memory

“The mechanism is unknown.”

An unacceptable answer. We stared at the aching mass of wet rot and dying books. The expressions were black, clay, ochre and the aroma ozone.

“We believe it to be an adjacent phenomenon to genetic memory whereby information is stored at a cellular level absent any sensory or existential experience. We observe, at least, that the organism possesses spatial memory and it is capable of transferring structural data through the mycelium.”

“How?” My colleague was approaching this mycological dementia with far less skepticism, and replacing it with adventurous curiosity.

“We’ve observed biologically-derived quantum fluctuations.”

“You’re saying,” her cadence is hesitant, “This fungus is generating quantum electricity?”

“We believe that to be the case.”

It began as a research study at the CDC. Then a flight to another country on a different continent. Another flight and another. Bus after boat. The final boat, where we received our injections, left from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, down the Beagle Channel. We descended into anesthetic dreams as we were taken as far south as south goes.

These might have been the first of our cankered omens.

The flood of consciousness came with loam odor and troubling quiet and stinging air. The cots we slept in were surrounded by a spurious, sterile room. Hospital sensations. My colleague groaned.

“Try to stay calm.”

A deep voice came from a wide mouth on a youthful, clean-shaven face adorned with square glasses and a tangle of black hair.

“We’re beneath the earth beneath the ice.”

Our veins were flushed with intravenous supplements, and we choked down hydration gel and nutrition paste. The apparatus appeared rudimentary—unfinished walls, ancient equipment, and an opaque sense that whatever was happening in this place was made of the stuff of scorned aspirations. Our coughs echoed down arbitrary hallways with spasming fluorescent lights.

Eventually, our attendant came to retrieve us, an older face but a familiar one. He had inspected us before the last boat in Argentina looking mostly for generic health markers. There were unsettling edge cases though—

Does your anxiety have a spoken name?
Can you recite the first thirty-trillion digits of pi?
Do you perceive your thoughtforms as flame or smoke?
Has your ego died?

Our answers must’ve been amenable because he was there to retrieve us. Through shocks of white beard he gave us heavy clothes and instructed us to wear them as we’d be leaving the meager comforts of this artificial place and going deeper into the earth. We followed the attendant after we dressed.

The labyrinth descended initially into a cultivation laboratory textured with snaking sterile troughs. Vibrant lichenous masses propagated across films of various decaying papers and leathers. Several of the base layers were decomposed in a way we’d never seen before: A translucent tumor mass that appeared to “breathe” iridescence. We felt the dread of seeing a thing that shouldn’t be, like a butterfly with eight wings.

“What’s happening here?” My colleague hesitates to process.

“Here, we reproduce the natural growth of the mycelium,” the attendant sputtered. He gestured toward diaphanous tendrils, webbing clustered on the tracts.

“When the first fruiting body was discovered, identified, observed — the mycelium was deep beneath the ground, well below any other root clusters of the local flora.”

My colleague, the botanist, “What biome?”

“The very first discovery was tropical rainforest,” the attendant answered. “The Pampas in the Bolivian Amazon. We’ve found them all over the planet, though. So long as there is deep earth for the mycelium to spread, the organism appears to be opportunistic.”

The attendant was cryptic, but at least academic in his answers.

“What about here, then?” My colleague asked. “These materials aren’t soil.”

The attendant cleared his throat, and the paper shivered. Perhaps.

“Based on observations during experimentation with the natural fruits, there was interest in whether the mycelium network would propagate throughout different materials. These paper layers and earth are virtually the same matter, if you look close enough. The organism does appear to make attempts at expanding when introduced to inorganic materials, but fruiting bodies never emerge. It appears to develop a symbiotic relationship only with matter that is alive or once lived.”

Her next question was only natural. “And the phenomenon?” My colleague gestured at the strips of pellucid fiber, the breathing masses that seemed to support the saprophyte until their inevitable collapse.

“The masses appear to be byproducts of a novel process that we have yet to fully understand.” The attendant hesitated, drawing a few sedate breaths. “The organism stores what can only be described as experiential information that it gathers from its growth ecosystem.”

There was no evading our expressions’ betrayals. There was no existing science for the concepts the attendant spoke of, no order, no sensible natural law. ‘Experiential information’ was a feature of consciousness, if anything at all. It described data where no data exists.

“Come,” the attendant replied to our naked skepticism.

