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Practical Details

Space Opera

When all of this started, there was a genre of science fiction concerned with the practicalities of space travel: a man stranded on Mars grew potatoes; when the water filtration on the ship broke down, the travelers captured crystallized water released from the ship’s membrane; CO2 levels made astronauts go mad and projects ended in pragmatic tragedy.

The first SIA mission to space began at this level, in a recycled clunker of a ship bound for Venus. They were brave in their suits with their oxygen tanks and their detailed plans for how to cycle down the energy needed for the very basic earthly mechanism of photosynthesis that close to the sun.

But they also had an ally with a capacity for great leaps of intelligence. Part of their experiment was that symbiotic relationship. Even as they flew towards Venus, the Mycelium and the human workers processing the waste collected by the golden women grew their technology in leaps and bounds, so that they soon had a vast empire of waste management and recycling. Then. building and growing, they came to a way of surviving and of concealing the magnitude of their project beneath the soupy atmosphere of that golden planet named, ironically, after the goddess of love—for she rained down acid.

Mycelium that had developed a tolerance to sulphuric acid in the fermentation industry’s waste management processes in China expanded its ability to resist, but also transform the fatal rains that fell constantly from the Venusian skies. The cleansed rains, the clouds of carbon dioxide, breathed and filtered and transformed into bright pools of sulfur, fed the gardens that soon grew into alien rainforests that exhaled oxygen.

The SIA and their ships could have remained there. But the cloud thickening mechanisms they built to mute the heat of the sun for their gardens numbed and dulled the light and could not meet their need for blue skies, for golden warmth on their skins and lashes, and for enough starshine to bake their clothes and the crowns of their heads on a hot summer’s day.

There was a Ray Bradbury story about this longing. The sun broke the clouds for one hour every seven years.

Besides, they would need to stay away from Earth for over a millennium. Were they so close to the blue swirls of their home planet, close enough to view the land of their ancestors as a star in the sky, they might not be able to resist that call.

They knew Earth needed time to purge and then to heal. They were determined to give it to her.

The astronomers of SIA had identified a pattern in the great randomness of the Milky Way in maps modeled after histories marked in ancient sites, at Stonehenge, at Machu Picchu, at the Great Pyramids under the gaze of the Sphinx, according to the Mayan calendar, and in alignment with those other mysterious tools for marking time and mapping space that were monuments to the old ones.

In 2050, the pattern would align again.

The people of SIA and their Multiversity of Arks would be waiting there.

At the Mirror, ready for the opening of the gate.

Our Planet

Mycelium Tech

In 2014, my biologist brother, Andy, sent me a speech by mushroom specialist Paul Stamets. Initially, I doubted. But by the end of the speech I was in tears of relief. Stamets showed us how fungus had cleaned up a diesel spill, as well as a chemical waste, restored ecosystems, and performed pest control. We were not alone, nor were we dependent on humankind. There was a resilient being protecting and healing Earth.

Thereafter, Andy and I joked about praying to The Great Mycelium. We hoped it would never consider us pests.

Still, Stamets warned, “we need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. If we don’t get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.”

What we lacked was consciousness of our kinship with all living beings and Earth.

In the early 1990s a close-knit group of geniuses, the Synergists, built and tested the first biosphere in the desert of Arizona. It was to be the first of many, designed with the goal of collecting data and of troubleshooting—so that one day they could create a spaceship or an extra-terrestrial colony on which to preserve life from Earth.

They traveled the globe collecting species for their mini jungle and their mini ocean, their mini forest and their mini meadow. “Do you know how many flowers it takes to feed a hummingbird?” one asked. They made a mystical home, wherein they knew every living being and felt their interconnectedness with all life.

But when they tried to to live off that land, they suffocated and starved. They went insane on carbon dioxide poisoning, fighting and spinning conspiracy theories against one another. The animals suffered needlessly. In the end, the Synergists had to bring in oxygen from outside in order to survive the full two years of their experiment.

I also heard that, without wind to make them strong, the trees fell over.

The SIA had learned two things from the Synergists. One, maintain secrecy. Two, work with the Great Mycelium.

It is now well known that the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a network of fine white filaments, called the mycelia, link into root systems of trees, plants, and other mycelial webs and transfer information and nutrition.

Perhaps the Synergists had cut their world off from this, the source of life beneath.

The intelligence of plants, laughed off by some scientists until recently, grew from the complex mind of the mycelium, which, as Stamets pointed out, grows like neurons or the nerve cells in our minds, like the dark matter of space, and like the network of the internet.

According to the research of Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, “trees in a forest organize themselves into far-flung networks” and use the mycelium, which “connects their roots to exchange information and even goods.” Trees communicate, “convey warnings of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need.”

Says Stamets, the “mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.”

Sagebrush warns its fellows of a pest intrusion.

