Velvet Eclipse

A Lullaby for the Silenced Chorus

I lost the frogs before I noticed the silence.

That sounds backward, but the mind is built for pattern, not absence, and it took days before the void between cricket chirps registered as dread. The rainforest research station where I worked, three stilted cabins and a satellite dish that hiccuped more than it spoke, had always been an orchestra pit. Now the concert was on intermission, and no one had told the audience.

I told myself it was seasonal. Drought. Barometric this, El Niño that. Anything but what the petri dishes hinted at under bluish laminar-hood light: ghost-pale circles furred with hyphae that coiled like question marks.

When I moved to the microscope, the hyphae resolved into architecture, vaults and tunnels, a microscopic station built from chitin and stolen genes. A pathogen with a floor plan.

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This is a science fiction story inspired by events happening in life - in particular, the decimation of our amphibian populations by the Chytrid fungus. The disease has been proposed as a contributing factor to a global decline in amphibian populations that apparently has affected about 30% of the amphibian species of the world. The fungus is capable of causing sporadic deaths in some populations and 100% mortality in others.

As you may know by now, I write science fiction to grapple with the world. This fall, my first full-length project will come out, set against the backdrop of an Earth dying from Chytrid.

The pandemic we never talked about.

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Rain-quiet

On the third rain-quiet night, a graduate intern named Marta stood on the veranda, face half-lit by an emergency lamp, and said, “It’s like the world forgot its own soundtrack.”

I wanted to reassure her, so I told a lie so thin it fluttered in the humidity: Field sites always go quiet before a storm. The lie might have stuck if the storm had come. It didn’t. Instead, dusk rolled into dawn without thunder, and dawn rolled into a noon that smelled of cinnamon rot.

Under the hood, the fungus answered our fungicide with origami elegance, folding toxins into inert crescents, assembling new metabolic puzzles faster than our laptops could model them. We were watching improvisation in real time: a jazz solo on a double helix.

Paper birds

We filed a preliminary alert to an inbox whose autoresponder promised a forty-eight-hour turnaround. Forty-eight hours later the world’s amphibian death curve was trending on the slow but unstoppable slope that epidemiologists call the apocalypse in soft focus. News outlets wrote features with titles like The Year the Frogs Slept In and ran stock footage of sleepy tree-frogs that looked upholstered in dust. Someone coined a hashtag: #VelvetEclipse.

By day ten, fish in oxbow lakes floated belly-up, their gills papered with the same brown velvet. The fungus had crossed an evolutionary moat in the night while no one was watching the drawbridge.

We sequenced until the generators coughed their last liter of diesel. The genome was a mosaic, hot-spring archaea, cave fungi, deep-trench shrimp. A scavenger of talents. Imagine a library that read its own books and rewrote them between check-outs.

Marta, who still believed naming a thing gave you leverage, christened it Chironex terrestris, not after the deadly box jellyfish but after Chiron, the mythic teacher. She said the fungus was tutoring itself on the syllabus of life. I didn’t argue; metaphors were the only currency left.

Every border is a hypothesis

A month in, the station’s satellite dish gave one final shrug, and the Internet collapsed into a buffering wheel. Still, rumors found their way upriver: sheep with velveted lungs in Patagonia; rice paddies in Luzon that looked dusted with cocoa; a single polar bear corpse filmed by an Inuit hunter, white fur webbed by brown filaments like veins in marble.

Geography blurred. Every border is a hypothesis until the data prove otherwise, and the data proved velvet. Supply chains snapped, grant agencies went offline, and global health organizations argued over whose mandate ended where. While they argued, hyphae learned to wrap themselves around hemoglobin and sing lullabies to mammalian mitochondria.

The last helicopter to fly over the canopy dropped two crates: canned beans past their expiry date and a letter of commendation acknowledging our “continued surveillance efforts.” Marta laughed so hard she cried, and her tears left rust-red tracks on her cheeks.

The silence begins to speak

Silence is never absolute. Remove enough noise and even a heartbeat becomes thunder. Eventually we heard them: not frogs, not insects, but the faint crackle of fungal spores launching like static electricity from leaf to leaf, a million microscopic parachutes opening at once. The rainforest was no longer a choir; it was a broadcast tower.

We wore respirators fashioned from coffee filters and duct tape and worked in shifts. One night, alone with the spectrophotometer’s green glow, I realized the velvet hyphae arranged themselves in branching ratios that echoed neural networks, an uncanny fractal kinship between cognition and contagion. The rainforest wasn’t dying; it was uploading.

I should have felt awe; I felt betrayal. Life had rewritten the rules without a quorum.

The evacuation that never came

A rescue team was scheduled, rescheduled, and finally cancelled when fuel riots reached the airbase. The official notice apologized for “any inconvenience this may cause.”

When the generator died for good, we abandoned PCR machines and carried notebooks into the tree line, looking for somewhere the velvet hadn’t reached. Rivers offered no refuge; the fungus rafted on silt. Hilltops were worse, cool mist gave spores more airtime.

We walked until our boots came apart at the seams. Days blurred into the color of iodine stains.

