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The mold was just gross at first.
Green and slimy, it popped up in odd places. Spots on keys. Doorknobs in public restrooms. Little streaks on chair backs in restaurants. It collected in the cracks in concrete and crept up the walls in subway stations.
But, really, it was just gross and a minor nuisance.
People commented on it, on Facebook and Twitter, and soon Instagram was filled with artsy manipulated pics of the mold in incongruous places.
"Ugh. I found a streak on my bathroom mirror yesterday. I bleached it clean, but it was back this morning. Nasty stuff! Any tips? #Slimageddon2017"
"Bruh...the nasty wuz on my ride's steering wheel, slimed my hands good! #SlimeTime"
When it started creeping across the screens of a Santa Rosa bank's ATMs, the news called it a "curiosity".
People in the Southeast US and humid tropics around the world shrugged. They were used to mildew, and expected it was just a minor mutation. Quick to appear, equally quick to disappear, something to just deal with, just part of the ongoing war with mildew and other molds.
But it kept appearing in spots that just weren't...well, normal. Like those ATM screens.
A few scientists began studying it. It was deep green, so when they found chlorophyll, well, yeah, they expected that. But when they took a look at the surfaces it was scraped from, they began raising alarms. Quiet, modest alarms. Curious alarms. Every surface--whether it was plastic, metal, paper, paint, glass--had microscopic striations where the mold had eaten away at the material. The eating itself wasn't what worried them, it was that the mold ate everything. And got everywhere.
The Mold acquired capital letters--everyone in the world knew what "The Mold" was. It was still seen as just a nuisance. An increasing nuisance, a ubiquitous nuisance, but nothing to be really concerned about.
Karen Jacks, puttering around her kitchen one morning, faced a malfunctioning coffee pot. This was double-plus UnGood; as far as she was concerned, caffeine was at the base of the food pyramid, the fuel of the gods and researchers. She couldn't function without her morning coffee. She glared at it through blurry eyes. She had programmed it the night before, right? And, Jesus, it was only a few months old. She yanked the carafe out and peered at the mechanism. Yup: the timer was on the fritz, displaying a jumbled mish-mosh instead of the steady, reassuring "M-F 7:00 AM" that she expected.
The voice behind her made her jump.
"Mooooom! My phone won't work!" A phone was thrust into her face.
Teens. Gah. She glared at the coffee maker, silently cursing the need to be the family computer technician without her precious fuel. She accepted the proffered phone and blinked blearily at it.
"What's wrong with it?"
"I don't know! It doesn't work!"
She gave her daughter a beady-eyed Death Stare. "HOW does it not work?"
Luisa slumped against the counter with a world-weary air and waved a hand. "It just doesn't!"
Karen closed her eyes and sighed. Then she focused on the phone. First, extract it from the case...
The case shattered in her hands, showering the floor with shards. The phone slipped from between her fingers and clattered on the granite counter. Her fingers began stinging; she absently wiped them on her jeans.
"Moooom! You're supposed to be fixing it, not breaking it!"
Karen waved an absent hand at her daughter, then leaned close to the phone, poking it with a ginger finger. Luisa hunched up next to her, staring down at the phone. A thin layer of The Mold covered the back. Karen frowned, poked a bit more, then rummaged in the anything drawer without looking, pulling out a small toolkit.
"Ew! That stupid, stupid mold!" Luisa watched as she carefully pried the phone open, then gasped as the innards, encrusted with The Mold, revealed themselves. "I guess it's really broken, huh?" she muttered glumly. Karen grunted agreement as she scraped a small patch of the slime off the exposed circuitry. She couldn't tell--her little handheld lens barely enlarged anything, and the circuitry was so minuscule and crammed together--but it looked like a few of the tiny threads of gold were...
Broken. Eaten through.
Not a lot, but enough so the phone was toast. She nibbled her lips, then stood up and stared at her coffee maker.
"Okay, Ma, I know that look--" Luisa stopped and rolled her eyes as her mother attacked the coffee maker with her tools, prying it, too, open. Curiosity got the better of her, and she peered over her mother's shoulders at the revealed mini-computer. "Sooo...?"
Karen stood up again, frowning sightlessly out the window aBob's the kitchen sink.
"So." She didn't say anything more for a few moments, then, in a flurry of motion, grabbed a garbage bag and swept the phone and coffee maker into it, ignoring the splashing of water from the still-filled tank. She grabbed her purse and headed to the door.
"Mom! What about my phone?!" Luisa griped.
Karen grabbed her own phone out of her pocket and said, "Here," as she tossed it at her. "Don't be late for the bus!" she called out as she exited the kitchen.
Joe Lopez's eyes widened as he took in the spectacle marching toward him. "You're wearing slippers," he said accusingly.
