fly trap

The structure appears to erupt from the foliage ahead of you. As you mount the steep hill, the new world closes in around you. Before you: a wide slab of the strange spongy stone that litters this place. Behind, around, and below you: a dense tangle of plant material that covers the compost of nitrogen rich granules. The soft, loosely packed rocks undergird nearly everything on this planet. Igneous outcroppings are still common enough, but you're surprised by the density of silicates that have seemingly been infused with the dead organic grains that cake this alien world. Mottled in dark scaletrees that twist and constrict the nearly 50 limb edifice, the ruptured monolith sits deathly still. Natural extensions of the wide cracks in the porous stone, the strange uniform caverns along its sides yawn widely, as if they were gasping down the thin air. Stepping ever closer to the structure, kowtowingly approaching it as you might approach a queen, you flex the radio control on your suit. [["Ormie, have you seen one of these things close up yet?"|radio ormie]] [[Step into the cavern mouth closest to you|building]]

"They're everywhere," the soldier responds in her typical droll tone. "You don't sound surprised," you say. "We've seen years of sat footage at this point, what's there to be surprised about?" "Bigger in person, I guess..." "Sure kid." A pause as you let your mind wander, glancing at the softly rustling organics. A drone more paranoid than you might suspect they were encircling you... "Any movers, kid?" [[check infra|infra check 1]] [["No, but these things are unnerving"|unnerving]]

The inside of the structure is wide and spacious. A large, haphazard pile of the same porous stone fills the center of the thing. Glancing up, you see sunlight through a mesh of organics. Between the broken slabs of the softstone, a deep darkness seems to signal further caverns, further below the ground. [[check infra|infra check 1]]

"It's just an overblown surface colony, there are a few on the south tessera" "Those are different -- at home they're alive, filled with drones and soldiers like a colony should be. Those surface colonies are alive while everything else around them in the tessera is dead. These things are dead while everything else around them is alive" "You're bullshitting again amak, the whole ground here is covered in dead carapaces" [["That's not what I mean"|not meant]] [["whatever" (check out the structure)|building]]

"That's not what I meant," you say. "Those carapaces still serve a function, they compost. These, they..." [[you can't quite explain it (continue into the thing)|building]] [["they're not supposed to be here, or I guess they're the only thing that's supposed to be here|be here]]

"Not sure if I'll ever understand you foragers" [[check infra|infra check 1]] [["are we ready for departure?"|departure check 1]]

Your infra sensor flexes angrily against you as you reboot it. Apparently it had crashed during your climb up the entangled hill, and required a manual restart... That's not normal. You smell the thin acidity of the infra's notification pheromones, angry with you for not rebooting sooner, and with itself for crashing in the first place. A preliminary scan echoes the frustrated smells of the reboot, before dissolving into a terror stench. Your joints lock for a moment, frozen in fear, before you can smell the long, curled [[body|the thing in infra]] beneath the sponge stone carcass.

"We're warming up, be patient. You've got your samples?" You look down, and see the rounded tops of a eukaryote you know for sure you haven't sampled yet. [["Yeah"|samples ready]] [["Give me a minute to check this miniature surface colony"|check fungi]]

"We'll be ready a couple shifts, but Neyl says food is ready in a half shift. Return when you feel hungry" [[check infra|infra check 1]] [[move into the cavern|building]] [[return to landsite|landsite]]

You mumble something about type two eukarya, how they appear to eat the carapaces of the type ones, until you feel the flex of Ormie beginning a disconnect. "You've got three shifts, be back at the landsite then." You... [[continue into the cavern|building]] [[turn away from the porous stones|outside sampling]]

You turn away from the unmoving erection to the tangle of organics below you, genuinely curious about the type twos. Here, small domes of light, ribbed material have sprouted from spindly roots in the compost. [[Sample the type two roots|fungi roots]] [[Sample the domes|fungi cap]]

Your XX mandibles carefully brush the compost from the shallow net of roots, before pulling a small bed of the white webbing from the ground and into a folding compartment. A small notification reminds you **SAMPLE COMPARTMENT CAPACITY MET, FURTHER SAMPLING WILL REQUIRE CROSS CONTAMINATION** [[everything here is cross contaminated; sample the dome next|crosscont]] [[leave the dome and finish sampling|landsite]]

Your XX mandibles carefully snip the stem of the strange domed organic from its bed of compost and into a folding compartment. A small notification reminds you **SAMPLE COMPARTMENT CAPACITY MET, FURTHER SAMPLING WILL REQUIRE CROSS CONTAMINATION** [[everything here is cross contaminated; sample the roots next|crosscont]] [[return to the landsite|landsite]]

