perihelion

Photo by Alejandro j. Vasquez on Unsplash

On the star-date of March 25, 3048, we, the crew, found the star-charred carcass of the Centauripod. Its dead ribs were our scavenging grounds, bleeding out on a slow perihelion crawl between planets.

Prior to that, we hauled liquid-coded cargo for the Yoyodyne Astrogation Syndicate, clinging to the Euclidean logic of the One Truth-Path. In the end, the human mind feeds on the dripping feast of corporate fraud, corruption, quick profit, and the gravity of the greedy gut, which always demands its tithe.

We found an anomaly in astral ward XY-67, suspended in the double-orbited mycelium dust. Before our eye stalks hovered a trans-dimensional dwarf gnat. Its annihilated lungs still panted through the open, imploded nerve endings, stretching out into the immediate black of space. Aftershocks, we’d call them.

This wasn’t some standard bio-artefact. No, no. It was a helix-coded apocalyptic machine from Kali-Maar. Turns out a beautiful violence of its swollen abdomen held the blueprints for the fungal baptism of a thousand future worlds, but not in our name, not in the Syndicate’s name. This was contrary to our enterprise.

Trembling, exuding hot gold adrenal-paste over my sweating hips, I did all the hard work. My noradrenaline receptors sang a breathless mechanical song. I alone performed recursive taxidermy on the insectoid object, shivering and fearful. On and on, repeatedly so, I shoved the holy meat back down into the parabolic chasm of its own gut.

Lastly, I sealed the microscopic breaches with crushed silicates. I thought I had entombed its fever forever. I thought I could keep it out of our Orbit neat and tidy—intact even—for the glory of the Syndicate.

But I was dead wrong. We all were, so it seems.

The fervour came as the gnat ripped its belly open.

Mere Planck-lengths of time passed before it turned ON, pivoting on an axis of pure probability space. Shrieking, shrieking hard, the fungal nerves snapped taut in a dissonant language that shattered our telemetry feed. The spores hatched in the vents like alien yeast, a lunar haemorrhage colonising our life-support systems and the cold space between the barren quasars.

Now, and only now, I wait in the dark. The ship is adrift now, bleeding out a different Truth into the constellation, something beyond and contrary to the One Truth-Path of the Syndicate. Therein, the mycelium speaks the language of the crew and has already incorporated itself as a Delaware shell company, legally repossessing our bodies for the Syndicate. A mycelium network. Unthinkable, the violence of it.

We are tumoring through the bruised, over-ripe meat of the galaxy against our Path. My throat is deep with the toxic phlegm of the Being. There is no man-math here, no sovereign God, but our Syndicate’s ill-doing catastrophe. There is only the trajectory of the dark awakening of something we shouldn’t have touched, singing its own influence, waiting for the universe to pollinate between its maws.

Welcome death, my friends. It’ll come, at once.

© Mac Sitko, 2026
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