In a 2013 article, “The Intelligent Plant,” New Yorker contributer, Michael Pollan imagined the scent of sage as an “invisible chemical chatter, including the calls of distress, going on all around.” He described the air as “powerfully aromatic, with a scent closer to aftershave than to perfume.”[‡]

A forest will even work across species to share food.

According to Simard, “fir trees were using the fungal web to trade nutrients with paper-bark birch trees over the course of the season. The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the season. For the forest community, the value of this coöperative underground economy appears to be better over-all health, more total photosynthesis, and greater resilience in the face of disturbance.”

Western scientists were naïve to the knowledge of people 10,000 years ago or that of African, Asian, and Indigenous societies, who depended on fungi and the inventions of mycelium to preserve fire, as antibiotics, as anti-inflammatories. And much, much more.

While humans were transforming the planet with art and technology and war and pollution, the mycelium had also been at work, resolving the devastations of our time. Ask yourself what capacity the Great Mycelium has.

“Let your imagination go wild,” answers Stamets.

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With the leadership of Indigenous scientists who were also members, the SIA and the golden women had learned to work with the mycelium, to communicate a vision with the intelligence of slime molds and polypores.

The mycelium tech in my mask (and in the recycling centers we delivered garbage to and in the ones that were soon propagated on satellites twinkling in our night skies from 2025-2040) was based in this and other Traditional Ecological Knowledges kept by friends and members of SIA and put to multiple purposes by the Arks and Islands of the Multiversity.

We were remembering.

And there would be so much more to learn from fungus—about time travel for example.

Practical Details

Masks and Armor

It wasn’t the death threats that brought me to SIA (as a guy in my AA meeting said, “so it’s your fifteen minutes of fame.”) Nor was it having my promotion blocked by the senior men in the History Department. It also wasn’t the one who went back to her husband or the one who hated how I guessed her mind—or tried to.

It was the quiet after all the drama. It was the Grim. The sepia days. The question as I drove around town: this is so hard; why do it?

When the pandemic of 2020 hit, I was a newcomer in SIA. I had a sponsor. I attended meetings. I had only begun to work step one. I learned from the old timers, who had been around the rooms for decades about my powerlessness over the isms: how we were survivors of it, but how, as survivors, we had also become perpetrators of it. Life had become unmanageable. Suicide seemed like an option. For many, homicide seemed viable. Some had done time in prison. Most of us lost sleep and peace fantasizing about revenge.

One day, between the lonesome of Thanksgiving and the lonely of Christmas, I had stomped the snow off my boots and entered the fogged glass doors at the Gargoyle Church. There they were: my people.

I quickly became dependent on the community in the rooms. I looked up to the elders there: to Juno, to Dido, to Britomart and Manel. My brother Andy, leaned back and grinned when I came in, tucked his bottom lip up. Camilla, as always inseparable from Gallia, stood and took me into her rough arms, then sat me beside her from day one, elbowing me gently and winking at me as the room laughed. I remembered this from AA—stories that would have shocked outsiders. We laughed because we were no longer alone.

The other newcomers, Cly, and Xan met my eyes from within their own raw armor, a glint of hope cutting through above the shadows.

Then, the elders took us to coffee.

There were many more beautiful folks in the daily meetings. But these were mine.

I was home.

It was weird, but I kept returning to the dingy room and the cracked cushions on the seats. I drank the bad coffee, with the dried creamer, from the chipped cups.

That March, the pandemic hit and we were told to shelter in place, alone in our homes. I was pretty scared. I had seen the Italians singing to each other on their balconies. I had heard their warnings, their remorse. I went dutifully indoors. I checked the news. I shook my head in amazement at the toilet paper shortage. I waited for my government to set up testing and to provide guidance.

My AA and ACA went on Zoom, but when I called my SIA sponsor, she said, “Come on down to the meeting.”

Stephen was there planting flowers when I arrived. He smiled his gappy grin. He laughed his hoarse laugh. He had a hard time staying sober. But we had been friends in the rooms for years.

I knew not to hug him. I can still remember the last hug I had had: on March 11th at an AA meeting. Les. Before nightfall, I was already afraid one of us would get the other sick.

My sponsor met me at the door with a carton of disinfectant wipes for my hands. Then she gave me a lightweight, clear plastic, strappy gizmo with a cylindrical center full of what looked like dirt.

“Put this on.” It was a mask. “Keep it watered. Report in here tomorrow at 6 a.m. for service work.”

And that is how I learned how the SIA meetings and the quiet garbage collectors were related. The very next day, I was assigned a shift in my neighborhood.

Gloved and masked in mycelium tech, we went about in our competent way, rounding up the city waste for free.

Vision

12 Steps for Survivors of the Isms Anonymous

The Reader walked up the concrete ramp, sliding her hand along the chipped and smoothed paint of the metal railing. She passed determined roses and sunflowers on ragged plants that needed to be deadheaded. She stopped to cup one bright beauty in her hand and brought it to her nose.

