Rot

Disclaimer and content warning: This story contains depictions of violence and descriptions of events that may be distressing to some readers.

Age Rating: 17

“Hear-ye hear-ye! Today marks the 5th anniversary of the horrid disaster,” cried out a young feline boy, waving a newspaper over his head.

“Today is the 5th anniversary since Neaville’s Spore-Core disaster. Mister, mister, buy a paper, stay up to date with the current situation and the power-struggle.”

The kid called out to a bunny who was passing by. The bunny stopped, turning sleepily toward the city crier who was desperate to sell papers.

“Ugh, fine. What else is new?”

The kid shrugged, “Only know the headlines, mister. 2 spoins please.”

The bunny reached into his overly complicated coin purse, a mechanical device that opened up automatically upon sensing the heat-proximity of his paws.

It hissed as it opened.

He reached in to take out 2 shiny coins with a 1 spore stamped on each of them.

“Now stop shouting, I’m too sleepy for that,” the bunny grumbled as he grabbed the paper. As soon as he turned around to walk away, the kid shouted again, his high-pitched, undeveloped voice, like nails on a chalkboard, sent a shiver down the bunny’s spine.

A few minutes later, armed with a coffee in 1 of his mechanical arms that protruded from the depths of his backpack, the long-eared mechanic folded the newspaper over, reading a few of the headlines. ‘Grimswell Workers Union promises to cut work hours from 70 to 60 after recent worker strikes.’

He yawned, flipping the page over, ‘Rataunion is hiring new talent, must be this tall to apply.’

“Alas, I’m too tall to join their union, they do have a nice benefits package,” the bunny grumbled to himself, taking a long sip of the steaming—black as the spore-engine’s oil—fluid, that was known as ‘coffee’.

The walk to the city center was an exciting one, barely giving room for thinking as at any time a core-powered chariot might try to run you over. Steaming, whistling, tracked wagons rushed past, delivering overworked workers to factories for their 12-hour shifts.

The bunny wished for some morning sun, the warmth of the morning rays, the dew on the leaves, but instead, there was only smog, stench, and the whistle of steam as it escaped the engines, and the groans of machinery. This was no paradise, but it was the only life they now knew.

Core

“Lester?” the guard called out, glaring sharply at the newspaper-distracted bunny whose ears twitched lazily at the sound of his name. He lowered the paper and took another sip of coffee from his mechanical helper-arm.

“Who let the dogs out?”

Lester grinned.

“Hah! Such humor. You know the rules, buddy.”

The guard was a rottweiler standing tall on two strong legs; his arms were each the size of the bunny’s torso.

“Yes yes,” he pulled out his ‘Class B Mechanic’ badge and presented it, then took off his tools backpack for examination by the security before being allowed inside.

His gaze lazily wandered around until it fixated on a brand new, sparkling, and shining placard.

Spore-Core

Property of the City Council.

No trespassing—violators will be minced.

A few moments later, he was inside the reactor’s building, navigating the winding hallways that kept splitting off. He followed the blue line— engineering. On the lower floors, he could hardly find any living creatures; an occasional overworked engineer would rush past him while he was rummaging through messes and coils of wires during his inspection.

“The engineering section’s lighting occasionally shorts,” he reminded himself of his task.

“Random flickering for a few minutes, then stops.”

He paused his work for a deep, long yawn that echoed through the empty halls.

As he reopened his eyes, there was darkness all around. His mechanical arm spread its fingers out, one of them opened up, and from within it a lighter came out.

‘Chhrk, chhrk’ it lit up at last—a dim, flickering light that barely illuminated the bundle of wires in the bunny’s hands.

“Hmmmm, nope, wasn’t me,” he concluded, glancing around.

The lights flickered on, then off again, in irregular intervals. It wasn’t like a spontaneous short; it seemed wrong and intentional, as if someone was playing with a light switch, of the entire section. He watched it; his instincts flared up.

There was clomping of hooves. Someone was approaching. His ears twitched, listening cautiously.

“Again the flickering, so annoying,” groaned a distant creature with a deep, harsh voice.

“Annoying? It’s ominous. Something is wrong. Yesterday’s crew said the reactor went down to 20% output a few times; they couldn’t ID the cause,” somebody whose steps were soft and elegant, replied to the hooved creature.

“Odd,” the deep-voiced creature replied.

“Anything else?”

“Hmmm, there’s also the—” he paused, peering through the flickering lights at the long-eared shape up ahead, “Talk later.”

Lester’s ears twitched again as he returned his attention to the wiring mess in his hands. The two approached him shortly after.

“Lester!? Didn’t know you were on shift today,” called out the soft-voiced fox.