One dawn we found an abandoned radio relay shack. Inside, dust motes danced in a shaft of sun like a snow globe turned upside down. The shack’s battery bank still held a trickle of charge. We jury-rigged a shortwave transmitter and broadcast data in bursts - genome snippets, phenotypic notes, a plea for any lab with negative pressure seals and a working CRISPR rig.

Maybe someone on the other side of the planet heard white noise that afternoon and mistook it for solar interference. Or maybe the burst reached a bunker where a weary postdoc printed the file and whispered, This might do it. Hope is the risky assumption that someone out there is still listening.

Marta’s mask

The fungus took Marta first. We’d run out of proper filters, and her makeshift respirator sagged at the seams. One evening she coughed a sound like tearing cloth. Under her tongue the mucosa bloomed with tiny brown petals. She pressed her notebook into my hands, the cover mottled with mud and equations and one line of poetry:

She asked me to read it back to her, but her hearing was already retreating into that cotton hush we’d come to understand as a prelude. I buried her notebook beside her, because secrets deserve to keep company with their keepers.

Afterward, I wandered the understory talking aloud just to hear a human voice. The forest echoed me with the faint crackle of spores, mockingbirds made of dust.

A city remembered

I followed a logging road out of the jungle, hitchhiked north on refugee lorries, and arrived at a city whose skyline looked sketched in charcoal: cracked glass, powerlines sagging like old violin strings. A red-spray-painted sign at the outskirts read QUARANTINE ZONE: KEEP OUT. No one patrolled it.

Inside the city, open-air markets sold respirator filters next to black-market antibiotics that did nothing. Every surface wore a fuzz of brown in the corners, like spilled cocoa nobody bothered sweeping up. Children learned to whistle high frequencies that seemed, anecdotally, to slow the hyphae’s crawl, street science at the edge of empire.

In the ruins of a planetarium, I met an engineer repairing solar inverters. She traded me a battery pack for the last pure culture of Velvet I’d carried in a cryovial cooled with river ice. She said some university lab in the north still bartered for samples, searching for a molecular weak link.

I never learned if the vial reached them.

Lessons in velvet

By the first amber autumn, the fungus had earned its own parables. Families painted doorways with salt rings; roadside altars burned sage and pesticides in equal measure. Somewhere, pilgrims hauled a desiccated toad around the countryside like a relic, promising townsfolk that touching its preserved skin granted immunity. Faith is a reagent more volatile than any lab supply I ever logged.

I kept walking. In half-collapsed libraries I copied notes onto waterproof tarps. If I found a chalkboard, I sketched the hyphal network, annotating in charcoal: Observe ratios. Target β-glucan template. Passers-by thought I was preaching. Maybe I was. Science had become a religion of footnotes.

Winter without twilight

Snow arrived late, fell brown, melted into slush that smoked where it touched skin. In a derelict observatory I taped plastic over cracked windows and lit a fire in a metal drum. I spent nights staring through the broken dome where telescopes once mapped galaxies. The sky was as empty as the canopy had been, stars drowned by aerosol haze. Even constellations seemed to retreat from our experiment.

One night, while scribbling notes by firelight, I coughed into my sleeve and saw the first velvet flecks. Recognition felt like relief. The story, at least, was symmetrical: the observer joins the observed.

With the paradoxical calm of the doomed, I compiled everything, a portable gospel. Genome fragments, field sketches, Marta’s poem, my own failures masquerading as protocols. Then I sealed the bundle in waxed canvas and tucked it into a weather balloon canister scavenged from the observatory’s attic.

At dawn I walked to a ridge where wind howled clean over the valley and released the balloon. Its silver skin caught the sun, then dwindled to a pinprick heading east. I imagined it drifting over borders until someone saw it snag on a radio mast and wondered what secrets weighed so little.

Velvet eclipse

I’d hoped dying would feel like retreating into sleep. Instead, it felt like surrendering the radio dial to static. Body heat dropped a fraction; hyphae compensated, weaving metabolic blankets. Breaths shortened; hyphae rerouted oxygen with ruthless efficiency. They weren’t parasites; they were collaborators, annexing infrastructure in exchange for silence.

On my final night I woke to snow the color of cinnamon settling through the busted dome. Each flake was a spore capsule reflecting ember-light. The observatory’s interior, floor, drum, notebooks, vanished under a thin brown quilt. Velvet eclipse.

I thought of the first frogs that vanished and the silence they left behind. How we had assumed their songs were background noise, not the metronome of an ecosystem. How any silence, if ignored long enough, becomes the only song left.

I closed my eyes, and the silence spoke in Marta’s voice:

Some promises take longer than a lifetime. Some mornings require centuries. Perhaps somewhere a child would find a waxed canvas bundle, decode the burden of these notes, and stitch a lullaby sturdy enough to wake the world.

I like to imagine that child reading by lantern light, velvet snow piling against the door, and instead of fear, feeling wonder because the instructions are incomplete, the puzzle unsolved, and curiosity is just another word for hope.

Hope, after all, is the silence we refuse to call an ending.