Ever since I was a child I’ve been haunted by the prospect of being a puppet-version of myself, or of seeing my loved one’s body emptied of its person and made a puppet. And wasn’t this the fundamental horror of zombies? That someone we knew intimately, whose body we kissed and embraced, should be suddenly emptied of their selves and hijacked by another someone or something. Like a corpse paraded through the streets, or a head planted on a stake, it felt like some kind of obscene mockery. The prospect of looking into your eyes and you not being there, of apprehending your animated body but realizing it no longer belonged to your person, was more horrible than any physical suffering that could befall me. Even the prospect of seeing you shot through the head would have been less horrific than witnessing your body, hollowed of its person, inhabited like a flesh costume by a thing, a virus, a non-person. And obviously this fear of inhabitation is disturbing and universal enough to form the basis of virtually every literary and filmic horror trope — zombies, werewolves, vampires, demon possessions, transformative viral infections, alien inhabitations…

Sometimes, when we couldn’t think of anything to watch, we’d just let ourselves be sucked down YouTube vortexes. One night we found ourselves watching a clip about the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a “zombie fungus” found in tropical rainforests. The fungus infested ants and took over their minds and bodies, causing them to forsake their canopy nests and foraging trails. The ants would convulse and fall to the forest floor, where they then scrambled to a low-lying leaf and clamped onto its central vein with their mandibles. The ant was now where the fungus wanted it: near the forest floor, where the humidity and temperature were optimal for fungal growth. There the ant remained, clamped to the leaf, until its death, at which point the fungus burst through the ant’s exoskeleton, using mechanical pressure and enzymes, and sprouted a stalk, which began to release spores.

As we watched this tiny freak show unfold in time-lapse, the question I became fixated on was: When did the ant become the fungus? Was it the moment the fungus began to control the ant’s brain and body? And in those moments when the ant was technically still alive, was it a kind of hybrid creature? An ant-fungus? There was no doubt that, in the end, all that was left was the sprouting fungus. But the moment that the ant stopped being the ant was altogether unclear.