“Got called in because of, well, this—” the bunny replied with a hint of irritation in his voice. The lights flickered a few more times, then stopped.

“Well done, you’ve fixed it,” the ox joked, walking past the B-class mechanic. Lester scuffed in their direction, murmuring under his breath, “Tsk, good for nothing assholes.”

Lester’s inspection lasted a while longer before he found himself even lower, on the floor of the reactor, rummaging through a power panel. His hand brushed up against something unexpectedly soft. He leaned closer, trying to catch a glimpse of what it might be, but the angle wasn’t good; he couldn’t see.

His mechanical arm’s middle finger opened up, a compass emerged from it, pointing in the direction of the nearest loose screw, “Nope, wrong, uhm, ring,” he called out.

The ring finger split open, and from within it emerged a hex-screwdriver.

“I need Phillips,” he groaned, reaching into his tools pouch.

In that moment, the lights flickered off, not turning back on for a while.

“Erhmmm,” he paused, looking around suspiciously.

“Not good,” he gulped.

A few seconds passed before emergency lighting kicked in and sirens blared.

“Emergency Lockdown initiated. 5 minutes until lockdown, evacuate immediately,” the automated system broadcast on the intercom.

Lester did not hesitate; he sprang instantly into action, hopping swiftly in the direction of the nearest exit, leaving behind half of his tools and the opened service panel.

As he dashed on all fours, he remembered reading about the Neaville’s Spore-Core meltdown and the fallout that ensued after; he really did not want to be anywhere near the reactor if it were to melt down. ‘Violent, spike-shooting spores covered the reactor building within hours of meltdown,’ he recalled reading.

Sirens continued to blare in a deafening loudness. The whole building seemingly buzzed with uncontrollable power as the reactor underwent emergency shutdown. Service panels sparkled, fuses blew violently, and some of the emergency lights were exploding from overload.

“Three minutes until lockdown, all engineering staff-evacuate immediately.”

“B-4 is now under lockdown,” the intercom announced. Lester watched the walls slowly lower as he dashed under them. Hurried hooves behind him, slammed right into the wall, “LESTER! MANUAL OVERRIDE!” a panicked voice called out, “PLEASE!”

Lester glanced quickly at the manual controls panel.

“B-3 lockdown initiating in one minute.”

He knew he had no time. It’d take no less than half a minute to open and then re-seal the lockdown barrier, he had no time, he still had three floors to cover.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, turning and sprinting away.

The Spread

The alarm blared, scattering his thoughts. Lester jolts awake, panic filling every fiber of his little body.

“Gah—hah? Already?”

He sighed, slamming his paw on the alarm to shut it off.

“What a day that was.”

He hopped off the bed and dragged himself to the curtains to pry them open. The street was alive and as noisy as ever.

The tracked wagons were up and running yet again, the crisis was averted, and the city was back to its former self: smog, noise, and endless rush to make money for the Grimswell.

Streets were busy, bustling with the life of a morning rush. The same as always.

“Hear-ye hear-ye. The Grimswell begins construction of a second Spore-Core to accommodate the growing city—hiring new staff. A generous pay and benefits package. Apply today,” the same high-pitched kid shouted. Lester sighed as he approached.

“Let me see that,” he ripped the paper out of the kid’s hands and flipped it open. Not a single mention of a near-meltdown the day prior.

“Corrupt bastards,” Lester rubbed his temples.

A thought crept up on his mind, ‘I need to right this. Or escape. I need to escape, this isn’t worth it, but then thousands will die. They know not the threat that’s looming over them.’

Conflicted, he stumbled off in the direction of the Spore-Core to resume his next work shift.

The walk to work was much the same. Rushing chariots, whistling machines, the metallic screech of steel wheels on steel tracks as the spore-engines came to a halt, dropping off workers.

Security, search, and not a mention of the incident last night.

“Erhm, Gorg, what happened yesterday?” he asked after walking past the metal detector, while the guards searched his bag.

“Hmm? What happened yesterday?”

“The uhm, lockdown protocol?”

Lester hesitated.

“Oh, that? Yes yes, the higher-ups said it was an unplanned training. Hah, what jokesters eh? Scared the spores out of a few of our engineers, I’ve heard a few folks got locked in the lower levels, thinking they were done for.”

Lester shuddered, ‘Yeahhh, I know of at least one. Hope he isn’t working today.’

Smiling anxiously at the guard, Lester nodded.

“Yeah, hope no more of those.”

And so began his work day on the lower levels again.

Albeit anxious, he performed his duties diligently, tracking down the electrical issues to the same panel where he was working yesterday. While unscrewing the panel to get inside, he heard stampeding hooves rushing in his direction. ‘Oh great,’ he thought to himself, turning around just in time to get grabbed by his jumpsuit and lifted off the ground.

