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göööööd tidings 2 u
a message from fungal friends
a short sci-fi narrative exploring the carnivalesque, and the regenerative power of fungi in the life cycle. written for faun #1: faunal thoughts on the carnivalesque.
listen to a musical interpretation of this story here
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i’ve hardly left this dark, dank cabin in the heart of białowieża forest in the past fourteen years. a century ago, the polish government funded a team of medical researchers and mycologists from the university in poznan to set up a centre in the middle of this primeval forest in order to study the ancient fungal networks beneath the forest bed, what they identified as the brain of the forest. the primary object of our study: “boski grzyb” or armillaria galicia – the mushroom of immortality. archaeologists have unearthed sculptures throughout the region that can convincingly date the sacrality of this fungus to the bronze age, but they speculate that this tradition may go as far back as the paleolithic. and this reverence was picked up again, in a way, in the research laboratories of our esteemed medical researchers and mycologists. there is now consensus throughout all of the departments of natural sciences at the university that if the key to eternal life does exist anywhere on earth, that it would lay within this ancient mushroom. our first attempts to tap the vital powers of the boski grzyb were more conventional, but they ultimately failed. powders, pills, blood infusions; we managed to extend human life up to 200 years, but this is not immortality. so, we changed our strategy.
40 years ago, cyberneticists made an important breakthrough in their understanding of the intelligent root networks that thread forests together into singular thinking, breathing entities. incredibly, they determined that the multi-species root networks are indeed intelligent and that the fundamental chemical and electrical phenomena within them give rise to complex, emergent interactions that are identical to those found in all other intelligent entities, from computers to humans. of course, fungi are central to this network – their hyphae intertwine trees, plants, and dead vegetal matter, forming the communicational medium of the forest as well as its primary energy source alongside the sun. the bureau of life extension saw the potentially revolutionary implications of this discovery for our research on the mushroom of immortality, and they transferred a few of the cyberneticists here to our station in the białowieża. since then, we’ve been working towards a technology that would enable us to tap into the mycelium, to connect human intelligence directly to fungal intelligence. in this way, we can get straight to the information. no more fiddling with mushrooms and cures – with the exact knowledge of immortality in our grasp, death will be a thing of the past.
and that is why today is a monumental day. today, we vanquish death. today i hook into the mycelium and procure the mystery of eternal life.
for now, i bid farewell to these rotting log walls, the dank stench of this cabin filled with fungi and machinery, and my tireless, aging colleagues. goodbye to the dim green light of the forest. when i return, we shall no longer fear death.
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lay down. strap in. peel back the scalp. open the cranial hatch. expose my pink, fleshy brain.
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a cool breeze on my cerebrum. the machinery is starting up. i know the procedure intimately: magnetic rays will guide the hyphal tentacles of the mycelium towards my open cranium. i feel them wriggling millimeters from my brain.
connection.
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hello? do you understand me my fungal friends?
(millions of voices, in unison)
greetings, friend. yes, yes, we understand you… what brings you down here to visit us?
(my god, it worked! death is vanquished!)
i have spent many years trying to contact you. up above, we call you the mushroom of immortality. i have a simple request. i only wish to speak to you. i seek the secrets of eternal life!
ha! a delectable thought! what leads you to believe that you can find those secrets down here? we are afraid we know nothing more on this account than you yourself surely already know.
but… but that’s impossible! we have revered you for thousands of years as holding the key to immortality! from your dna, we have devised treatments that extend human life by a century! your fungal ancestors were among the most ancient life forms on earth! and you metabolize dead life into energy – the very lubricant of the entire lifecycle of the forest! you must hold the key to eternal life! for how can you not?
it’s all a matter of perspective, no?
i’m afraid that i don’t understand… what do you mean?
friend, all that you say is most certainly true. our ancestors do predate all vegetal and faunal life on earth. but we are not immortal – our time scales are simply different. and as far as metabolization goes, this is a universal process; you already know all that there is to know. there is nothing more we can teach you!
oh, but you do! you and your fungal relatives are the only complex life-forms that can turn death into life. with your knowledge, my people can escape death! surely this is no trivial difference…
it is true that we feed on bodies that you say no longer have the breath of life within them – but what is this breath really? structure and potential, that is all that there is. when we feed on so called “dead” life – on what you surface-walkers might call corpses – all that we do is break structure into potential. from form to energy and back again. we simply shift one form of life into another – allow life to beget more life! this is rudimentary and these processes are by no means unique – they permeate our world! you are already capable of all that you wish to be capable of.
no! i refuse to accept your crafty words and linguistic trickery! there is something fundamentally different between us!
friend, what on earth could that difference be?
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you already possess endless life, and you don’t. immortality is and it is not. up there, life exists in its most spectacular structures, down here in more modest forms. but life is life – at the root of the matter, we are the same!
but when i die, i will be no longer. how can that be life? no movement, no consciousness… nothing.
ah but dear friend, you misunderstand. your notions of life and death have little meaning down here. there is only endless, joyful flux! forms constantly, selflessly metamorphizing! simply a universal, delectable compost-heap! you have dedicated many solar returns to discovering the secret of immortality down here, but have you once even questioned what life itself is?
i… i suppose i have not…
your people have been studying us in that cabin up there for nearly a century – what can we tell you that you don’t already know? certainly, we understand each other in different terms, but that is nothing new. given your expertise, the clearest way to illustrate may be by way of mushroom.
our hyphal networks, as you know, are extensive and delicate. we weave our way through the forest and interlace with various bodies. from their insides we break the hard skins that separate them from each other and from the motherly humus. we prefer not to internalize our food – we absorb it. easier to share our cooking with the soil and the roots this way. but how do we break apart our food if not in a stomach? well, this is an important question! what we do is ooze out enzymes, and they do all the rest. all that is left for us to do is to absorb our food. you already know how enzymes work, but do pay attention now! what you may not have considered is that our dear enzymes simply facilitate inevitable reactions that break molecules apart.
ah, i am beginning to understand! things are coming into focus. death and life are changing their meanings completely!
yes, to us, these are peculiar terms. from our perspective there is only form and energy, life begetting life. structures always have the potential to fall apart and be reconstituted. and inevitably they do. it’s simply a matter of time.
simply a matter of time… yes! yes! simply a matter of time! until i become one again with the humus! i am already one! with the humus and with the world! i wish to wait no longer to experience this communion. i wish to intertwine with you!
what a wonderful idea! let us intertwine! though we have little new to teach you, we can show you much. we cannot give you the knowledge of eternal life to take away, but we would be delighted for you to join us here in a beautiful existence of eternal flux!
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mycelium fingers pulse forward in practiced motions and delicately caress the brain. grey matter beckons for fungal communion like the tree roots in the forest floor below. the boundaries between the mushroom of immortality and the human brain become blurred. hyphae and pink flesh intertwined in a beautiful tango. first entering the temporal lobe. time liquidates – only multi-dimensional flows of energy and information now. the frontal lobe next. new modes of consciousness dispersed into the hyphal network! cerebellum. a few, painless twitches, and the motor functions are one with the movements of the forest. the voice of boski grzyb is everywhere and nowhere. spores disperse throughout the body, travelling through the rapidly circulating blood stream. through the digestive tracts. into the womb. a monumental exchange of life from above to below and from below to above. infant fungal-humanoid springs forth into the world above ground and human brain enters the hyphal intelligence below.