, he could not shake the sensation that excited him, crossing into something the earth had long buried for good reason.

The flight to Kyiv was long, uneventful, and drenched in fog. He spent it staring out the window with a growing anticipation blooming within him.

The next morning, an old military van carried him north through the withered countryside, where entire towns lay in ossified stillness, abandoned decades ago, their windows blind and broken, their doors hanging open like the mouths of dead animals.

Chernobyl emerged not as a place, but as a wound in the land.

They arrived at the edge of the exclusion zone just after dusk. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and a dull, bruised twilight cloaked the trees. Forests here grew too fast, too thick. Some trees had bark split open like infected flesh. Others leaned at strange angles, warped by the invisible hand of radiation. Birds did not sing. The silence was alive, vibrating beneath the skin.

Kaelan stepped from the vehicle, his boots crunching over broken glass and soil that smelled faintly metallic. His breath misted in the cold air, though the weather was unseasonably warm.

A dosimeter hung at his hip, ticking softly like a heartbeat.

He stared at the horizon, where the reactor dome loomed over the trees—ancient, vast, and shrouded in scaffolding. A modern sarcophagus encased the old one, but Kaelan swore the very structure breathed.

A handler, a man in a gray suit with sunken eyes and a voice like paper, escorted him through the outer gates. “You will remain within Zone One,” the man said. “You are not to approach the core or enter restricted tunnels. Do not remove your mask. Do not touch the wildlife. Do not speak to the locals.”

“Locals?” Kaelan asked, surprised.

The man did not answer.

They passed a field where flowers grew too large, their petals black-veined, slick with morning dew even though it was nearly evening. A fox watched him from the edge of the brush, its eyes glassy and wrong.

Kaelan clutched the strap of his pack tighter. Somewhere in it was the sterile container meant for fungal samples.

You came here for samples, he reminded himself, but a twinge of nerves began to creep up his spine.

But Chernobyl had its own voice, and even now it whispered to him from the reactor’s shadow. The black fungus was waiting. It always had been.

And he had come, like a pilgrim to a rotten altar, eager to partake in its communion.

But tomorrow, with the sun, he would explore more. In the meantime, he spent the night in the shack of a shelter.


((This thread is open if anyone is interested.))

[Nazariy Moroz]

The dog was not right.

It limped through the dormant grass like a marionette whose strings had been cut and knotted again wrong. Tufts of fur clung to its body in patchy bursts, as if molded onto raw clay. Its eyes, one blue, one too dark to be anything but diseased, watched Nazariy from a distance, unblinking, unafraid. Its pathetic nature somehow endearing.

It had found the half-empty tin of sardines he'd left beside the old turnstile gate near the amusement park, the one twisted into a rusted smile of forgotten joy. He hadn't meant to bait anything. It was just habit. A leftover instinct from another life.

He crouched behind the husk of an overturned bus and held his breath, watching the thing eat. No... not eat. Devour. It wasn't hunger: it was panic, like the meat might vanish back into nightmare if it didn’t get it down fast enough.

A sound rose in Nazariy’s throat.

It wasn’t a growl, not quite. But the air seemed to pull away from it, the way smoke pulls from a too-hot fire. The dog stopped. Sniffed. Turned its head.

That was when he saw it clearly.

The veins beneath its skin pulsed with something wrong. Not blood. Not natural. More like threads of shadow; moving against the flow of life. The creature froze, and for a moment, Nazariy thought they might understand each other. Both freaks in a place the world had buried.

Then he took a step forward.

The dog bolted.

It ran with that awful, lopsided gait. Bones clicking, jaw slack, meat falling in ribbons from its side like it was already halfway to corpsehood. Nazariy didn’t chase it. But he wanted to. And that scared him.

He stood there a long time after the dog had gone, hands balled in his coat pockets, staring at the place where it had been.
He could’ve fed it again. Tried to tame it. Named it something soft.

But he knew how that story would end.

He would touch it too much. Try to keep it close. And one day it would look at him with eyes that said I trust you—and he’d reach for it, and something inside him would twist, and the dog would gasp its last breath. It always did.

+++

It was dusk when he found the paints.


They were in a child’s backpack beneath the skeleton of a crib, in the shadow of an apartment tower cracked down the middle like a broken spine. Most of the tubes were dried, but a few still oozed dull color when squeezed.

He sat on the floor and tested them on the concrete. Red. Blue. Yellow. White. Enough.

The rocks came next.

Pripyat had plenty. Rubble, really. Shards of buildings, teeth of the earth pushed up through sidewalks. But some were smooth, water-worn from the flooded basement of a building that still had party banners hanging in the lobby.

Nazariy carried them in his coat like contraband. He selected each with care: one shaped vaguely like a cat’s head, another that felt warm when he held it too long. One that looked like a curled-up animal, sleeping.

He didn’t know why he did it, not at first. Not until he painted the first one.

A crooked smile. Two uneven eyes. Pink ears. It looked nothing like the dog. Or the cat he'd seen weeks before—a long, low thing with too many toes and a stub tail. But the rock was safe. Harmless. It would never rot in his hands. Never mewl or bite or beg.

He named it Pushka. Set it on the table of the apartment he’d chosen to live in. Fourth floor, room with an east-facing window, where the sunrise cracked the hilly horizon in radioactive gold.