“LESTER!”

“Oh, I guess the lockdown truly WAS a training, wasn’t it? Either that or I’m seeing my favorite ghost, Twohorn. How delightful to see you alive and well.”

The ox heaved, his nostrils flared angrily.

“You left me behind, I should make a stew out of you.”

The bunny shuddered, “Correction, I sprinted ahead of you. You just happened to be too slow. I didn’t engineer these systems.”

“You could’ve,” the ox began, but the bunny interrupted him.

“Yes, and then we’d be both locked in on the B3 instead of B4, that really wouldn’t have gotten either of us saved. Besides, it’s not exactly in my job description to rescue oxes in distress, not even damsels.”

The ox raised his other hand, ready to plant it firmly on the bunny’s face, when a bull and a husky guards approached them.

“That’ll be quite enough. Return to your duties, Class A engineer, Class B mechanic. You are not paid to fight, you’re paid to work. Mr Grimswell does not approve of wasted work time.”

The metallic panel cover clattered to the floor—Lester dropped it in shock.

The soft thing his hand had brushed against yesterday was visible now, and it was certainly not mechanical in nature.

A mushroom.

Growing straight out of the power conduit—a high-voltage cable, armored in steel sheathing, carrying five thousand volts through the Spore-Core’s main arteries. Yet there it was, poking through the cracked casing, alive where no life should ever be.

“Holy,” Lester gasped, glancing around.

“Well, there’s your short-circuiting issue.”

He gulped.

As he reached for it, the power flickered again. He hesitated, then poked it again.

The powers went out.

When he pulled his hand away, the power flickered back on. ’10 second outage before lockdown begins,’ he thought to himself, rummaging through his tool bag for a pair of bolt-cutters.

“Here goes nothing,” he commented, poking it again to cause a power outage so that the surveillance system malfunctions too.

While the power was off, he swiftly snipped the mushroom with the bolt-cutters and threw it in his toolbag before the lights came back on.

The power was restored, and while he fiddled with other wires, pretending to troubleshoot so as not to be noticed, the lunch time soon approached.

He made his way out of the building swiftly, setting course to his friend’s lab, a little underground augmentation and research laboratory run by the Rataunion.

Tinkerbit, the Rataunion top-tier engineer and Lester’s close friend, didn’t even need a second look. He was well accustomed to the Bloom-Shrooms and instantly recognized them.

“Yap, that’s a bloom alright.”

“What? How?”

Tinkerbit shrugged, “Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps the fungi are resisting the corrupt government too? Who knows, maybe they’re tired of being milked for their power? I mean, everything runs on these damned things: your watch? The blender? All of it. I’d be sabotaging the reactor too if I were them.”

Lester tapped his paw impatiently on the floor, “This is so far above my pay-grade, but we’ve ought to do something.”

Tinkerbit in the meantime was preparing some sort of a chamber, “I’ll keep it yes-yes?”

“Sure,” Lester responded without so much as a second thought.

“What now?”

Tinkerbit shrugged indifferently while shoving the mushroom inside a thick, metallic canister and then plugging it into some sort of test setup.

“Shut it down yourself? Tell the press? Get the mayor? Leave the city?”

Lester slammed his curled-up fist into the palm of his other hand, “That’s it! I’ll tell the mayor, he’ll shut down the corrupt Grimswell’s Operations, and the city will be safe.”

“Hah, best of luck with that,” Tinkerbit commented, heeding the bunny no attention as his focus was on the now buzzing canister with the Bloom-Shroom that was violently releasing seemingly endless amounts of spores inside the chamber, producing power.

Lester’s gaze momentarily glued to the display that showed ‘2 MHw.’

A few short moments later—Lester left in haste, his course set on the Mayor’s office.

Corruption

Lester hustled down the market street, paws tucked into his coat, a cup of coffee in his mechanical arm that he was sipping on impatiently.

He paused at a corner of a junk stall to quickly sell his used cup to the merchant, when his gaze fixated on a pale white-capped tiny mushroom, proudly poking through the seam between two street blocks. Tiny, barely perceivable, and utterly out of place.

He stared at it for a long moment.

Blinking in disbelief and rubbing his eyes, Lester sniffed the air. A faint stench of copper and mildew filled his nostrils when a voice pulled his attention from it.

“Buying? Selling? Trading? We’ve got offers for all your junk.”

Lester glanced at the merchant; it was, unsurprisingly, a raccoon.

“Uhm, neither,” Lester hurried off, past the merchant.

A few blocks later, he saw a major commotion off in the distance. Police blocked off an entire block. ‘Do not cross’ tape fluttered in the wind.

He overheard a local reporter interviewing one of the officers, “A murder? In broad daylight? Unspeakable. Can you share any details?”

