1. Recording 1357 - The O'Neill Capsules Oral History Collection Terra Lunartree, Mycelial Communication Division

Journal Entry 1

My name is Terra Lunartree. I was named after my ancestors' devastated planet and their hope for seeding new life in our solar system. Growing up, my grandmother told me the story of the lunar trees—the first plants that had successfully grown on Earth after being sent to space as seeds. On January 31, 1971, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Apollo 14 launched American astronauts into space. One of those astronauts, Stuart Roosa, had been a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. Hundreds of tree seeds journeyed with him into space as part of NASA's collaboration with the Forest Service to see how seeds would be affected by zero gravity. When Roosa returned to Earth's surface, the seeds were germinated and planted throughout the United States. They grew and became known as the "Moon Trees".

I never had a chance to set foot on Earth or to touch the Moon Trees. Yet, my whole life, I've been drawn to the question of whether Earthly life can grow on other planets. My passion comes in part from having never felt or smelled plant-rich soil on any planet. But it's also in my DNA. My grandmother, who raised me after my parents died, was a synthetic biologist. It is fitting that I become a syntho-astrobiologist. The Moon Trees are my legacy, and astrobiology, which grew from the earliest space missions, remains the only hope for humanity's survival. And, while we don't yet have hope of growing trees on Mars, we do have expectations of growing fungi. After all, in the Devonian era on Earth, long before the advent of other plants and animals, fungi the size of large trees grew on the planet's surface.

Today, Earth calendar June 1, 2178, I proudly completed my first day on the job as a Mycelial Communication Scientist working for the NASA syntho-astrobiology division. I have lived and studied on O'Neill Cylinder 124, currently in orbit around Mars, my whole life. There are about 1,000 people on each of the 250 cylinders. Each inhabitant has their own job to do. There was only one job for me—to communicate with the robo-spores (as we call the robotic-fungi hybrid motes up here) like my grandmother did. Us spore communicators are a small but elite team—just ten of us on my capsule, plus our team leader. It was an honor to be selected for the most important job of all—programming life on a new planet for the benefit of humankind. Today feels like the beginning of new possibilities to continue my grandmother's work and that of my ancestors. Signing off.

2. Recording 1364—The O'Neill Capsules Oral History Collection Terra Lunartree, Mycelial Communication Division

Journal Entry 4

I should probably tell you, future kin, about how my mission started. In 2021, fifty years after Stuart Roosa took his seeds to space to test the effects of weightlessness on germination, NASA piggybacked a secret mission, known as Operation Robo-Spore, onto the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. This secret mission only became known to me in the last few weeks, after starting my position on the Cylinder in the mycelial communication division. Having gained security clearance, I hungrily looked through all of NASA's vast archives having to do with wilding Mars. After nearly destroying their own planet to the point of uninhabitability through wars, the depletion of fossil fuels, and poisonous emissions, those who had wealth, connections, and privilege on Earth realized they had to create a home elsewhere. The Operation Robo-Spore mission was going to be the start of a new life.

In 2092, the year that the last of the remaining humans on Earth with enough power and privilege launched into space in a last-ditch effort to preserve their way of life, the synthetic biologists chosen to work on the cylinders were briefed by top military officials. At that time, they learned about the robo-spores. These spores, which integrate technology and mycelial matter, were to slowly terraform Mars and prepare the red planet for human arrival. The AI-enabled motes were meant to “learn” from the Mars environment and transform the barren planet to make the “desert bloom.” While the public mission of Perseverance was to look for signs of past microbial life on Mars and get samples back to Earth, what was not known at the time was that twenty-first century US politicians and techno-billionaires, already worried about the Earth's environmental collapse, climate change, and wars, also instructed the spacecraft to spread the robo-spores across a small part of the red planet's surface. The .5mm robo spores were supposed to communicate back what they saw, heard, sensed, and smelled. They could also be controlled and coded to coax the living fungal spores, with which they were entangled, to grow. This did not happen.

It is still thought, based on long-standing scientific research, that since fungi are responsible for life on Earth, they will eventually “spore,” so to speak, life on Mars. Yet now, as a syntho-astrobiologist, I spend much of my days watching dust. And I now know, for over almost one thousand years, the robo-spores have only recorded images of dead dust and rock.

No visible life. No wilding of Mars. Not in 2021. Not in 2092. And not today.

I hope to change all that.

3. Recording 1397 - The O'Neill Capsules Oral History Collection Terra Lunartree, Mycelial Communication Division

Journal Entry 15

I dreamt last that we had successfully wilded Mars. I dreamt of a verdant, red planet thick with plant life spreading across rich earthly hills. Now that I think about it, I am reminded of the twenty-first century artistAlexandra Daisy Ginsberg's visions of a red planet blooming with green plants and jewel colored flowers. But I woke up, as I do every day, in a metal capsule hurtling around Mars, not on a lush planet teeming with life.