The next rock was green with black spots. He called it Sasha. The third was grey and speckled—Babushka Irina, though he felt a little guilty naming it after her.

By the end of the week, he had twelve.

He arranged them in a circle on the floor. Sometimes he spoke to them in low tones. Not childish babble, but serious words. Updates. Questions. Apologies.

He wasn't lonely.

He was alone, which was different.

Loneliness begged for something to fill it. Aloneness simply was. Like fog. Like death.

But sometimes, when he woke in the middle of the night and the wind outside sounded like it was trying to remember his name, he reached out and touched the rocks. Just to be sure they were still there. That they hadn’t wandered off like the animals always did.

That he hadn’t killed them by mistake.

They were safe.

Safe from him.

+++

He never painted eyes that matched.

That was important.

Because things with matching eyes could see you.

And if they saw you, they might know what you were.

And if they knew…

Well.

He was still deciding whether that mattered.

[Kaelan]

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.

[Nazariy Moroz]

The second time he saw the dog, it was morning.

A yellow-grey dawn bled through the clouds like iodine through gauze, and the trees creaked with wind that never quite touched the ground.

Nazariy had been foraging for wire. He’d found a junked refrigerator the day before with its guts still half-intact, but he forgot all about it when he saw the animal.

Same patchy fur. Same crooked gait. Only now, its ribs showed like the slats of a sunken boat, and one ear was a raw stump. The way it moved was more confident now, or maybe just more desperate. It snuffled along the pavement like it was following a scent.

Nazariy followed it without really deciding to.

He kept low. Moved quiet. Not hunting. Not exactly. More like tracking. He told himself it was just curiosity. He'd been here too long, and silence was starting to chew at the edges of him. Something moving, breathing, being. It was enough to pull him from his routines.

The dog didn’t notice.

It padded past an old bus stop half-swallowed by moss, trotted down a cracked road where birch trees burst through the asphalt like pale bones. Then it stopped. Ears perked.

Nazariy heard it too.

A hiss. A mechanical whine, distant, soft—like a breath being drawn in by something very large, and very old.

Then he saw the figure.

Across the clearing, just past a crumbling sign that still warned, СТОЙ! ЗАРАЖЕНА ЗОНА!—STOP! CONTAMINATED ZONE!—a person in a full radiation suit trudged through the brush.

They moved with purpose. Not fast, but focused. Not like the scavengers who sometimes passed through, wild-eyed and muttering. This one had gear. Packs. A dosimeter that ticked softly in the air. They looked like a ghost in hazmat skin.

The dog froze.

Then, without warning, it turned and began following the figure at a cautious distance.

Nazariy’s pulse kicked up.

He waited. Watched. The suited person didn’t glance back. Just moved forward, steady as a clock. The dog’s head swiveled now and then, ears twitching at sounds only it could hear. And Nazariy stayed in the trees, moving when they moved, stopping when they stopped.

A procession of broken things.

They walked for almost an hour: past the rusted skeletal remains of a hydroelectric station, down a slope thick with nettles and slick with mud. The air smelled of rot and copper. A swampy, marsh-edged part of the river lay ahead, a flat expanse where the world felt soft and sunken.

That’s where the pump station stood.

It was low and long, built half into the earth, like a bunker. Its concrete walls were stained with the memory of rain. A pipe jutted out into the marsh like a broken limb. Reeds whispered secrets no one would believe.

The scientist paused at the door.

They pulled something from a pouch—a key, maybe—and after a moment, the door groaned open. The figure disappeared inside, swallowed by shadow and rust.

Nazariy didn’t move. Neither did the dog.

It had stopped about fifteen meters from the door, head cocked, one paw lifted slightly. Watching.

For a while, all three of them remained as they were. The man underground. The dog at the threshold. Nazariy behind a ruined car, half-submerged in the muck.

Minutes passed. Maybe ten. Maybe twenty.

The dog stepped forward. Slowly. Tail stiff. Its nose hovered inches from the black rectangle of the doorway. It didn’t enter.

Instead, it sat.

Its head tilted again. Listening.

Something shifted in the air. Subtle. A vibration too low to be sound. The dog stood, sneezed once, then turned and padded away without a glance back.

Nazariy remained.

He stared at the doorway. Something about it tugged at him - not fear, not interest. A weight. Like the way heavy rain feels just before it falls.

He didn’t want to go in. But he didn’t want to leave, either.

Instead, he moved to where the dog had been and crouched, fingers grazing the wet earth. The reeds moved, but the wind had died. A dragonfly hovered near his face. Its wings were... wrong. Too slow. Too loud.

He stood and looked down into the stairwell. It was dark. Not pitch dark, just enough light to see a glint of metal railing, the edge of water pooling at the bottom.

The scientist wasn't in view. No sound. No movement.

The dog had left a pawprint in the muck. It was already filling with water.

Nazariy stared at it.

Then, without really knowing why, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a rock—Pushka, the first one, the one with the uneven eyes and the pink ears. He stared at it, thumb brushing the paint that had begun to chip.

“What do you think?” he murmured.

There was no answer.

But the wind picked up again, gently, and it felt like it was trying to pull him forward. Like it was whispering in a voice he almost knew.

He didn’t go down.

Not yet.

Instead, he placed Pushka carefully at the top step, facing the darkness, as if on watch.

Then he turned and walked back the way he’d come.