The officer hesitated before responding.

“Uhm, well, no details yet, all we know is that the victim died due to numerous puncture wounds, as if repeatedly stabbed by a large needle-like object. That’s all we can share for now.”

Lester shuddered at the mere thought, the slight possibility of the corrupt Bloom-Spores spreading, and that the meltdown was not a drill yesterday.

He hastened his steps.

“Purpose?” the mayor’s clerk asked in a bored and official tone.

“Emergency, I need to see the mayor immediately,” Lester held up his Class-B Mechanic badge as if it were an official federal agent’s badge that’d grant him access anywhere at any time.

“Everybody says that, the last one was a sloth who complained that the rabbits as neighbors were a risk to the slow-moving communities of this city.”

Lester sighed, “Look, it’s really, really important.”

The clerk slowly traced the appointments list, “Lucky you, must have a bunny’s paw. Mayor is free for the next 15 minutes, I’ll inform him of your visitation. Up the stairs, second floor, big door at the end of the hall,” the clerk informed him.

Lester sprinted off before she even finished her sentence, his ear twisted to pick up the rest of the directions while he hurried up the stairs.

The doors creaked without urgency, and the bunny rushed through them. His breath was ragged, and his fur–a total mess.

“Mister mayor,” he called out.

The Mayor–a red panda, wearing a clean, black suit—stacked some papers and folded his hands, glancing up at the out-of-breath bunny who just stormed through his doors like an action-movie star.

“I have a,” Lester began, but then paused when he heard an impatient cough from someone to his left.

He looked there to see a sheep in a gray-patterned suit, grinning knowingly.

“Mister Grimswell? Ahem w-what are you doing here?”

He swallowed nervously.

Grimswell, the CEO of the Grimswell Worker’s Union Guild, owner of the Spore-Core that powers the city, and the founder behind the very technology that powers everything.

“Oh, me? Don’t mind me, please, do go on about your business, Class-B mechanic, Lestern Nortur.”

Lester clenched his fist and tightened his jaw before returning his attention to the Mayor.

“Sir, the uhm, the Spore-Core is unstable. I, as Mister Grimswell just pointed out, work there and, well, I was there yesterday during the threat of a meltdown,” he continued, but the sheep interrupted him, “During the drill, you mean.”

Lester protested, but his warnings were ignored, disregarded, and overturned against him.

“Besides, lunch break is long over, is it not? I would hate to see a Class B mechanic’s promising career ruined by, dare I say, incompetence and laziness.”

Lester sighed—it was pointless. The Mayor was bought by the Grimswell, and would do anything the CEO tells him.

The Grimswell grinned, as if a wolf in sheep’s clothes.

“I assure you, the reactor is perfectly safe. Now, return to your duties at once, or we might be forced to conduct a performance evaluation.”

Lester nodded..

“Yes, sir.”

Bewildered, but not entirely surprised by his discovery, Lester swiftly returned to Tinkerbit who welcomed him with a grin.

“Back so soon, was it a success?”

“No,” Lester replied impatiently.

“Figures, good thing the Rataunion never acts without plan B, so we’ll skip that one too,” Tinkerbit jumped over from 1 of his workbenches to another one, and tapped his tiny paws on a device the size of a bottle of water.

“Take it,” Tinkerbit said.

Lester picked up the device and examined it. Inside the glass tube were copper coils that whined and hummed softly, charged and ready for whatever they were created for.

“What’s this?” he queried, turning it in his paws.

“A scrambler. It won’t kill the core, but it’ll fry every single circuit in the facility, overload everything, shut it down, and likely render it irreparable. Backup systems will shut the reactor down safely and lock it all down. City goes dark but doesn’t turn into Neaville # 2. Catch my drift?”

Lester nodded, “So, I sneak this in past the security, activate it, Spore-Core goes down?”

Tinkerbit chuckled, “No no, no need for special agent stuff, my brethren of the Rataunion will take you in through the sewers and tunnels, we’ll take it out from underneath.”

Days passed. Silence befell the city as the Spore-Core went out of commission, plunging the city into darkness and stillness.

What remaining machines existed ran out of juice within a day.

Factories no longer ran, spore-batteries were not produced.

While the city stood still, the news spread fast, albeit only in oral format.

“BREAKING NEWS! At midnight two days ago, the Spore-Core powered down, cause: unknown. The Grimswell Worker’s Union Guild has yet to make an official statement. The mayor has been missing since then.”

Lester sat on a bench, sipping his coffee while admiring the stillness and silence, grinning ever so faintly. Only he, and a handful of rats knew what had happened. ‘We’ll take care of the rest,’ Tinkerbit’s words echoed in his mind.

THE END