Slime Mould

I’ve spent a long time thinking about to word this. As time’s gone on it’s becoming clear to me that I should be honest about my mistakes, although I have no desire to give my identity away. Still... I can’t just stay silent.

So, should I start this like a talk at a conference? Should I slowly work my way to some massive justification for my life’s work? I could tell you how my work could, potentially, have offered new ways to deliver complex medicines, or offered philosophical insights into the past and future of life’s organisation, or even created blueprints for strange new robotics that would let mankind conquer the stars. Or maybe, perhaps, I should actually be honest.

I studied slime moulds, and I did it because I liked feeling like the smartest person in the room, so I picked a topic few people could challenge me on. The problem was that I was very impressive to most lay people, but within my field I wasn’t particularly well-recognised. I dealt with taxonomic classification and was, for all intents and purposes, a lab assistant. Our field team collected lots of samples and someone had to organise them, categorising the moulds and ordering them, looking for anything that stands out. I’ve joked that I’ve discovered more species than any other scientist, I just never got the credit.

That might actually be true.

But it’s also true that I spent almost all my time running through a fixed battery of tests. Researchers sent me dirt, I developed cultures, tested them and if anything was unusual I would sent it off to a genetics lab for testing. Any papers that got published would have me listed as an author, usually sixth or seventh (I was forever lost in the ‘et al.’). But for almost 99.9% of the time, the tests came back with the same old results. Somewhere above me were other more celebrated scientists who were looking for novel species that might do strange new things. That’s where the robotics and medicine stuff comes from, of course.

Don’t forget, Penicillin was a mould, just like the things I look at.

But I wasn’t saving the world. I was doing the same old shit day in and day out. Mine was the boring work that needed doing to save other people time and money, while I jealously waited for a chance to prove myself to the older academics.

That chance, I thought, came with Melissa.

It started with a small sample of mould sent to me along with hundreds of others, one I would later come to name Melissa after my late sister whose favourite colour was turquoise. To this day I don’t know exactly where Melissa came from, just that the note on her file seemed like a joke to me so I ignored it (researchers occasionally slipped references into the notes for a bit of fun). Either way, Melissa was one of many strange unidentified organisms who we share this world with, picked out of some dark forgotten corner where she had been overlooked, and then shepherded to my small basement-level laboratory. She was a shimmering, almost metallic beauty with vivid pulsing veins spread along her pastel cloudy hues. She looked like a psychedelic explosion caught in time and staring at her microscopic structure felt like being transported to an alien world.

Even at first glance, I knew she was going to be special.

And oh boy was she, starting with the fact she never got a single maze wrong. She could home in on food with remarkable accuracy, the kind you might expect from an actual organism. After about 50 trials I was getting ready to write up the unusual nature of Melissa’s success when I noticed the sample in the maze had what appeared to be some kind of dirt in it. A closer look showed a tiny black orb—the size of a salt-grain—embedded in her bluish flesh. They reminded me an awful lot of a clam’s eyes and acting on a hunch I decided to place some card that obscured the location of the nutrient packet and then run a few more trials.

I remember thinking it was such a stupid idea. If anyone had asked why I’d done it, I would have struggled to come up with a sane idea. Eyes are multicellular and complex. Slime moulds are simple. That kind of specialisation just doesn’t exist in their kingdom, even in the more complex fungi.

But Melissa was full of surprises. What she did next was quite really quite remarkable. She simply crawled up the maze wall, re-grew her eyes (for it was now clear to me that they were eyes) in a new location, and used the vantage point to identify which branch to use before solving the maze all over again. I must have repeated that experiment a hundred times but eventually exhaustion got the better of me and I called it a day. Before I left, I sampled Melissa to grow another dozen samples, providing them with plenty of nutrition to encourage growth. I knew that the next day I’d need to go through an awful lot of very rigorous tests and I very much wanted to be prepared.

When I returned the following morning, I was utterly enthralled to discover that Melissa’s growth was successful. I now had over a dozen independent samples of her which meant I needn’t worry about working with a limited supply. Once again I set off to work and while I can’t go into tremendous detail I will say that Melissa was truly something special. Over time it became obvious to me that she possessed rudimentary powers of information processing and could readily call into effect cellular specialisations with as little as 60 minutes preparation.

