What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

the problem with many fungus-takes-over-the-brain stories is that the interfaces are deeply incompatible, and I started thinking about how an intelligent fungus would deal with that. What would it be like the first time you realized that these creatures you were puppeting around communicated not by something sensible and straightforward like chemical messages or even photophores but by forcing air over their flaps and modulating the airflow? Light receptors in enclosed balls of fluid, okay, that’s not so weird, but everything’s wired backward and upside down and you have to figure out how to crack that encoding? Good God. You’d have to be a genius to work all that out. A genius with a lot of time on your hands. Of course, the neat trick with fungi is that most of their cells are undifferentiated, so if the majority of cells were effectively brain cells … okay, that could give you a really smart mushroom … and if you spend a few centuries practicing on the local wildlife … I am, in all honesty, a little sad they had to kill the tarn. I know why they had to do it, but part of me says, “But what if you saved a hare and had a clean room and cultured the fungus in a medium there? Couldn’t you learn to communicate? Make friends? It’s not malicious; it has no way of knowing that humans really, really hate it when you make dead things walk around.…” But with the technology available in the 1890s, and the screaming atavistic horror bit, well. Can’t blame anybody, really.