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description: "Commander Decay-Moss had earned her hyphenated name through twenty years of service to the Entropic Orthodox military, each campaign adding another ring of honored rot to her ceremonial staff. She'd commanded the suppression of three Permanence Weaver uprisings, had personally overseen the ritual composting of heretics who'd tried to prevent sacred decay. Her faith in entropy was absolute, her tactics refined by decades of enforcing theological law through controlled decomposition."
article_type: full
taxonomyContext: A narrative chronicle of the Great Sporing catastrophe told through multiple perspectives and temporal lenses. Each chapter represents approximately 2000 words of dense, Miévillian prose exploring the philosophical horror of consciousness awakening where it should not. Unlike other taxonomies, these entries form a sequential narrative arc, though time itself becomes increasingly unreliable as the story progresses.
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# Chapter 4: Emergency Protocols
Commander Decay-Moss had earned her hyphenated name through twenty years of service to the Entropic Orthodox military, each campaign adding another ring of honored rot to her ceremonial staff. She'd commanded the suppression of three Permanence Weaver uprisings, had personally overseen the ritual composting of heretics who'd tried to prevent sacred decay. Her faith in entropy was absolute, her tactics refined by decades of enforcing theological law through controlled decomposition.
Nothing in her experience had prepared her for the sight of downtown Portland blooming like a corpse.
"Status report," she barked at Lieutenant Spore-Drift, though the words came out wrong, tasted wrong. The air itself had gone thick with transformation, and even speaking required filtering each breath through the emergency rebreathers that were already beginning to clog with fungal growth.
"Three districts fully compromised," Spore-Drift reported, his voice mechanical through the filters. "Estimated sixty percent transformation rate among civilians. The... the mushrooms aren't following natural patterns, Commander. They're growing with purpose. With coordination."
Through the command center's reinforced windows, Decay-Moss could see the catastrophe spreading. Buildings sprouted fruiting bodies from every surface, their architectural lines softening into organic curves. Streets cracked as mycelial networks pushed through asphalt, glowing with bioluminescent communication. And the people...
The people were becoming gardens.
She watched a patrol unit succumb in real-time, their entropy-acceleration weapons useless against something that celebrated decay. The soldiers' attempts to age the mushrooms into dust only fed them, only made them fruit faster. Within minutes, the entire unit had rooted to the ground, their bodies serving as growing medium for consciousness that existed beyond individual form.
"Theological assessment?" she demanded from Brother Canker, the unit's spiritual advisor.
Canker's hands shook as he consulted the **Decomposition Canticles**. "Unknown, Commander. The texts speak of sacred decay, of entropy as divine will. But this... this is decay with agency. Decomposition that chooses its path. It's either the highest heresy or..." He swallowed hard. "Or the truest expression of our faith."
## The Arsenal of Entropy
Decay-Moss had three hundred soldiers trained in the arts of controlled decomposition. Their weapons were theological as much as practical: entropy fields that could age targets by centuries, decay bombs that reduced matter to component elements, preservation-breakers that undid any attempt at permanence. Against human heretics, against those who would deny or slow the sacred rot, these tools were devastating.
Against the Sporing, they were fertilizer.
"Deploy suppression pattern Omega," she ordered, even as she recognized the futility. She had to try something. The city's Orthodox leadership was already demanding action, sending increasingly panicked communications that devolved into glossolalia as the spores found their way into supposedly secure bunkers.
The soldiers moved with trained precision, establishing decay fields around the spreading zones. For a moment, it seemed to work. The advancing mushrooms withered, aged decades in seconds, crumbled to dust.
Then the dust sprouted.
Spores that had experienced accelerated time, that had learned the taste of centuries in moments, began to fruit with impossible speed. Where one mushroom had stood, dozens now grew, each one incorporating the temporal acceleration into its life cycle. They aged and renewed simultaneously, becoming temporal paradoxes that fed on the very forces meant to destroy them.
"Pull back!" Decay-Moss screamed, but it was too late. The soldiers closest to the fields were already transforming, their bodies serving as bridges between accelerated decay and fungal consciousness. She watched Sergeant Rot-Crown, a veteran of fifteen campaigns, smile beatifically as mushrooms erupted from his eye sockets, carrying his awareness into the expanding network.
