Earth. The thought of it made him want to grieve. He had only experienced it at the state-of-the-art virtual reality Dome on Tokyo Bliss Station, spending hours and hours wandering through re-created stages of Earth’s history. He liked the 1980s best, a far, far distant time of new tech and synthesizers and cocaine. Parts of Tokyo Bliss Station reflected those neon sensibilities, the arcade district in particular, so maybe that was what made it all feel like home.

Sometimes he got nauseated from being in the VR for too long. It often gave him vertigo, but it was worth it. He visited his parents’ hometown, but only when it was still thriving and lively. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still see the sunset making a riot of the mosaic tiles on the Wazir Khan Mosque. Once, he invited his mother to come along and experience it with him, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t.

“It was hard enough to leave,” she told him. “It would kill me to go back.”

For a while the virtual insides of that place had been his talisman against the Foxfire. He would fetch his mother’s prayer rug from his locker, kneel and go there, really go there, sit and listen to the chanting and find temporary reprieve.

He kept the rug close by while he studied the Foxfire samples he had collected from himself and the others and the interior of the ship. Of course, there were pure samples from the contaminated crate they picked up from CDAS, but he wanted variety. A broad sampling might let him see tiny changes, and track if the cellular structure changed once the fungus interacted with human tissue.

Like many of the experiments he had done in his life, the results thrilled and terrified him. Never had he come across a compound that spread this rapidly. Fungus could not self-replicate, but somehow this substance grew out of control, colonizing at a rate that was dizzying to observe. A part of him admired its elegance, its efficiency, an almost self-sustaining system that, when viewed under a high-powered microscope, appeared beautifully symmetrical. Even engineered. No, that was a ridiculous idea. Nature and evolution were profoundly startling, and it was egotism to think humans were responsible for this. He had made himself the most unique test subject in a moment of panic, the voices in his head, ones he couldn’t explain or stop, driving him to self-harm. During vanishing moments of sleep, he could still feel the cold bite of the ship’s plating as he slammed his head into it again and again.

So verily, with the hardship, there is relief, verily with the hardship there is relief.