Descent Into Madness

The mathematician pondered at the only blank wall of her room perplexed. Was that particular wall immune to the fungus? They were growing everywhere, mushrooms strangely shaped as flowers, and arrows pointing the way into the attic. She had not entered the attic since her partner took the bus to The Grand Mars Theater with the kids and never returned. Later she heard about the explosion and her life turned to rubble resembling the gilded door frames destroyed by the bombs.

The deadly silver colored furry spiders soon infested the ruins of the building, anything left abandoned in Mars was full of them, like their cousins back in earth, rats or cockroaches, they were resilient and spread quickly inside walls and crevices. She was sure they were also in the attic.

Sometimes, while she was trying to decode the newly formed fractal mushrooms as she liked to call the complex brightly colored dome shaped life forms popping out of her bedroom walls she heard noises, like drums in the distance. She vaguely suspected the mushrooms were messing with her mind, some were scented like mature white Dendrobiums spicy and exotic.

In sunny days she would go outside, descend the long black stairs that went down the slope towards the pond where red Koi fished lived... She would talk to them in her mind and they would answer like oracles full of wisdom to anything she asked. She adored them. They could make the drums stop and go silent for a while. But lately their answers seemed more and more careful, as if they were reticent to share with her the future.

Twice already they've asked her if she was alright so she decided to stay indoors this time, despite feeling pulled towards the pond.

She went to bed to distract herself trying to make sense of unsolved theorems but the Koi fishes kept calling her, mingling their little voices with the rhythm of the drums, and when she stubbornly refused the summons, they came flying through the open windows, they hovered over her notebook and nibbled at her pencil and kept asking her:

“Are you alright?”

---

✬✬✬

• This is my entry to the contest by @isaria.

• The story idea was partially inspired by the image but the opposite is also true...

• I'm experimenting with QR codes and their possibilities integrating text and image. The image contains the story above into one of the QR codes. I had a lot of trouble until I could make one that didn't fail to be read and was small enough. I tested the QR codes in QTQR and they were read fine, please tell me if you try them and they fail to load.

• Image was created using a couple of my old azaleas and tree photos, put through Deep Dream Generator and Gimp. QR codes were made with QTQR and https://cwaqrgen.com/