The Mushroom War

By Wayne Blodgett, Ph.D.

This apocalyptic fantasy encourages serious thought about our global predicament. The children of the future will either praise us or curse us, depending on the outcome. One man, suffering from professional burnout, and a few others attempt to transform Homo sapiens before it is too late. They receive help from an unexpected source, an ancient fungus with a mind of its own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne Blodgett
• Release date: Aug 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516349302

Wayne Blodgett, Ph.D.

Wayne C. Blodgett, Ph.D. is a psychologist who has worked in the mental health field for many years. Dr. Blodgett also enjoys a variety of personal interests, including the study of comparative religions, cultivating tropical plants and exploring digital photograhy.

Book preview

Chapter 1 – The Blue Planet

In My name, supreme Goddess and Mother to all earthly life, attend Me. I command the planetary intelligences of sky, ocean, land and underground to listen carefully. I have blessed you with self-awareness. Hear Me now and obey.

We face a threat which I will tolerate no longer. You all know of what I speak. The monkey people refuse to restrain their numbers. They continue to breed uncontrollably. This leads to great suffering, for them and for My entire world. My usual limits on any species’ excess fecundity, such as mass contagion or starvation, have been bypassed by their recent clever manipulations.  My holy plan for universal balance has been upended by these hairless apes.

Observe the damage they inflict upon My body. They insist on drilling out and burning the carbon from the graves of My long dead ones, spewing the fumes into My air. They do this for their own convenience and greed, not out of true necessity. They dare to poison My beautiful oceans, so now most of the fish are gone. The monkey people litter My world with heaps of waste that cannot be renewed, even by Me. They even dare to alter the sacred spiral of life for their own petty purposes.

Such developments are totally unsustainable.

My anger has grown more bitter as they inject poisons into My very bedrock, making the ground quake. Who are they to wreck such ugliness upon My world? The talking apes have shown themselves to be an unexpectedly dangerous form of life. They are forcing far too many of My most dear creatures into premature extinction. Must I now cut these ape people off, like a cancer, for the good of all life remaining? Clearly, only fools would dare to anger the Goddess, the Mother of life itself.

These chattering hominids do truly tempt My most severe judgement of species annihilation. But to bring them all down at once would cause enormous damage, more than I can easily absorb. This blue planet is Me. I am in great pain. I implore you, evolved knowers to whom I have endowed the gift of self-awareness, find a way to repair this assault. In My name, find a solution to this unique threat.

The clever apes were once one of My more promising creations. I watched as they made beautiful art from the natural materials surrounding them. But lately they choose to worship empty idols of their own creation, which honor nothing more than their own vanity. I see this growing evil everywhere. It must be put right in My sight.

As the mindless growth of the monkey people continues unchecked, it devastates My world and the myriad other creatures in it.  There is no love for life in what they do. See how they grow so mean spirited. See how they kidnap the gentle air breathers of the sea for mere display in tiny pools. The monkey people choose to keep their animal brothers and their own human brothers in miserable cages. See how they foolishly misuse the wise plant teachers I sent to their healers for their own benefit. I have given the hairless apes many gifts. I am repaid with the utmost disrespect. They have forgotten Me, their true and eternal Mother.

Lately, in their collective insanity, they would intertwine their living minds and bodies with lifeless machines of their own creation. This melding of living flesh with dead machines for the sake of unnatural power is the ultimate abomination in My sight.

I know you sentient sea creatures wait patiently for the waters to rise up and drown the monkey people, thus washing away all foul works from the land. But that great flood, while it is surely coming, will take far too many moon cycles to accomplish My urgent purpose.

Enough! I will endure this obscenity no longer. I am Sovereign of this orb. I will judge My own creations as they deserve.

Yet, there may be one final opportunity for their redemption. Those of you who have been granted self-awareness must attempt to reform these chattering apes, if it be possible. Remind them of my great love for all life, so that they may continue to live. I am merciful. But if you fail to awaken these backward beings from their appalling dream of separation from Me, I will remove them from My world, forever. I give life to life. I can most assuredly take it away.

I who am called Gaia, planetary Goddess, demand this intervention. My verdict on the talking apes is necessary.  It will be rendered soon. My ultimate decree will be just. Therefore, go heal the apes if you can, lest they be utterly destroyed.

Go now, you mindful ones. Begin with one of the apes you deem worthy. Spread yourselves far and wide among their kind. Go quickly, with My blessing.

Chapter 2 - Death from Above

They must be tracking us with aerial drones. One Hellfire missile will turn this car into a blazing wreck and us with it.

