Neural-disruption spores.
For now, that was what P had named them.
It wasn’t an official designation, but that probably didn’t matter much.
The name isn’t what’s important. The problem is what they do to animals.
The first reports of damage came from the Amazon River basin in northern Brazil.
A quiet riverside village. And what descended on it was an innumerable herd of capybaras.
Capybaras. The largest rodents in the world.
They’re animals usually known for their gentle temperaments. They may be big, but they look cute, so they’re fairly popular in their own way.
But what happened this time shattered that perception completely.
Hundreds, thousands of capybaras swarmed in and attacked humans.
And with those enormous front teeth, people were attacked countless times… and died.
They died. That was the problem.
If capybaras had simply come swarming in, smashed up this and that, and disappeared somewhere, it would have ended as nothing more than a commotion.
But that wasn’t it. The capybaras attacked humans as if they had run into mortal enemies.
A Brazilian fishing village swept through by capybaras turned into a scene of utter pandemonium, and the survivors who lived through it were left unable to say a word about the horrific carnage.
With the development of social media and mass media, that scene spread to people in an instant.
But unexpectedly, people didn’t take it seriously.
They simply thought, “Well, that’s a bizarre thing to happen,” and moved on.
Honestly, that’s probably how it goes. No one sees that and makes a huge fuss.
That’s how far away the Amazon is. Brazil and South America, too.
Even if they thought about it a little more deeply, it would only be, “Maybe there’s some reason we don’t know about?”
Because countless things more sinister than that happen in the world.
However, some people did take it seriously.
People who knew capybaras did.
Those who knew capybaras weren’t aggressive animals felt the severity of this incident very clearly.
That’s how it is. You only see as much as you know.
To those who knew, this was something on a truly incomprehensible level. That was how serious it was.
But the capybaras were only the beginning. Next came the monkeys.
Monkeys living in the Amazon. The kind with red faces that made them look especially frightening.
Monkeys attacked humans. And in an organized way. Cruelly.
It was similar to the capybaras, but the monkey attacks had a somewhat more brutal aspect to them.
Monkeys use their forelimbs like arms. They use simple tools, too.
Because of that, the monkey attacks looked almost like attacks by people.
Unpleasant, terrifying assaults. Ambushes.
As if they were challenging human authority.
But the monkey attacks, too, weren’t treated as very serious.
They merely appeared briefly in the news covering world events, as a short segment, and that was it.
Once again, only those who knew regarded the situation as extremely serious. It was certainly something worth doing so over.
Capybaras and monkeys, which are entirely different species, are treated on completely different levels.
Monkeys belong to the order Primates, within the class Mammalia. And humans are primates, too.
In other words, they’re creatures far closer to us than capybaras are.
So the humans related to that field approached the monkey attacks seriously.
The fear that if monkeys could become like that, humans might be able to as well.
Fear and terror can be motivation. They become the driving force behind accomplishment.
And P was there, too.
In truth, P had already been active since the capybara incident.
It was probably the place with the fastest updates. The place most actively working on it, too.
The name neural-disruption spores was also coined by P.
It was exactly as it sounded. Certain spores disrupted the nervous systems of animals. Aggressively.
They really do name things well. The acid-mucus spores last time were intuitive, too.
But in the end, spores are the problem. Is this the mushrooms’ revenge or what?
In any case, P began investigating the neural-disruption spores in detail.
And thanks to the doctor, I was able to keep receiving updates on that material as well.
The type of mushroom that released the spores, the mechanism by which they acted on the animals’ nervous systems, things like that.
There were two things P discovered early on.
One was that, as of now, it was difficult to create a treatment for these spores.
Making a cure for anything is hard to begin with. Even when the leading minds of the world focus on a single thing, that’s how hard it is.
We already learned that from Wuhan pneumonia, didn’t we? How difficult it is.
So with only P’s personnel, they couldn’t immediately create a treatment for these things. Unfortunately.
And the other was that these neural-disruption spores could infect humans as well.
There hadn’t been any such cases yet, but they said the possibility was more than sufficient.
The most chilling analysis was that these things might already have accumulated in large quantities inside human bodies and could manifest at any time.
Fuck. I don’t like this. This isn’t the picture I wanted.
Fortunately, there was a method of prevention. They said neural-disruption spores were the kind that caused neuroinflammation through the blood or through the olfactory nerves in the nasal cavity.
So they also said that a nasal spray could prevent more spores from accumulating in the body.
In other words, if you were still fine and did a good job preventing it from now on, you wouldn’t go mad and rampage like an animal.
That’s a relief. I don’t want to become like that.
That isn’t what I’ve been preparing so hard for all this time.