One of the great ancient astrophysicists, Gerard O'Neill, who himself had a dream of a future for humans in space, designed the capsules that the last of us now live in. O'Neill envisioned a contained world in these capsules that was as flourishing as the French countryside had once been. I've never been to Earth or the countryside, but I can't imagine it was anything like this. Sterile. Claustrophobia-inducing. Isolating. A tin can in space.

When Earth became uninhabitable, those who had the means, or those who were somehow useful to NASA, got a chance to escape in a total of 250 O'Neill capsules. Only scattered rebel groups and those with no means were left behind on the Earth's surface. My grandmother, Maria Sabia, was one of the scientists selected for evacuation.

Sabia means wise woman in my people's language. My grandmother was named after the great Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina who lived in the early twentieth century and used mushrooms to heal people. Like her namesake, my grandmother had a deep knowledge of communing with mushrooms.

Her was part of a lineage of early synthetic biologists who used mushrooms as building materials in space. However, she also always brought the knowledge of our early ancestors, the Mazatec people, to her conceptions of what it takes for life to thrive. And what it takes is to find ways to connect and transmit knowledge across lifeforms, languages, species, and generations across Earth and other planets.

The original and not top-secret project that sought to use mushrooms to make extraterrestrial planets in our solar system habitable for human life was the myco-architecture project. It started in the Ames Laboratory in Silicon Valley during the 2010s. The scientists of the time researched how humans could use mycelial structures to grow habitats where humans could live. These habitats, they speculated, could be configured on the Moon, on Mars, and beyond our own solar system.

The magic of mushrooms is that they filter water, produce light, regulate humidity—they can even heal the Earth and themselves! In our own time, we believe they will prepare the red planet for humans to thrive, to plant and grow food, and to have children. To have a second chance after Earth's destruction. And with human technological capabilities to enhance the natural power of mushrooms, it is still thought the robo-spores project cannot fail.

Until the wilding of Mars, us remaining humans wait on the O'Neill capsules, our temporary homes. My own family was lucky to land a spot on the cylinders. Unlike the wealthy, who purchased their place, it was my grandmother's scientific expertise that landed her on the astrobiology team.

In my own bedroom on the cylinder, I keep a small stone mushroom relic that my grandmother brought on board. She passed it on to me when she died, right before I was selected for my new scientific post on the cylinder. This small stone mushroom, gifted to my grandmother by a Mayan teacher, looks like a person. As she told me, these stones hold and transmit the awe, fear, and power of mushrooms in our ancient Mesoamerican culture. While we don't know what powers the ancients through these stone mushrooms had, I can sometimes feel my body pulsing when I hold it. And, as I hold it, I think how much easier it would be to speak to the mushrooms if they were people.

But in my “day job,” I communicate with a void.

The excitement around the question of what life will become has faded a bit, given that we've seen no growth on Mars in the last 150 years. Not that we have given up. In 2115, the task of Mycelial Communications Experts was clarified as the newest subfield in syntho-astrobiology. Our job is to coax the robo-spores to do what they were meant to do—create life out of a lifeless mushroom desert. As communications experts, we try to code new languages into the robo-spores. Since my grandmother told me the stories of our family and the Mazatec people communicating with mushrooms across generations, I always felt there was a way.

Sometimes I have doubts about how well us O'Neill dwellers can see and communicate through the robo-spores. I think of the Martian “blueberries” - when humans saw round spheres on Mars that reminded them of mushrooms, they thought they spotted life. We see what is familiar and recognize it as life. But, I often wonder, what if we humans cannot perceive alien life that is in front of us because we cannot recognize it?

4. Recording 1415 - The O'Neill Capsules Oral History Collection Terra Lunartree, Mycelial Communication

Journal Entry 21

Most days, I wake up, take a jog around the fake plastic trees filling the faux French countryside, grab my caffeine-infused vitamin and calorie bar, and head to my workstation. Some days, I search for new smells, like those the truffle mushrooms used to release on Earth so that pigs and dogs could find them so Earthlings could sell them at a high price. Other times, I direct the robo-spores to move underground—any sign of hyphal growth? I instruct them to agitate the ground. Yet other days, we work as a team reprogramming the robo-spores to give the directive in a way that the fungi can understand—Grow! Proliferate! Spread! Prepare this dead rock for our arrival!

Today, though, I fell ill. So ill I had to leave my post. Out of nowhere, a high-pitched buzzing started vibrating between my ears. I plugged and unplugged my ears but still it wouldn't go away. My hands and fingertips started tingling, and then my toes. Was I having a heart attack?

Flashing lights. A light shining in my face. I am in the O'Neill medical facility. I am awake. The doctor says I've had a panic attack. It is common here, on the cylinder, to suffer such attacks. I will apologize to the team tomorrow and resume my work.

5. Recording 1499 - The O'Neill Capsules Oral History Collection Terra Lunartree, Mycelial Communication Division

Journal Entry 113

In my dream last night, my grandmother floated above me holding our mushroom ancestor stone relic. Her eyes were big, pleading with a sense of urgency. Suddenly, she closed her eyes in prayer before taking a bite out of the mushroom relic. I woke up confused at first. I had continued having flashes of buzzing in my head over the last several weeks, so I thought that the confusion must be part of this unidentified sickness. In my dream, my grandmother had been leading me to a part of the O'Neill cylinder where I don't usually venture.