Of course that might not sound very incredible to you, but try growing a third eye in one hour and let me know how easy you find it.

And there were more than just eyes. There were special fibres, microscopically shaped like small springs that, under certain electro-chemical signals, could tighten. These were no more than a few nanometres across but in one demonstration Melissa wove hundreds of thousands across a wall (well, a bit of playing card I’d selotaped to the maze) and buckled it to clear a path to food. In another demonstration she used specialised digestive juices to break down a plastic wall, chemically engineering the necessary enzymes to break apart the laminated business card (I had to work with very limited supplies you see).

In another set of trials performed in total darkness, she grew a myriad of tiny hairs across her surface and used them to detect faint vibrations in the air. Not only did she use this to solve the maze in record time (tracking an artificial beeping sound I used to indicate the correct path), but she later used this same trick to recognise sounds like my footprints. Pretty soon Melissa learned to detect the correct path just by the sound of the food packet being dropped into place, regardless of light conditions, so I had to create dummy packets to properly control the experiment!

There was no end to her magic. When I presented her with some acid-resistant plastic (Tupperware to you and I), Melissa developed a series of chitinous hooks to grind and tear it apart. Of course, it took four hours, but it looked quite ferocious when sped up, like a sea of knives come to life.

Fascinatingly, I also found that if I trained one sample of Melissa with half of a puzzle’s solution and trained another sample with the other half, that once combined the two samples would successfully integrate both halves and solve the problem completely. In fact, just a few cells from one sample transferred to another could impart significant knowledge. By the time the day ended, there must have been a large amount of knowledge spread out between the twelve samples. Melissa was a once in a lifetime discovery, and I so desperately wanted her to myself.

I was going to do my tests, I decided, record them appropriately, and have all the proof necessary to show everyone that I was more than just a lab monkey to be overlooked.

I left work that day feeling ecstatic, barely able to contain my excitement. This was the kind of thing that would have people from every department knocking on my door: computer scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, mathematicians, and doctors alike would all want to work with me. I fantasised all evening about cancer-curing moulds trained to detect and consume tumorous tissue, plastic eating organisms solving world pollution, and engineered moulds that could grow enough nutritious fruit to end world hunger.

Unfortunately, the next day I returned to find that someone had nudged the twelve individual samples closer together, possibly looking for more room on one of the shelves in the refrigeration unit. Either way, Melissa sensed herself and reached out across the various dishes—cracking lids where necessary—and reassembled her various parts into a single sample. It was no larger than a dinner plate by the time but it meant none of my individual samples could be tracked. Any hope of continuing specific experiments from the before were dashed, and I had to resolve to start all over again.

Or at least, that was my intention. Unfortunately, some of the tricks Melissa had learned were quite vivacious. Initially I tried lifting her with my latex gloved hands, but soon felt a prick as I slid my finger between the glass shelf and her cold flesh. Pulling my hand away I noticed a small needle like protuberance embedded in my flesh. It was hardly deadly, but afterwards I found myself feeling trepidation at the thought of touching her again. I’d never been stung before, and certainly never by my own work.

Still, a nearby spatula let me pry her away and I quickly set to work with some knives. I’ll admit to feeling a bit reprehensible as I watched Melissa struggle. First, she oozed thick acid to try and melt the knife but that was futile. She tried fixing some of her microscopic filaments to my skin and the handle, perhaps to gain some leverage, but she was far too slow and they snapped pitifully as I sawed away. I watched as her flat, glistening form rippled in display threats, and also saw strange patterns of hooked flesh that looked much like the inside of a shark’s mouth rise and clash against the cold steel to no effect. Eventually, and this was the part I found hardest to deal with, Melissa stopped her attacks and grew even more primitive black eyes and furry patches of ear to watch her own mutilation.

And, of course, to watch me.

She never flinched though, not even after I had separated her into dozens of pieces that (sadly) never stopped trying to reach each other.

After that she became non-compliant. She stopped trying to solve the maze and instead focused solely on me. The only instance of activity I ever saw was when I dropped a small paper clip on the testing area and Melissa assimilated it before I had chance to reach it. I tried pinching it out as she sucked it into her pliable body, but succeeded only in getting stung once more, this time by a far longer and slightly curved proboscis that javelined out towards my hand by a good five or six inches. I laughed at the time, amazed at how there was no end to her marvellous abilities, and simply accepted the loss of stationery. But afterwards I found myself increasingly disappointed with just how difficult it was to get any work done with such a hostile subject.