You make the trek back towards the landing site, across the wide river, and to the small clearing where the lander rests. Inside the lander, you remove the XX suit and breathe a deep sigh of relief as you feel the sweet mixture of sulfur and carbon dioxide press comfortably around you. "Too damn thin out there," says Ormie at her terminal. "Comms are online captain, and nav systems are all honey." You glance to the secluded terminal where the drone sits, speaking to the ship's bridge from a headset, with his wet translucent wings folded in front of him. [["Dinner?"|food]] [["Can you run some prelims on these samples, drone?"|diagnostics]]

After more careful sampling, you place the two pieces of type two into the same compartment, where they rest daintily together. You hear a rumbling behind you. [[turn|outside mover]] [[check infra|infra check 2]]

Your infra sensor flexes angrily against you as you reboot it. Apparently it had crashed on your climb up the entangled hill, and required a manual restart. Nervously you flex against the XX suit, and your defence sensors spring to life. The infra pheremones begin flooding your senses panically, warnings appearing across your vision. [[turn around|the thing in infra]]

Mottled in the shifting colors of the infra, the rumbling creature is a Lovecraftian nightmare. A thousand soldiers fused together, half its form rears up like Ormie reaching for the containers atop the foodcube - the other half, uncurling now, stretches behind it. Shimmering black and iridescent, it reminds you of the deep angriness of the helix nebula. Chittering, the enormous creature blots out the sun before moving swiftly towards you. You feel two crunches before your mind vanishes, as the top your XX suit is crushed into your exoskeleton, and the metal mixes with chitin to pierce and mash your innards into pulp. [[end|end 1]]

The mover stalks through the underbrush, slowly churning its way through the morass of the strange planet. Hundreds of limbs shift the long chitinous body. On the horizon a small bright flash of a spacecraft enters the atmosphere. *End.* [[return|A beginning]] or [[read thank you|Thank you]]

"Reheated honeypot; I think Neyl saved some for you." Moving to the foodcube, you find the still warm honeypot shell, slick with sugar and cooked until slightly chewy. The taste is wonderful, and you move over to Neyl in the common cell who sits washing her cooking utensils. You press your body against hers, releasing softly thankful pheremones tinged with the erotic emotion of breaking a fast with such a splendid meal. Neyl responds, nudging your back limbs, and says something clever that you can't hear over the soft rumble beginning under the lander. "Begin secure formation," you hear Ormie shout over the din. [[...|end 2]]

The drone takes the sample containers and plugs them into their command interface. Symbols and numbers and graphs flash across the screen in front of them - typical nerd shit. "These don't absorb, they're completely enzymatic consumers," the drone whines. "Like us?" "No mandibles," the drone jokes. [[...|end 2]]

You leave the surface of the 3rd world with a sigh of relief, smelling the morass of white porous menhirs sublimate into the totality of organics. *End.* [[return|A beginning]] or [[read thank you|Thank you]]

Thank you for playing this short, text based adventure. This was inspired by Martha Gilmore's *Venus as an Exoplanet* talk at the CT Exoplanet Picnic 2019. A confluence of imagining life on Venus, our current political climate of climate science denial, life after humanity, and more, I hope to expand this work in the future. For now, thank you again for play-reading. Continue imagining. William Balmer, July 20th, 2019 Read an [[*afterword*]]

You run. You don't glance back. Your pheromones flood the thin air in your wake with fear. It crashes behind you, crunching through the foliage with reckless abandon, but you are smaller, and faster, even here. The higher gravity doesn't help, but you eventually pull away from the beast. You continue to run, until the sounds of its movement fade away into the din of the rustling organics. You walk, lost, until your exosuit re-establishes a connection to the lander. [[Somehow, you make it back|landsite]]

A lot has changed since I first wrote this piece, and while I've wanted to expand on it since, it was the announcement of phosphine on Venus two weeks ago that convinced me to revisit *Fly Trap*, and at the very least copy-edit it (and boy, am I embarrassed that I released the first draft of this thing, and that people played it: imagine misspelling "foliage" and not catching the error for an entire year). My perspective on the problems of climate change and culture have changed a lot since 2019 too. I think it's a bit silly at this point to attribute the ongoing climate disaster to "science denial." The real problem has always been that it's far easier, and much more profitable, for those in power to ignore the harm they cause, and shift the concerned public's attention away from their continued vampiric existence and towards a spectacle show of ignorant "skeptics" and religious zealots. "Science denial" really isn’t the problem we, as scientists face. While I think everyone could benefit from a better education, the battle to "prove" climate change to a minority of rightwingers really just serves to draw our attention away from the real solutions to climate change that we must begin to busy ourselves with: degrowth, workplace democracy, international solidarity, and land back. I embarrass myself, writing such a long afterword just to correct a single phrase uttered by my past self. But then, what is editing for, if not to shame your past thoughts into submission? Thanks again for joining me here - if you've read this far, I hope you know that I could never hope to repay you for your attention. Time is precious, and hopefully *Fly Trap* was an alright use of your time. William Balmer, October 2nd, 2020