I couldn't go back to sleep and resolved to respond to her demand. I hesitated to put on my translucent DNA skin suit that allows me passage through levels of the ship that require security clearance. Each doorway opened with pursed lips that expanded wide and then engulfed me, one after another. My heart was beating fast. I knew in the morning my supervisor would learn from the suit records that I had entered the cylinder's womb. Because of how highly protected the contents of this womb are, only the highest level officials and scientists are allowed entry. How will I explain that I could not ignore my grandmother's plea to dig deeper into the mysteries of the ship's Earth archive and our past? But I am not in control of my body and I push forward.

Room 0: “Noah,” the door read. As with all high-security clearance spaces, the door was sealed shut, protected by a DNA scan-enabled entry. But, when I turned my body in a full 360-circle, it miraculously opened without resistance. I had only ever seen our DNA seed bank in holographic presentations in school, but there I was, staring at all the capsules of life hidden in titanium compartments. The room was chilled by icy cold streams of arctic air spraying down from the ceiling and up from the floors. I looked in awe at the thousands of capsules holding seeds of every variety, then to the animal DNA freezer, until I saw the dried plant section.

I recognized one specimen immediately. It was an ancient mushroom I stared at every day on a poster hanging in my room—the Psilocybe mexicana. I pulled out the cylinder and waved my hand to open the smooth glass. My body buzzed. The humming in my head grew louder. Not knowing what overcame me, I said a quick prayer as I saw my grandmother do in my dream. I begged the mushrooms to commune with me before eating a few of the larger stalks of dried specimen in my hand. I will record my observations of what happens to my body for the team's scientific record.

[Recording resumes]

I can't believe what I'm seeing and feeling. I didn't feel anything for the first 20 minutes. Now, I see lights come towards me, in multiple colors, perhaps in shapes that look like ancient hieroglyphics. Code. Of a very different kind than what we send to the robo-spores. The stars come toward me faster, so fast. Now a burst of light. Where am I, who are we? Somehow, this time, I know the buzzing and flash of light are not sickness. I am floating in a brilliantly flickering darkness without a spacesuit. Moving through a dimension that pixelates with high-intensity detail. A slight shift of the wind, motion, light, and another dimension, or world opens up. A mirror shines through the dark and at the end of a long fractal road. We emerge, the stone mushroom people—now soft, springy, and alive. We grow our hyphal tentacles underground, the pixels shift, we portal ever so slightly. We connect to other worlds, other planets. Past, present, and futures merge. A time of destruction and rebirth when the dinosaurs disappeared after an asteroid impact, followed by volcanic eruptions that led to a drastic change in the weather. The desperate sounds of pterodactyls screeching across the dark sky are woven into the fibers of our memory webs after the wildfires raged and soot and ash blocked all sunlight. Once gone, we were left alone again to grow our spiral fungal roots up from the ground to the sky.

The light, now barely perceptible, and the pixels change again. We rise above Mars. Life that cannot be perceived by those who would just use it up; it cannot be destroyed again. Like dust, we are now a translucent medium of perception.. You have to be on the right dimensional frequency to see us. It's as if, yes, one's heartbeat has to be on the same vibrational frequency to see our flickering and growth.

Mars rises.

Pulsing on the same frequency, we are still on the Earth the O'Neill followers thought they destroyed. Our networks cannot be reached by swarms of robo-spores. Beneath the amputated tree trunks, brown gooey lakes, and sawed-off mountains, our sister mycelia glow with excited chatter. Our vibrational currents in the underworld light up a path through the sky and reach up to the planetary realm. We hold each other in a web of connection that glows in fractal patterns. When our spore sisters release their breath up through the hard-packed surface on Earth and Mars, we communicate our collective growth on both planets, large towering limbs reaching for each other.

We have prepared our mycelium networks across the galaxy to shine a fractal road. We will collaborate with our rock kin to revive and nourish the soil so the plants return. On Earth, we will work hard to absorb all the brown goo of toxic waste clogging the streams, rivers, and access to the oceans and cleanse this waste into nutrient-rich soil and clean water. When the plants return, the trees will grow, and the sun will shine more brightly. The clouds will part ways, and the Earth's rotational pull will rock the oceans and sing through the trees, bringing tears to the eyes of future Marsshroomhumans whose songs and voices have vibrationally reached us since the beginning of time. We hold this code in our DNA, a pattern of memory that we follow along the galaxy to chart our way across spacetime.

The stars light a path of geometrical patterns—I transport again. As a speck of dust as large as a star, I travel through the solar system—a massive energy source that works with the mycelium networks to absorb traumas and purge human perceptual glitches through a planetary cleansing system. I am back on my cylinder clutching the stone mushroom of my ancestors. I think I feel them vibrating a smile back at me.

5. Recording 1639 - The O'Neill Capsules Oral History Collection Terra Lunartree, Mycelial Communication Division

Entry Title: Unknown