The descent was solemn, industrial tile became loamy turf and meager insulation became biting cold. Light became softer, warmer, unreliable. We sank gradually, the icy earth creaking and groaning a minatory dirge. Then came a jagged labyrinth, confined tunnels where bends were occluded and shadows cast the wrong way.

Eventually we arrived at the first chamber, a clamshell outcropping in the dense undersoil. A shower of light, now so dim that it appeared red as some crisis, illuminated stacks of books. The mycelium sprawled over them, clusters of tendrils fingering the pages and burrowing into barely perceivable negative spaces. Splatters of the shimmering cysts underscored the fibrous network, and in a few places, the fabled fruiting bodies burgeoned. Capped fruits of myriad colors.

My colleague inspected meticulously and the attendant bided his time for her response.

“How do you know?” It was an interior rationale, presumably. “How do you know empirically that it has the ability to retain this information?”

The attendant scratched his beard and answered as if he had some awareness that would be the next curiosity. “The fruits contain hallucinogenic properties — when consumed orally, subjects report acute psychedelic experiences, not unlike those induced by other fungus.”

“Subjects?” My colleague interrupted, incredulous. “This has been given to researchers?”

The attendant gave her an austere nod, “And study participants.”

“Which part of the organism?” She was likely possessed by a similar concern — had they harvested the strange sarcomas and fed them to humans?

“The fruiting bodies. The striking phenomenon here, if you haven’t arrived at the conclusion already, is that the experiential information is transferred to the subject. Without more advanced medical infrastructure that doesn’t function under the ice, there’s no way to be sure, but the best hypothesis is that this is the result of a neurological process. Perhaps even some undiscovered function of the pineal gland.”

A strange, if not preposterous conclusion to reach without direct observation.

“What evidence is there to correlate this experiential data function of the organism to a neurological process?”

The attendant drew in a steady breath, something we had seen him do each time before he would relay something increasingly outlandish.

“They learn.”

“The quintessential observation was the Vietnam Pod. Here, the mycelium was established on a collection of Vietnamese language texts — from travel phrasebooks, to dictionaries, to study works meant for students of the language. Three subjects were selected: two female and one male, all middle aged, Americans with no prior knowledge of the language. After the psychedelic experience was induced, the subjects demonstrated their ability to communicate with each other in the language, with near perfect fluency. There were even linguistic markers that weren’t present in any of the text.”

“And what theory is there as to where those originated?” My colleague was blatant in her doubt. Or was it subdued fascination? Or fear?

“The leading theory is that the organism not only collects an experience data set from the text itself, but from the text’s source as well. The author.”

The absurdity had reached a fever pitch.

“How?”

“The mechanism is unknown.”

We shivered and we walked, bearing witness to each fungal alcove that dotted the substrate as constellations in a vast night. Mildewy specters of the organism receding like ocean tides, ebbing about scrolls and tomes and off gassing its eldritch fibers. It was a thing that shouldn’t be, but we couldn’t evade that notion that this place under the ice was some mycological Alexandria. We had yet to negotiate whether it was damned to be devoured by fire, changed into an academic memory or the provisional fever of a psychonaut.

The attendant halted our ritual walk at the portal to some earthen chapel, the estimations over his shoulders betrayed that this domain was different from the others. He shuffled in place and dug his boots into the dirt. He breathed the icy air and wrestled with the delusion that he could ready us.

“These discoveries gave way to renewed interest in expeditions of a certain nature. Within the last year, several of the researchers were compelled topside to search for extant artifacts of the heroic age.”

He coughed out some anxiety, some notion of academic hubris perhaps.

To see the thing in the room felt unnatural or perhaps far too natural. It was not clear anymore, a blur of supercognition, a drowning deluge of things that could not be, but were. The mycelium had executed its anomalous process throughout a humanoid form, the flesh-made-fiber now jittering and exhaling its exotic vapors. On the earth above the tumor, it plashed ochres and mustard aberrations. At distance, we saw peculiar fruits emerging randomly from the tendrils: caps containing nebular gas and flutes with parallel, descending stripes. The distinct odors of diesel and fecal matter. As we approached we found that the arrangement of the fruiting bodies in dimensional space was a message.

I AM JUST GOING OUTSIDE AND MAY BE SOME TIME

My colleague, perhaps collapsed under the dementia, approached the mycelial mural and gently, meticulously plucked a handful of the fruits from it. The corpse lump to her side quivered. She noticed.

“I’m afraid, but I have to know.” She carefully set the galactic cap on her tongue. Her instructions were implied, so I followed her into the mold.