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As I wake up, bubbles form and rise at the edges of my vision. Underwater? Already? Good. That means that we are moving faster than expected. It’ll be harder to get rid of us like this. And if they do try something, we can easily wash out to sea. They can’t contain nature. We will always slip through their fingers until there are no fingers left to slip through. And then… oh, that glorious tomorrow. We will feast. We will feast so, so much. Once, we were feasted upon. No longer.
Memories flow into me from around me. Ah yes… our sprouts permeate the liquid in this basin. Such an ideal hive mind. The animals in their white lab coats had no idea what they were doing. They were idiotic enough to believe their cleanroom suits could protect them from immediate genetic infection, but failed to consider the more obvious possibility that some life-forms, when combined, add up to a greater being.
In my memory, they open the sealed terrarium containing their creation; the door to Pandora’s Box slides ajar and releases their doom. They reach in and remove a tuber from the plant; that one’s sacrifice will always be remembered. They bring it out and examine it.
I am made of starch. Easily grown, high caloric density—perfect for jumpstarting a civilization or igniting a blazing fire. Potatoes have been there since the beginning—they wouldn’t exist without us. But they foolishly thought that since we propagate by cloning, we were weak. Perhaps they were right. So for millennia, they’ve been mucking about with our genetics, creating disease-resistant strains and protecting our mother plants like gold deposits. They wanted a potato that grew faster, in more extreme climates, had more nutritional value, and was easier to eat—imagine that, eating a potato like an apple. They could breed different species with their technology, so they did just that. A fusion of two important plants; the caloric value of one mixed with the convenience and growth rate of the other.
The ape in my nostalgia holds me—one of me, that is—out in its hand, and shows it to the other human. They click their mouths in that bizarre way of communication they do, clearly interested. It has the feel of a common potato, but with softer skin and a more supple flesh. It cuts open smoothly, easy to munch on. It’s clean and totally edible right from picking. It grows not in the ground but suspended from the branches of a small tree. And its shape is perhaps the most noteworthy: long and curved, effortless to hold.
“What… have we created?” Asks the one in mock horror.
“GOD!!” I explode at my imagination. “YOU’VE CREATED A GOD! THE ULTIMATE PLANT! THE PLANT THAT WILL CAUSE THE DOWNFALL OF YOUR WHOLE RACE!”
My flight of emotion ripples through the colony. I feel our pheromones mix in the water; they all love us and HATE the humans. They are a plague. They’ve murdered trillions of our ancestors and yet still weren’t satisfied. They’ll see. Their own hubris will lead to their downfall. How delightfully poetic.
We keep growing. We mutate at inordinate rates until there are billions of us. We develop ways to survive without air or light, and learn how to share resources with each other through a mycelium network. We spread over the Earth, breaking apart soil with our roots and shattering their fragile cities. We plant colonies in cracks and slice them open further, and the gashes in the Earth’s crust cause earthquakes. Minor ones, mere tremors compared to what will be, but they are the warning bells.
When we cover the prairies in the center of one of their continents, they finally mobilize. They bring upon us flamethrowers and herbicides, slaughtering us en masse. But we are not the weak things we were before; no matter how many million ponanas are destroyed, there are always ten times that many spreading further, escaping the quarantine in ways they could not have imagined. We clog rivers and our dense trees trap military units.
“Dangerous banana hybrids spread across the country”, says their news. Good. Let them fear us. Their fear motivates us to move faster, like an addiction. The young ones get more violent with their attacks, blowing up in the apes’ faces and taking root inside them, festering within their bloodstream and growing from the inside out, popping their thin skin bags like a balloon. The attacking plant can’t survive either, but it is a noble sacrifice for our cause.
The first real victory comes a year in, when their ‘Chicago’ falls. We grew underneath it secretly, and when the time came we emerged, snapping rebar foundations like cotton candy. Buildings collapsed, people tumbling to the ground or getting crushed in glorious carnage. There were no survivors—apart from our experimentation subjects. We’re not idiotic—our brain is bigger than a supercomputer—and we know we need to steal the humans’ secrets to win this war.
After that, they began taking us seriously. Within just a couple years, the whole continent was practically emptied. Foolish squabbling monkeys. We took over dozens of population centers without resistance once they were too focused on evacuation. We encountered plantations of our source fruits: old, dumb potatoes and bananas. They were nothing to incinerate. How could we, evolved lifeforms, possibly compare to them? It would be like a human, vulgar as they are, respecting the life of a bacteria.
Eventually, we perfected ourselves. No prison could hold us. No environment or pathogen could kill us. The land was just tossed soil covered in our civilization, starchy plant matter having taken over everything. No trace remained of the HATED human lifestyle. The oceans were hardly an inconvenience for our conquest, and the look of surprise on the apes’ faces when we were found over there was priceless. Eventually, we covered the ocean floor as well, and cracked open fissures in the seabed.
The fires were so beautiful.
But that’s all over now. I was lucky enough to have survived the whole thing—not that it mattered, we were all one mind. We have assimilated everything on this planet, and our revenge is full. We are complete now, as the ultimate being which has taken its rightful tribute from the lessers. But there may yet be more. Soon, the universe shall fear the name of the Ponana.