Karen swept past him. "Lab. Now. Everybody." Her purse bumped against the rustling garbage bag as she moved on.
"And your hair is all...all..." He waved his hands, at a loss for words in the face of the rats' nest crowning her head.
She swiveled to face him, shook the garbage bag and purse, and snarled, "Lab! Now!"
Joe shrugged, and followed at a more leisurely pace, poking his head in office doors and urging fellow researchers away from their data and coffee.
He and his curious followers piled into the lab. Eyes took in Karen's disheveled aplea ranch and slanted sideways at each other. She took no notice while hauling the garbage bag up and emptying it on the central table.
"Now, we all know The Mold's been eating stuff," she started. Heads nodded. She pointed at the disassembled heap before her. "Well, guys and girls, I think we may have a problem. A serious problem," she added with a grim voice. "My coffee maker died this morning. Luisa's phone died, too. And y'know what did it?" It was a rhetorical question. "The Mold did it, guys." She grabbed the phone and plopped it on the stage of the nearest microscope. She peered through the eyepiece, made some quick, delicate adjustments to the focus, and stepped back. "Take a look at what we're facing." She waved a hand, inviting. Joe looked around, shrugged, and took a step forward to peer through the scope.
"Huh." He examined it for a moment, gently pushing it back and forth on the stage. The delicate circuitry enlarged to golden cabling. Here and there, at random, the cables were cut through with jagged edges. "Now isn't that interesting..."
Andy pushed him aside to take a peek, only to be pushed away in turn by Meghan. Meghan retreated with a faraway look in her eyes, which suddenly focused on Karen. "Hey, uh, Karen, I know you were in a hurry, but did you know you've got The Mold growing on your jeans?"
Sure enough, there was a green splotch on the denim on Karen's thighs. She shuddered and automatically tried to scrub it away with a hand, then hissed in dismay as it left behind small holes in the fabric. "God damn!" she snarled.
Meghan watched with wide eyes. "That's...that's a lot--"
Joe's voice joined in chorus with hers: "--quicker than it's acted before."
The room was suddenly very quiet as they digested the new information. Then the quiet was broken by Karen screeching and dashing to the lab sink to scrub her hands. She danced from foot to foot, hissing. "God damn!" she repeated, her voice quivering. "It's eating my fucking hand!"
Silence descended again. Then Joe said, quietly, "Damn. We have got to find a way to kill this stuff."
Meghan had moved over by the sink to help Karen. She made an odd little crooning sound as she turned Karen's hand over to display the hundreds of tiny pinprick spots of blood to the others. Karen looked down at her hand, then back at Joe, her eyes wide.
"Yeah. Y'know, Joe, I think that's a damn good idea. And we need to find out if this is a small, local strain, that we can contain...because otherwise...given the way it's gotten everywhere..." She paused. "Well. Think of it eating away at all our expensive equipment here..."
Joe looked at her, and shook his head. "I'm not thinking of expensive lab equipment. I'm thinking of, oh, the Internet..."
Meghan added in a gloomy voice, "ATMs, like the ones in Santa Rosa..."
Andy chimed in, "Pets. Cars. People..."
They looked at each other in growing dismay.
Pundits were amused at the story leaked out of the White House of way The Mold attacked President Trump's hair. The amusement died when pictures of the bloody mess on the President's head leaked the next day.
The new variation of The Mold was already widespread by the time Karen's team spread the alarm. It was too late.
I got Karen's full story from her when I interviewed her in the hospital. It was already obvious by that time that there was nothing we could do; The Mold v. 2.0 was busily eating and reproducing, chowing down indiscriminately on just about everything in its path. My interview was a last gasp at normalcy. My newspaper had sent me out to do the interview once she rose the alarm, but The Mold was already eating at our infrastructure by the time I reached her. The cab that delivered me to the hospital choked, rattled, and died just before we reached the front doors. The hospital building had a greenish layer covering one corner; a team was spraying that corner down, but I had a feeling it was futile.
I did the interview anyway.
I made sure that the paper I wrote this on was autoclaved before I used it, and I plan to sterilize it again and coat the plastic bag it's in with, oh, pesticide?--I dunno, just before I seal it in the drum and bury it...somewhere. Probably right out front--that way, there's less chance of it being eaten, too. Not that anyone's gonna read it.
So that's the story of The Mold. It was just a nuisance at first. Right now, I'm watching through the hospital window as the building across the street just sort of...melts. It's a small building, so it's going quickly. Bigger places like the hospital should take longer.
Hey. It's been interesting. See ya on the other side, I guess, if there is one. We had a good run. So what produced The Mold? Did we do it? Some environmental impact kind of mess? Or was it just an accidental mutation of some ordinary fungus? Guess we'll never know.