That was a disappointing day. There was no testing or growth of any kind, just me bumbling about as I presented novel stimuli in the hope of eliciting new behaviours. By the time that day ended I wondered if Melissa had learned as much about me as I had about her, and I sullenly returned the various petri dishes back to the fridge.

That later turned out to be a mistake. The fridge was filled with over a hundred other samples and I returned the following day to find them destroyed. Not only was this a grotesque loss of over three months’ worth of my academic work, but it appeared that Melissa had absorbed precious specimens and contaminated herself along the way. Strange fibrous protrusions crossed various shelves and Melissa, now significantly larger than before, was slowly turning every other sample around her a glistening iridescent shade of turquoise.

I decided that I would no longer be able to do this on my own. Melissa was simply too tenacious and the stress was already robbing me of sleep. I’d barely been in the lab for an hour and already I could feel a headache coming on. The stress and excitement were getting to me, so decided to bring in a colleague to cover for me while I rested. If anything, it’d be good for them to confirm my prior findings.

I reached out to a good friend, whose identity I can no more share than my own, who arrived at my door only a few minutes later. They looked awfully concerned as I sat and explained each and every one of my experiments to them. The poor man was obviously incredulous at my claims, but by this point I was so exhausted and my nose so blocked and my stomach so sore that I had no desire to argue with him.

“Look,” I said. “The sample is in there and it speaks for itself. Just take a look while I catch up on some sleep, and then you can apologise at not trusting me.”

He laughed at that and let me go on my way, probably because I was so clearly tired and dishevelled that he felt the need to humour me. I might have been surprised at how bad I felt at the time, but I’ve long-since been familiar with just how bad sleeplessness and exhaustion can affect the mind and body. Old cuts don’t heal, slight infections grow aggressive, colds are prolonged, headaches more severe… even as I collapsed onto the cot I took a moment to consider just how badly swollen Melissa’s stings were. They throbbed and ached, stinking of infection, and I decided I’d need a course of antibiotics if they showed no sign of healing by the time I woke up. Then, with blurry vision and a pulsing headache, I quickly drifted off to thoughts of Nobel prizes.

For the first time in two nights, I found myself dreaming. They were profoundly unusual dreams, even for someone who studies slime moulds all day, looking much like beautiful fractal patterns and brightly coloured shimmering flesh. It was as if someone had turned a living person into some kind of modern art, taking the vivid and rich purples of bruised flesh and the pallid sickly yellow of jaundiced skin and intertwined them, weaving a tapestry out of threaded skin and nerves. It was all a dizzying kaleidoscope of abstract sensations and images that left me feeling deeply sick, so much so that the first thing I did when I awoke was vomit into a nearby wastebasket.

God, what a rancid mix that was, that which fell sloppily out of my open mouth as I shook feverishly over the bin, barely able to hold myself upright. There were visible blood vessels buried in that strange rainbow coloured spew, thick blue capillaries that shivered and moved like dying fish. I decided in that moment that I desperately needed to visit the doctor and went to tell my colleague about my need to leave work (smiling to myself that I’d also get to hear him tell me I was right about the miracle mould) only to be confused when I saw him lying on the floor through the glass partition.

Somehow, and I’m still not sure how, my friend must have slipped during the testing. On the countertop was a slick pool of blood and his head was opened from a nasty gash just above the ear, quite likely from where he struck the counter as he fell. Panicking, I pushed open the door and pulled my phone out ready to call emergency services, but after looking up I was forced to stop after only a few steps.

The lower half of my friend was covered in the bumpy irregular shape of Melissa, whose slimy and embrace had inched its away up his legs like he was a fallen tree waiting to be digested.

“My God!” I cried out and ran forward. Starting at the sound, my friend opened his eyes and looked at me in a daze, most likely unaware of what was happening. “Don’t worry Harold!” I cried. “I’ll get it off.” I reached forward and grabbed a thick lump of Melissa—she was now easily a metre-squared in size and as thick as a deck of playing cards—but I instantly felt a terrible pain shooting up my arm. Good God it hurt! It hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt, like a hundred thousand tiny burns. Immediately blood flowed out from under my gloves and I tore my hand away with a terrible sound not unlike Velcro straps being pulled apart. What was left of my skin looked like a fleshy cicatrix, and under other circumstances I might have fainted out of sheer pain.

