[ WP ] You 're in a world where you need to be moving continuously , or plants take root in your body/lungs and kill you

Faking Death Part 1 
 
 For millions of years, the fungi of this world could not eat dead trees. The mighty and looming kings of the forest would be felled by wind, water or time. But their remains would lay in vast arboreal graveyards for eternity, undecaying monuments to the ingenuity and resilience of their very structure. Some say that the indigestible nature of the tree was the catalyst which led to the vast sizes found at the end of millions of years of evolution. They were starved from the ground by the shade of dead ancestors, and starved of light from the canopy above, new seedlings had to sprout high and tall if they were to survive, they had to change and adapt just like everything else. 
 
 Mutation is key to the evolution and survival of all species and eventually, some fungi colonies found a weakness in the still, un-moving husks of the felled giants They could attack its very structure and gain sustenance from this huge, untapped natural resource. Any colony with this ability flourished, away from competing species, while avoiding many of the herbivore predators which thrived on the edges and savannas of the great forests of the time. 
 
 Every time in history a species could acquire a new source of nourishment, it has thrived and prospered beyond measure. New senses with which to hunt, new venoms to fell faster prey, intelligence to craft tools and invent prosperous systems like agriculture put the respective species far higher on the food chain than ever before. 
 
 It is a shame, or perhaps irony then, that the same intelligence which gave rise to the dominance of the homo sapien species was also its downfall. Intelligence brings with it the ability to think. With the ability to think comes new notions to the animal kingdom, things like wants and desires, a far cry from the primal instincts of his ancestors and fellow fauna. These desires led to many great achievements, but also, they could spawn ideas which served no purpose other than to satisfy the current appetites of the brain. The more prosperous this species ended up being, the closer it approached an unknowable disaster. Reforms were passed to reduce world hunger and poverty. Machines were built to replace the labour of mankind. Time was freed from dawn to dusk to ponder the world, some embraced this time by further enhancing the abilities of this species, others chose to live a more sedentary existence. 
 
 Less and less brilliance was required to further humanity to higher and higher achievements, towards the end of the 21st century, thinking machines replaced a portion of those people who were needed to think and develop new technologies, allowing an ever lucrative drive towards passivity in all people. There was no uprising of A.I or over-pollution of the world as popularised in fiction a hundred years prior, instead the'great disaster' was borne from a far more insidious source which would soon reveal itself to the world. 
 
 Many diseases had arisen over the centuries to decimate the human race, but humanity had conquered them all, viral and genetic, no longer were people mowed down by cancers and micro-organisms, instead these things were put to the enhancement of humans, DNA was stripped of errors and retroviruses actively repaired cell dysfunction, increasing the average human lifespan two fold. 
 
 But while we were sitting at home, enjoying our hard earned lives away from work, where pills could enhance muscle and heart function while emptying our bodies of excessive fat from the overabundance of consumed food, we were being tested. We had become an all to familiar thing to evolution, we had become those untouchable towering giants of old, we had engineered our resilience and immunity and we basked in this. We had created for ourselves a skin far tougher than wood, one that would repel everything invasive that we could no longer be fed upon by any living creature on earth. 
 
 Then it adapted. 
 
 It found the chink in our biological armour. Broke the heel of our perfect system. For you see, micro machines had long taken over the function of oxygenation of the body, we no longer even had to bother to breathe and our blood ran blue through our veins like an icy river, pulled by trillions of tiny machines and given oxygen only at the last moment before delivery to our one still living organ, the brain. Even our hearts no longer required to operate as the core of our biological factory. We were the living dead. We had fully become an innumerable forest of uncontested, idle food, and we had just become ripened for the largest harvest of humanity the world had ever seen. 
 
 It was the spore from a sub-species of a common algae which found it. A species on the brink of moving from a subsistence life cycle based on the sun, to an invasive and flesh eating plague which could tap a new plentiful food supply, burrowing deep inside it where the sun was no longer its master. Its genius was finding a way to hide from the nano-machines and immune system, by altering the chemical output of its spores to match that of the dead blood and tissues in our bodies. These spores had passed harmlessly through human bodies for thousands of years, ending up digested or in a place where there was no longer light to propagate, since it was non harmful, most of these foreign spores had been allowed by both the technological and biological to simply enter the body and die of their own inability to survive in this new environment. This had given them all the time needed for evolution to take its course, and for that first spore to live inside the living dead. It turns out that life just can not fake other life, but this spore found out how to fake death. 
 
 Millions died sitting in their homes, the spread was largest near natural fresh water reserves where the mutated spore could kill its first victims and mingle with others of its kind in a more natural environment, all while still retaining this new weapon. The thinking machines were quick to respond and identify the source of this new super infection but no adaptation to the immune system could compensate for a foreign object which was for all intensive purposes, invisible. Ordering nano machines to attack the spores would result in the liquidation of unused organs and blood in the body, it was indistinguishable to the immune system, but the body still needed blood to carry the machines which did the inner work for man. Synthetic compounds were tested but failed and rejected by the body. Our evolution had not been given a chance to catch up to the changes we had made. Everything that was made unnecessary our body demanded we keep, the brain could not cope without blood to deliver its nourishment and this once life giving substance was now rapidly filling with a parasitic infection which devoured us from the inside. 
 
 The decision was made to revert the changes we had made, new generations was kept as true, living humans. However, now lacking the nano-machines which had been an unyielding shield for humanity a tidal wave of disease and other sources of infection pushed humanity to an ever closing coastline of extinction. It was a time where a simple cut could be fatal, anti-biotics had stopped working decades ago, no new drugs had been developed nor had the natural immune system of a combined humanity been tested in battle for just as long, all the while bacteria had been evolving and developing in the rest of the animal kingdom, ready to find a new host, one who was now unfit to repel it. The spore infection itself would still kill the idle masses, the lone natural immune system was unable to fend off an infection against a foe which had managed to improve its decoy technique. This type of rapid evolution is seen in ecosystems where there is short fast life cycles and high environmental pressures. The spores could now keep up the ruse when the body was running in a rest state, the lower respiration was close enough to the death state it pretended to exhibit that it could keep its cloak of invisibility. 
 
 Air filtration kept out most of the spores, a reduced humanity was forced inside or underground to avoid the green plague. We became a species of fear and paranoia, avoiding all activity as much as possible, living in fear of a scrape or cut. We descended into VR communities leaving automation to be our saviour. Entrusting the outside world to the artificial. We had been attacked because we tried to be dead on the inside, and in typical human fashion, we responded by becoming even more dead. 
 
 Nature responded in kind, suddenly the green infection became even more virulent, killing faster and seeming to spread at unprecedented rates, using sunlight where it could to spread worldwide and cover every surface, looking for a way in, it had tasted flesh and it seemed to hunger for more. It became impossible to farm produce outside, the spores were everywhere, and even the best filtration and decontamination systems could not keep out all the spores, and it only took one to get in. Indoor fields were created, but any error, any mistake, and whole crops would have to be incinerated to remove the spore infection, you had to give light and water to grow food, and thus you had to make the perfect environment for this spore, one tiny spore to beat the mighty metal box that had been erected over the human farms, 
 
 People were no longer safe, containment systems were failing at higher rates and the automated systems were struggling to develop a solution fast enough to keep humanity alive. People were dying to fast to replace the numbers and yet they slumbered, living in an artificial world, running away from the problem while smarter machines toiled to find an answer for them.
