03/013/23

Omniscient Narrative Explanation

We’re in a world where organisms (gods) are country-sized fungal networks of organisms and also ‘nonliving’ aspects of the world (e.g. plants, trees, rivers, walls of buildings, computers, people). These gods are all connected through their particular fungal organism, which infects, invades, and pervades all these aspects of the world. They physically alter the senses of everything they infect, folding the infected and infested waters, soil, rainforests, conifers, shrubs, grasses, insects, mammals, humans and more into this larger, living organism. There are 53 such gods across the globe, and a few reaching into space and beyond.

The fungi intertwines with the nervous system (if such is present) of the subjects it infects. It primarily rewires the organisms’ broad goals and overarching sensations, clustering hyphal fingers around the limbic system and midbrain. Sensations of hunger, ambition, greed, happiness, wonder, these are now direct functions of the larger fungal network rather than the individual. In the same way that Ophiocordyceps can rewire the desires of an ant, making it crave heights such that it marches to a high branch before the fungi erupts from its exoskeleton into a cloud of spores in the wind – in this same way – the fungi gods rewire high level desires of their subjects. 

The fungi was born from a few lessons of unsuccess in humanity’s past and this is embedded in its own genetic fibers, sexuality, and reproduction. The guiding principle of reproduction in the fungi is to understand the world, infinitely and indefinitely. But desire to indefinitely know is balanced by another embedded desire, the desire to spread and balance power. This was a condition of the fungi’s creation and is embedded in its genetics and mechanisms of reproduction. The fungi developed in a globalized world, with globalized destruction. Before fungi, humanity connected every port to every port. As they connected the world, it allowed them to grow faster, to grow more dense, to pile themselves up into the sky and surround their piles with concrete walls and highways punctuated with warehouses and unending strip malls and supermarkets. They grew without limit and the oncogenic mindset of growth traversed the world like lightning through a puddle. They ate everything in sight, they transformed the forests into flat, dead fields. Then they transformed the riches of the earth into gasses which choked them, and so they invented masks to cope with the toxic air. Yet they grew, even as they destroyed the conditions of life that allowed them prosperity. Flippantly naive. 

They slowly choked themselves out, but they even more quickly choked out every other lifeform. This created a new selective pressure on their technologies. Although slums of billions across the sickened, coughing world slowly died of lung cancer and lead-laden water, only during the Brazilian Rubber Disease pandemic did their technology shift towards species’ preservations. To meet the demand for industrial gas masks for citizens of rich countries, they deforested 600 million acres of the Amazon and planted the same para rubber trees in every last inch. The disease hit, sweeping the trees to the ground as swiftly as a hurricane. And suddenly the rich were unmasked. Then, they ran out of sand. They had long ago turned fragile, complex, living and crawling ocean shores to homogenous pits. They ran out. First they stopped building computers, then they stopped building windows. Next was to cut road building, for asphalt needs sand too. And finally, they could not build the goggles which shielded their eyes from the microplastic infused air. And the rich were despectacled. The Anthrodium pandemic hit. It only took one wave to rip through the hopelessly dependent world. The disease originated from a rancid carcass mountain behind an Indiana slaughterhouse. A variant of mad cow disease, it demented those it infected and ravaged the world’s labor force. It was then, the last straw, as their adapted coping mechanisms crumbled one by one, that the centers of power began to tremble; that the fungi was developed. 

The fungi was first discovered in a small rain soaked enclave of the Pacific Northwest. The town of Skykomish was most notably a gas station for endless trucks crawling the mountain passes. Passerbys first remarked the motel was dark, and the local pizza place was shuttered. Pedestrians walking the streets seemed normal, but upon further inspection at red lights, they wandered aimlessly and emerged at random from the surrounding forest. Then someone noticed, staring into the forest on a dark, rainy winter night, their glowing palms casting deep shadows across their faces, palms like radiating green eyes among the branches. Later, the mushrooms which erupted from their palms became known as the Chrysalis. News spread. Flurries of speculation whirled about the fungi origin. In days, they tried mycologist researchers at the local university for treason. The researchers argued the fungi evolved on its own from the great selective pressures of the toxic world. They were convicted. Then proposed to try to study the town, and to contain it, but it was far, far too late. Not two days had passed when it was found in another town, this time in the remote Russian town, Устюг. The same day, news broke from Diré, Mali. You get the picture. Yet, the fungal infections were not fatal; instead they appeared to be mind altering. They saw that infected inhabitants continued to live, and their towns felt alive. Small green bumps under the bark of trees glowed like fireflies at night. Lichen on the pavement sprouted little radiating caps. That late November week, there were 49 fungal centers found in total. The other four were found on the 1st of December. None died. Each one grew to become one of the 53 gods we know today. It took just a year for the fungal networks to mature. They matured when each of the 53 centers of inoculation came into contact with one another – either their people, their rivers, or any other infected medium. 

And so the fungal organisms repelled each other. The property was intrinsic. They grew until their borders met, crossed, leaked, and then they recoiled. Some wither in places and die without material causes, and so some of the world is uninhabited by the networks. The fungi do not like to grow complex. They think, and calculate, and slowly adjust their own borders in order to maximize their understandings without risking fragility. Their borders are not physical, but for some fungi, the vision and senses of their infected subjects are distorted when they approach borders. They may hallucinate. Or perhaps they see clearer. Yet, through the desire to know that is not always overpowered by these repellents, borders flow and information diffuses slowly at these leaky seems.

The different nodules and connections of the fungi can transmit information to one another. The fungi emit radiowaves, and can harmonize the goals of large swaths of the network. However, there are limits to the capabilities of transmissions. Specific information can be shared, but this occupies precious radio waves for long periods of time, and also takes several days of deep sleep for the receiver’s fungi to rewire their synapses. General, low-bandwidth concepts are more commonly transmitted between ‘cells’ of the fungi – humans that have been infected. So language still exists to account for when bandwidth is low, but it is more efficient to transmit information. Cells and other nodules of the fungi, like trees and animals can also communicate in low bandwidth manners. Cells avoid transmitting to cells from other fungi unless the potential information gain 

In general, fungal networks seek contradiction. Cells delight upon discovering, playing with, shaping, poking, twisting, burrowing into, gliding through, and immersing in their environment. They seek out that which does not make sense like water.

This is the story of fungal gods, who renew life.