But my screaming had awakened something in Melissa, and she reared herself upwards like tsunami and revealed a terrible sight. There was barely anything left of my friend below the waist. She had dissolved muscle and skin leaving only softening bone in a yellowish stew that gurgled audibly.

I looked back at my friend with new horror. He shouldn’t have been alive! Slowly his mouth opened and he rasped, without moving his lips, “Help,” in a voice that wasn’t his.

“Get away!” I screamed, and suddenly his torso lunged at me. It filled me with terror, the way he moved like a tongue to Melissa’s lips, hungrily searching for me. It was almost like a Punch and Judy doll, his body visible only from the waist up, the puppeteer hidden by the curtain of rippling mould that coated his legs.

I easily kicked his hands away from my legs, and just as quickly as I had entered I fled the lab and slammed the door shut behind me. Pressing my back up against it, forcing it shut, I took a moment to catch my breath, jumping momentarily when the door jostled from Melissa. She could sense me beyond, and slowly a shadow was cast across the room from behind me as she slithered up the glass in search of my flesh. I turned and saw an enormous writhing mess of cilia and gaping sphincters that winked aggressively, sometimes baring teeth, hungrily pressing against the glass like a starfish at an aquariam. Then came a familiar hissing as digestive juices began to break down the door and its wooden frame. Quickly I stepped away, just in time to avoid a dozen spindly spider-like legs flicker under the gap towards my heels.

It was clear to me now that I had grossly underestimated Melissa. I could no longer act like she was anything but a direct and immediate threat to my life, so I decided to go for the simplest solution of all.

I lit the room on fire, starting with the door she was trying to break apart. Thankfully there were lots of dangerous chemicals on hand and they all burned very, very hot. It was actually quite odd watching her react to that ancient threat. Melissa quickly realised that the only exit was blocked by the flames, and many of our laboratories are designed to be controlled environments with very little risk of contamination, offering her few routes to leave. I could never really say if she did or didn’t escape, of course. I just knew I needed to aggressively stop her getting through.

I also decided that perhaps my best chance was to “disappear”, maybe even hope that the half-eaten remains of my charred colleague might be mistaken for my own body. That’s not to say I had a clear plan in my head as I fled the lab and university, rather just some kind of peculiar instinctual desire to flee, which I did in a desperate and haphazard manner. I left my whole life behind that day, driven by some overwhelming compulsion to get the hell away from that room.

In some ways, it was almost like my mind wasn’t my own.

It has since become clear to me just how stupid I was. I have been forced to live in this wretched broken-down caravan, far away on a Hebridean isle somewhere in the North sea. I’m not even entirely sure what’s left of Melissa or where she went after the fire. Sometimes I have apocalyptic nightmares of her slowly digesting the whole world, but I often remind myself that she was, after all, a natural species found on this Earth. For all I know she just returned to wherever she came from, some obscure pit or dark underground chasm perhaps.

Or perhaps she found the perfect place to hide already. Maybe she’s like me, a scientist interested in exploration. In which case she’s found herself quite the playground. What things will she learn there, I wonder?

If only it didn’t have to be so painful. It was only recently that I awoke and went to touch my feverish head, wiping away the sweat. But I was startled to find that what touched my moist skin was not my hand at all. It felt like an awful lot like a sock.

I forced my eyes open and I saw that a thick teal velvet glove had somehow been placed on my hand. I tried, quickly, to peel it off like it was a glove, but my thumb sank into the flesh below like I’d grabbed a piece of rotten fruit. Slowly, the horror dawned on me and I tentatively reached forward and snapped a finger off. It crumpled in my hand, effervescing powder into the still air as I crushed it in one fist. Slowly, my sanity fading, I crumbled the rest of my hand apart until I was left staring at the pulsating hairy flesh of my exposed arm. Even the bone was soft like papier machete.

Since then it’s just kept getting worse. And the dreams… oh God if I could just sleep in peace then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Still, I do have one consolation left...

At least I finally get to be part of something bigger than myself.