I knew that my companions and I were being hunted from the air. We could be dead at any time. It would hurt for only a second. But getting hit by a missile would bring horrific pain during those last brief moments of life. We would be able to sense it coming, but would not be able to stop it. That bright, burning flash would be the end to all our hopes.

My tall beautiful wife, sitting next to me in the white Hyundai Sonata, looked back at me with sad blue eyes. Molly had thought I’d just saved her from a military execution back at the Penn State football stadium. In reality, all I had likely done was to postpone our destruction by a scant hour or two. At least Molly and our best friends would be together with me at the end. Having my fellow mind partners in the car helped me remain relatively calm, focused on the here and now.

I was driving too fast on a steep mountain road at night with no headlights on. My silver streaked hair reflected what little light was coming in through the car windows. Our good friends Joe and Lucy were buckled into the back seat, holding hands. Lucy’s Scotch – Irish face was turned to gaze at Joe’s saturnine visage. They looked pale but determined. We were expecting an abrupt end to our journey at any moment.

Joe spoke his thoughts out loud. The Army/Marine taskforce took Molly’s fingerprints when they rounded everybody up back at State College. She’s a teacher, so her prints are on file in a government database somewhere. They know who we are. They must have assumed we would come to get her out of their detention camp. So, we should assume they know us four are together, on the run. Homeland Security probably views us as some kind of terrorist leadership cadre. That makes us prime targets for termination by a drone.

Lucy quietly chanted a prayer inside our local mind core to help us maintain focus. Om Mani Padme Om; Om Mani Padme Om. Then she mentally communicated something I had missed. It gave me a glimmer of hope as I drove the car through the darkness. She spoke to the others in the car using mindspeak.

Maybe there is a chance for us to get some outside help, like a lifeline. We have learned important lessons from recent events.  When the partnered ones join together in a group, like at the fracking protest demonstration or when we were prisoners at the stadium, we get mentally stronger. The physical proximity of our mind partner friends definitely makes our collective mental field of consciousness more intense. Our mental field is not just a little stronger when we assemble in a group. It becomes exponentially more powerful, like taking the number of us present and multiplying that number times itself. I can feel it now. The four of us here are sixteen times stronger than me alone. We can focus that power to influence the humans at a distance. They don’t need to be mind partnered with us for it to work. Remember, we just did this to escape the war planes that the government sent to Penn State to kill us. It will work.

Lucy’s thoughts echoed soundlessly within us.

All of us in the car realized Lucy was correct. I quickly used our combined strength to mentally reach out to the network of friends, coworkers and family whom we had previously transformed into mind partners back in New Jersey. Even at this late hour, hundreds of our friends were soon awake and aware of our precarious situation.

I broadcast my message via the enhanced mind link.

Folks, we need your help. You all live fairly close to the Echelon Mall in Voorhees. At this hour, if you leave right now, you can be there in ten or fifteen minutes. Gather in the parking lot on the west side of the mall near Macys. Hold hands. If any outsider tries to interfere, just tell them you are having a sunrise prayer meeting or something. Join together and aim your combined awareness toward Washington, D.C. I’m not sure exactly where, just blanket the general area south of you. Project a mental fog of confusion. That will not be an unusual experience for people living in the D.C. part of the world. We need to buy some time so we can get far enough away from Penn State to be out of range of their surveillance. Blessings to you all, in the name of the Goddess. It is wonderful to have you as partners, to feel so connected to everybody. We will reach out to you all again soon, when we are not so busy.

I broke the telepathic connection to better concentrate on our current situation. Looking intently at the darkened road ahead, it occurred to me that we still might be tracked from the air by our vehicle’s heat signature. Maybe driving fast at night with no lights on in rural Pennsylvania was not such a good idea. It might actually make us stand out more from other traffic. I found a closed gas station ahead and pulled in next to the pumps, which were protected by an overhead canopy. Joe could naturally tell what I was thinking.

You got it, my friend.

Joe unfolded his compact but powerful body from the back seat. He stepped out of the four door sedan into the warm night air as I unlocked the trunk. Joe found the jug of water I kept there for emergencies. I quickly opened up the hood of the Hyundai. Joe’s bald head already glistened with sweat. He carefully poured the water over the hot engine, a little at a time so as not to crack the block. The engine metal steamed but become noticeably cooler under the trickle of water. By cooling off the engine block, the thermal image of our vehicle should become harder to detect with long range infrared sensors. When the water was gone, we refilled the jug from a faucet provided by the gas station. Then Joe and I got back into the car and parked behind the service station, under a cluster of trees. The trees had kept their leaves into late October, an unnatural phenomenon in that locale.

The sense that we were