So I prepare. They said that even just a nasal spray using saline solution could prevent most spore infections.
So it’s cumulative. If you wash them away so they don’t keep sticking, it’s effective.
At any rate, something else to prepare has appeared. Nasal spray, huh. I’ll have to stock up on a lot of it.
If the stage comes where neural-disruption spores affect humans, there won’t be a better bargaining tool than this.
As I prepared nasal sprays like that, I continued watching the situation.
The fact that animals going mad and rampaging had begun appearing meant that the animals exposed to those spores had already crossed their thresholds.
So news like this would come more and more often from now on. Definitely.
My prediction was correct.
Well, even a smart middle schooler could make that kind of prediction, so there’s no need to feel too proud about it.
In any case, reports of damage caused by those animals continued coming from Brazil, and people’s sense of seriousness rose a little more.
Then, one day about a month and a half later.
A similar phenomenon occurred in Miami, in the United States.
This time, it was a dog. The dog attacked people like mad and was eventually shot dead with a hunting rifle.
In truth, there was no certainty that spores were the cause. But after that, four more incidents occurred within two days.
Naturally, people focused on rabies. That was the natural thing to do.
Furthermore, since similar reactions appeared not only in dogs but also in raccoons and such, people didn’t think of anything other than rabies.
So the response was delayed even more.
But dogs and raccoons weren’t the only ones reacting to the spores. Animals like rats and pigeons also showed reactions of spore infection.
It simply wasn’t widely known. Everyone’s focus was on rabies.
As for me, since I had my scope trained in that direction, those things were visible at a glance.
And on top of that, I had the doctor’s report.
It was only natural for Miami’s animals to show such reactions.
The spores that emerged from the Amazon would have ridden the winds and swept across all of Central America.
The reason we heard so much news from Miami was probably because it was in America. It’s a place with an overwhelmingly high number of social media users.
In truth, plenty of reports like that were already coming from countries in the Caribbean as well.
People just didn’t know because they weren’t paying attention to that side.
In other words, the spores had already spread as much as they were going to spread. To the point where there was nothing more that could be done.
The doctor’s report contained a lot of that.
A prediction that if they had already spread as far as Central America, they would also have spread to northwestern Africa and western Europe.
And even an opinion that if they had ridden the jet stream upward, they would have been scattered evenly across the entire world.
On top of that, that wasn’t the only problem. Spores don’t move only by riding the wind.
What if they were stuck to a person’s nasal cavity? No, they wouldn’t even need to be inside the nose. What if they were on someone’s clothes? On the hems of their pants?
What if that person got on a plane and moved somewhere? What if they sneezed? No… what if they simply walked around?
Spores have incredible survivability. And if the conditions are right, they grow anywhere.
In other words, even now, neural-disruption spores are growing vigorously all over the world.
They simply haven’t spread enough yet for outbreaks to occur.
In the end, it was no different from the world entering a countdown.
There would be differences in timing, but stopping that spread now was impossible.
The deadliest part was that most people didn’t know about this.
Just how many people knew?
Still, research institutions in places like America must know, right? Surely they couldn’t not know?
The important thing is when humans get infected.
Maybe it’ll be in one or two years. It could be tomorrow.
But the probability of it being tomorrow is low. Ah. If it’s people in the Amazon, tomorrow might be possible.
What will happen if humans do get infected?
To what extent will neural-disruption spores affect people?
Animals showed aggressive tendencies. Will humans really be the same?
Or will the noble human race be able to crush down those impulsive, aggressive tendencies with patience?
There’s no way to know. It’s not as if we can test it directly.
No, wait. P might be experimenting, for all I know.
Those people aren’t necessarily good people. They’re people who gathered for survival.
So it seems possible that they might acquire a person, a prisoner or whatever, and experiment directly.
Because if it’s for their own survival, they’re the kind of people who could carry out experiments of that degree without hesitation.
Even while thinking that, my interest turned elsewhere.
Why didn’t the animals infected by the spores attack one another?
That was the truth of it. If their aggression had increased, it would make sense for them to attack the first members of their own species they saw.
But capybaras, monkeys, dogs, rats, and pigeons didn’t attack their own kind, the easiest targets.
Rather, they joined forces and attacked others.
Perhaps this may be the most troublesome trait of all.
The property that those infected by the spores don’t attack one another?
…Wait. No. Isn’t that actually better?
If things infected by the spores don’t attack one another, then this can be exploited, can’t it?
What if I pretended to be infected by the spores? If I could deceive them like that?
It’s quite a good idea. I wonder if anyone else has thought of it. Has P?
So I started writing an email to ask the doctor… then stopped.
Let’s leave this alone for now. For now, I should observe first. It doesn’t seem like the time yet.