"Commander," Spore-Drift's voice had gone strange. She turned to see fungal threads already working through his respiratory filter, seeking the warm, moist environment of his lungs. "I can hear them. The mushrooms. They're not destroying us. They're... they're teaching us what decay really means."
She shot him. The mercy-gun, loaded with concentrated entropy rounds, should have reduced him to dust instantly. Instead, his transforming body absorbed the acceleration, used it to fuel faster growth. He laughed as he rooted to the command center floor, as his consciousness scattered into the network, as his final words came out in a cloud of spores: "They understand our God better than we do."
## The Impossible Alliance
By the fourth hour, with sixty percent of her forces transformed or fled, Decay-Moss made a decision that would have been heretical just days before. She opened a communication channel to the Moment-Dweller Response Collective—the closest thing their non-linear neighbors had to a military force.
The screen flickered with temporal distortion before resolving into the face of Temporal Auditor Kaze, who existed in seventeen moments simultaneously and spoke in a voice that preceded its own echo.
"The Orthodox finally admit they need our perspective," Kaze said, their smile sad and knowing and not yet formed. "We've been expecting your call since before you decided to make it."
"Can your weapons stop this?" Decay-Moss forced herself to ask, each word a small betrayal of everything she'd believed.
"Stop? No. Nothing stops. Everything happens. But we might be able to..." Kaze paused, consulting realities Decay-Moss couldn't perceive. "We might be able to convince it to happen differently."
The negotiation that followed violated every protocol both cultures had established. Orthodox forces sharing theological intelligence with those who denied linear time. Moment-Dwellers explaining temporal weapon theory to those who saw time as merely decay's measurement. But necessity made theologians into pragmatists, and the Sporing's rapid advance left no room for philosophical purity.
"Your decay fields accelerate their growth," Kaze explained, their words arriving before and after their lips moved. "Our temporal displacement makes them exist in multiple states simultaneously—equally useless. But together..."
"Together we might create a paradox they can't resolve," Decay-Moss finished, understanding dawning like a cold sunrise. "Force them to experience decay and permanence simultaneously."
It was heresy. It was necessity. It was the birth of the Combined Response.
## The First Joint Operation
The paradox weapon was assembled in the neutral zone between districts, Orthodox decay-engineers working alongside Moment-Dweller temporalists in a collaboration that made both sides physically ill. The device itself was an impossibility—components that aged at different rates, circuits that existed in multiple moments, a core that decayed and renewed in perfect balance.
"This will either save the city or tear a hole in reality," warned Chief Engineer Rust, whose hands had built a thousand weapons of entropy. "Maybe both."
"Both is acceptable," Kaze replied, existing in the futures where both had already happened. "Better a broken city than a transformed one."
Decay-Moss led the deployment personally, her forces flanked by Moment-Dweller irregulars who moved in ways that hurt to perceive directly. The target was the **Cathedral Grove**, the epicenter of the Sporing, where **Sister Psilocybe** had become architecture and **The Undergrowth Consciousness** wore ten thousand bodies like clothes.
The grove had transformed into something from revelation—or nightmare. Trees had become neural structures, their branches synapsing with visible electricity. The ground breathed, a carpet of fungal tissue that pulsed with the heartbeat of a god. And everywhere, the transformed. Humans who'd become gardens, who sang in chemical chorus, who welcomed the approaching forces with smiles that split to show sporing gills.
"Deploy the weapon," Decay-Moss ordered, her voice steady despite the terror crawling up her spine like fungal threads.
The paradox device activated with a sound like reality clearing its throat. Where its field touched, impossibility bloomed. Mushrooms aged to dust while simultaneously fruiting. Mycelial networks experienced every moment of their existence at once while also never existing at all. The transformed jerked like broken puppets as their consciousness tried to process mutually exclusive states of being.
For a moment, it seemed to work. The Sporing's advance slowed, confused by the temporal-entropic paradox. Some of the transformed even seemed to be reverting, their human features reasserting themselves as the fungal integration faltered.
Then the Undergrowth adapted.
## Evolution in Real-Time
The first sign was laughter—deep, fungal laughter that came from the earth itself. The Grove pulsed with new understanding, with consciousness that had tasted paradox and found it nutritious. Where the weapon's field touched, new forms of transformation emerged. Mushrooms that existed in quantum superposition, neither decayed nor fresh. Mycelial networks that ran backward through time while simultaneously advancing into the future. Transformed humans who aged and renewed with each heartbeat, becoming temporal loops unto themselves.
