My name is Farley Sean. I'm writing this in Blue Terrace Idaho.

Blue Terrace is where it all began. This can be proved simply by looking through news articles from two years ago.

Blue Terrace was where the mold was first seen. For all I know, I was the first human on earth to see it.

When I walked out onto my balcony one day in July to check on a tomato plant my mother had given me,

I noticed the mold growing on the side of the pot. It was a strange color, a brownish green.

I mentioned it to my roommate but he didn't know anything about gardening.

I put my finger into the mold. It felt grittier, grittier than dirt that's completely dry.

It had no moisture to it at all. It clung to the side of the pot and it covered five square inches or so.

Then I noticed a little of it on the balcony itself near the very edge of it growing right there on the cement.

I thought of it as mold but even then I had doubts.

A day after observing it on the tomato plant I saw some of it on one of the handlebars of my racing bike.

I tried to brush it away but it held fast. I had to chip away at it with the bottom of a comb until it flaked away almost entirely.

That was another strange thing about the substance. It left no trace of itself behind like mold would.

If you could manage to chip it away it would all be gone every bit of it.

I read about the substance in the newspaper a week later.

Some reader wrote into the expert who wrote for the gardening section and mentioned it growing on corn stalks.

The expert referred to it by some name but I knew right away he'd gotten it wrong.

A week after that there was an article in the Metro section called What Could It Be?

The substance had been found growing slowly on all sorts of surfaces in Blue Terrace, especially inside buildings on walls.

Inside the hospital, the high school, the Lutheran church right on the block from me.

It was quickly chipped away and people just found it to be an irritant but no one could claim to really understand its nature.

When it was analyzed it was found to be a lot like moss but able to grow with only a minimal amount of moisture in the air.

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