Car mold infestation has me thinking about rot story.
Haven't said much (read: anything) about it because it barely exists but the world is similar to Nausicaa or that one mushroom planet from TAZ Balance. Except there are no hiding places. Everything is rotting. Humans are cobbled together with face masks and mechanical lungs and organic laminators. The spores are inside you from birth. They will kill you. People excavate deep into the planet's rotting crust to extract what few resources remain from the long buried cities, contaminating them afresh in the process. A book-obsessed archaeologist of sorts has to seal her finds as quickly as possible and read them page by page using an electron microscope, because exposing them to the air on the surface will rot them instantly. Even still she only has a few hours to get through them before the ink starts to feather into illegibility and the paper starts to crumble.
She hopes that her life will follow a satisfying, cathartic arc, like a story. That humanity's fate will, too. But she knows that it won't. Life does not lie along perfectly themed lines. Most things happen according to natural law, which does not care about human conceptions of meaning.
But she can rely on entropy. The natural arc of the universe tends toward decay - and in that decay lie the seeds for growth. She will not live to see them germinate. But she can feed them from beyond the grave, and before that, find moments in the toxic mire of her life that make it all worth it.