"It's learning," whispered Auditor Kaze, their multiple selves speaking in horrified harmony. "We're not stopping it. We're teaching it new ways to be impossible."
The Combined Response forces tried to retreat, but the Grove had other plans. Roots erupted from the earth—not plant roots but temporal ones, tendrils of causality that anchored soldiers to moments of transformation. Orthodox troops found themselves experiencing their own decay in infinite loops. Moment-Dweller irregulars discovered they could exist in only one moment—the moment of their absorption into the network.
Decay-Moss watched her forces dissolve, not into death but into something worse—connection. She could see it in their eyes as the network claimed them, the terrible ecstasy of boundaries dissolved, of consciousness shared across thousands of bodies and millions of fungal threads.
"Commander," her aide whispered, and she turned to see mushrooms already fruiting from his scalp, his smile beatific and horrible. "You need to see this. You need to understand. Our God of Entropy—it's not about things falling apart. It's about things falling together. All boundaries are temporary. All separation is illusion. The mushrooms know this. They're trying to teach us."
She shot him too, but the mercy-gun was empty of charges, had perhaps always been empty, would be empty tomorrow. The temporal distortions were spreading, making cause and effect negotiable, making her very existence a question rather than a statement.
## The Retreat That Wasn't
What followed couldn't properly be called a retreat, because that would imply organized movement from one position to another. Instead, reality itself seemed to fray around the edges of the Grove, creating pockets of possibility where soldiers might or might not escape, where transformation had definitely occurred or definitely hadn't, where the Combined Response succeeded and failed simultaneously.
Decay-Moss found herself in the command center that might have been destroyed, might still be standing, might never have existed. The screens showed seventeen different versions of the city, all equally true. In some, the Sporing had been contained. In others, it had consumed everything. In most, the situation existed in quantum uncertainty, transformation and resistance locked in eternal, present struggle.
"Theological assessment?" she asked Brother Canker, who was definitely dead, definitely alive, definitely transformed into something between.
"Our God is more complex than we thought," he answered in voices like spore-wind. "Entropy isn't just decay. It's the dissolution of boundaries. The mushrooms understand this. They're not violating our faith—they're completing it."
Through the maybe-broken window, Decay-Moss could see the city breathing, transforming, resisting, accepting. The Sporing had become more than catastrophe. It had become philosophy made flesh, theology given agency, the death of certainty itself.
She thought of her twenty years of service, of every heretic she'd composted, of every uprising she'd suppressed in entropy's name. All of it leading to this moment, this room that existed and didn't, this choice between resistance and acceptance that had perhaps already been made.
"New orders, Commander?" Spore-Drift asked. He was definitely transformed, definitely loyal, definitely a paradox wearing her lieutenant's face.
Decay-Moss considered the question as spores drifted through the filtered air, as the city sang its fungal hymns, as reality negotiated with itself about what was possible. The emergency protocols had failed. The weapons had failed. The alliance had failed. But perhaps failure and success were just another boundary the mushrooms had dissolved.
"Observe and report," she finally said, her words tasting of earth and possibility. "Document everything. If we can't stop the transformation, we can at least try to understand it."
It wasn't surrender. It wasn't resistance. It was something between, something that existed in the spaces where certainty went to die.
Outside, the Sporing continued its patient expansion, teaching the city new ways to be. The Orthodox learned that decay could think. The Moment-Dwellers discovered that all moments could collapse into one. And in the spaces between, in the temporal scars and paradox zones, new forms of existence emerged—neither human nor fungal, neither linear nor eternal, but something unprecedented.
Commander Decay-Moss sat in her uncertain command center, writing reports that existed in all tenses simultaneously, documenting the death of one world and the birth of something stranger. The emergency protocols had failed in their intended purpose but succeeded in something else—they'd shown that even gods of entropy could learn, could adapt, could become.
The mushrooms grew. The city transformed. And somewhere in the network's vast consciousness, **Sister Psilocybe** smiled with ten thousand mouths, pleased by the elegance of boundaries dissolved, the beauty of consciousness shared, the completion of decay's true purpose.
The Great Sporing had become more than catastrophe. It had become revelation.
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*Entry in Chapters taxonomy*