“So sweet,” she whispered to the plant.

Under the awning of the old stone church with its desert pink stucco joints, which were decorated with long-necked statues of monsters that gave the church its nickname: the Pink Gargoyle Church, she was met by friends on wide wooden benches around the patio. People stood up from conversations to embrace one another in warm, chaste hugs. They looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the coded banter they had learned in rooms like these, rooms like the one she now entered through glass doors.

She stopped to introduce herself to the grim young man sitting just inside the door, shaking his hand warmly. “Welcome home Sebastian,” she said.

Inside, against a wall decorated with two plain banners—The 12 Steps of SIA, The 12 Traditions of SIA—she sat among more friends, smiling around a fold out table in a circle of thrifted chairs. The woman at the head of the table began to read from the familiar format. So, the meeting began– over the quiet clink of metal spoons stirring sugar and powdered cream into chipped mugs at the coffee pot.

The last bits of chat quieted slowly as the leader said, “Will you please join me in a moment of silence for the still suffering, followed by the Serenity Prayer.”

The quiet came deep, willing, communal. The Reader could feel the flutter of anxiety rise and still as her breath came all the way in, all the way out. She concentrated on the words as she spoke them, trusting the one she said them to, trusting the evidence in the room. Trusting the wisdom and the freedom that they requested in unison.

“We meet to share the experiences we have as survivors of the isms of a society built on dominance: colonialism, racism, binarism, heterosexism, ableism, classism…”

The readings went as usual, read every meeting, reminding her every meeting. She let them flow around her.

“Those experiences infected us as children and continue to affect us today…

“One. We admitted we were powerless over the isms and the effects of growing up in structural violence and that our lives had become unmanageable.

“Suicide, addiction, harm to ourselves and others, anxiety, depression…

“We lived life from the standpoint of victims…

“We take our own inventories and leave the rest to our higher powers…”

And then, after the readings, in the familiar format of the meeting, wise, brave, petty, self-pitying, humble, comfortable, familiar, humorous, vulnerable, honest, and sometimes also still in denial, the people spoke for their three minutes, each as their ticket number was pulled and called from an old coffee can.

She looked out the window at the blue sky, at the tree waving in the breeze. She looked at the speakers. She nodded. She smiled. She felt moved. She felt glad it wasn’t her. She felt grateful. She opened her heart. She resisted. She checked out. She checked in. When the Newcomer Sebastian shared, choked with grief, she nodded with the room when he said, something about walking his neighborhood in fear for his life, about “being jumped,” “total isolation,” “the plundering of queer bodies,” “shame.” The hour gradually passed.

“Number 68,” the ticket person said.

The reader looked up from her folded hands and smiled. Her number had been called.

“My name is Juno and I am a Survivor,” she began.

Practical Details

Gaga Garbage

In January 2018, China’s National Sword policy brought the globe into awareness of its waste crisis. Well-intentioned people attempted to quit using plastics. But these measures were no match for a throw away economy where the highest good was too often in conflict with profit. Corporate citizenship had long stunted arguments for social justice and sustainability across all sectors.

A helplessness came over us as we rinsed out our produce bags and refilled them until they frayed and fell apart, landing in the waste basket along with all the plastics we could not avoid. A person could look around her household, or even into her bag and see plastic, plastic, plastic. And a need for more as these fragile items cracked and broke around us.

Companies that had once asked us to put our sorted recyclables into color coded bins on the sidewalks, instead quit collecting glass. Papers were poured into a common bin where they were soaked and polluted with grease and fluids from the other containers. Or paper was bagged in plastic.

Gone were the days when a little girl could smash her dad’s beer cans in an afternoon of cathartic stomping, then take them down to make a bit of cash for a new toy or some candy.

These were just some of the depressing thoughts.

So, when the reader began to speak of garbage, the golden women listened.

For us, it seemed to be a wonderful charitable act that resolved one of the heavy worries we lived with.

A shiny postcard came into our boxes offering garbage and recyclable collection service for a mere $5 a week. And then, as these concerns grew, we began to see all of our waste taken away for free. Bulky, hazardous, green. A fleet of shining, quiet trucks driven by matter of fact, courteous drivers moved in the early mornings through our neighborhoods.

They bought up the landfills too. They encircled them in high fences and, as was their way, quietly stirred dust and gently clattered through the piles.

And, of course there were big corporations and organized crime bosses to negotiate with. But the golden women and their force of close mouthed, diligent drivers and sorters and movers and…whatever else it was they did—well they efficiently addressed the global waste problem.

I am sure it would make an interesting story.

By 2025, we no longer needed to reach into a burlap bag we had bought for bulk oats in order to retrieve a clean produce bag. And frankly, there was a lot more to worry about by then.