Do you know what love is? A chemical. Electrons in your brain sending signals. Are you familiar with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis? It’s a fungus that infects ants. It’s amazing, really. The spores take over their central nervous systems and force them to climb to a high point, and then the fungus begins to grow up, bursting from the tops of their heads like a branch. And it kills them, of course. All so it can spray new spores over the jungle, infecting more ants. When people say love, that’s what I think of.
Do you know what love is? A chemical. Electrons in your brain sending signals. Are you familiar with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis? It’s a fungus that infects ants. It’s amazing, really. The spores take over their central nervous systems and force them to climb to a high point, and then the fungus begins to grow up, bursting from the tops of their heads like a branch. And it kills them, of course. All so it can spray new spores over the jungle, infecting more ants. When people say love, that’s what I think of.
Love is a parasite. I knew it!
So, manipulative, infectious, subjugative, and fatal?
Good thing cordyceps can’t survive in humans due to our higher body temperature.
Yet.
And if that happens?
Seems like “the last of us” goes from fiction to reality…
Or it would be treated by a antifungal.
Hard to tell with things like this whether you get eldritch horror or a trip to the pharmacist.