This essay was initially revealed as the duvet story within the Summer season 2025 difficulty of Orion Journal.

“Who’re you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the enormous mushroom, and Alice, by no means fairly having thought of the query, mutters a baby’s model of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m no one! Who’re you?”

Earlier than he was Lewis Carroll, creator of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a sequence of nested thought experiments about change and the bounds of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one aspect of the mushroom would make her smaller and the opposite taller, Alice is stupefied by how one thing completely spherical can have sides, how a single factor can produce such reverse results. And but inside this fictional parable concerning the nature of the self is a organic actuality concerning the nature of fungi — organisms that function in line with a unique logic. They belong to a single kingdom, but they’re endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that may sharpen a thoughts and the honey fungus that may slay a tree; the cordyceps that may drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that may drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved tens of millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into lethal famines, altering the census of the world.

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Across the time I found Wonderland, my mom — my sophisticated mom oscillating between the poles of the thoughts — found foraging. Every weekend we might head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend lengthy hours looking out — for mushrooms, sure, but in addition for a typical language between our two island universes. I delighted within the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a mattress of moss, within the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, as soon as, to find a king bolete larger than my awestruck face. Right here was a world that was wilder but safer than my very own, resinous with surprise. I used to be captivated by the notion that edible species may have toxic doubles, by the best way the mind kinds a search picture that trains the attention on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms have been serving to me study a lot of what life was already instructing me — {that a} factor can appear like one thing you’re keen on however flip harmful, even lethal; that the extra you count on one thing, the extra of it you discover.

An organism, after all, isn’t a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, each sovereign and interdependent. Though mushrooms have populated our myths and our medication for millennia, they have been solely factored into our mannequin of the dwelling world lower than a century in the past. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two dwelling (crops and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his era gave fungi no particular consideration, brushing them underneath the conceptual carpet of crops. Darwin ignored them altogether, though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, serving to aquatic crops adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not but able to buying vitamins on their very own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

Maybe, then, it’s not unintentional {that a} marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the phrase ecology the 12 months Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a brand new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms which are neither crops nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. However it could be one other century earlier than, simply after my mom was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their very own kingdom of life.

Among the many a whole lot of 1000’s of species now identified, and doubtless tens of millions not but named, there are ones that crumble on the lightest contact and ones that may survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer house. On the western fringe of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. Within the mountains of East Asia blooms a shiny blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Throughout tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. Within the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells a person fungus spanning eighteen hundred soccer fields — Earth’s largest dwelling organism.

With out fungi, we might by no means know Earth’s most lovely flowers — orchid seeds haven’t any power reserve of their very own and may solely acquire their carbon by way of a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which different crops seize photons to alchemize daylight into sugar for all times. Emily Dickinson thought of the ghost pipe “the popular flower of life.” A portray of it graced the duvet of her posthumously revealed poems. She was not incorrect to suppose it “virtually supernatural,” for it subverts the abnormal legal guidelines of nature: fairly than reaching up for daylight like inexperienced crops, the ghost pipe reaches down in order that its cystidia — the high quality hairs coating its roots — can entwine across the branching filaments of underground fungi, often known as hyphae, sapping vitamins the fungus has drawn from the roots of close by photosynthetic bushes.

These mycorrhizal relationships permeate each ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the material of nature is woven. Maybe that is why it was so arduous for thus lengthy to categorise them individually from different life-forms. Maybe we by no means ought to have completed so. Maybe it was a mistake to segregate them right into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms in any respect, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into international locations bounded by borders that reduce throughout ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath each battlefield within the historical past of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to show demise into life in order that ghost pipes and orchids might rise from the place the our bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it’s and they’re going to inherit it. They aren’t a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.

Nearly precisely one 12 months earlier than Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters whereas boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by somebody who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper underneath the heading “Darwin Among the many Machines.” It will later be revealed because the work of twenty-seven-year-old English author Samuel Butler. Epochs earlier than the primary trendy laptop and the golden age of algorithms, earlier than we got here to name the confluence of the 2 “synthetic intelligence,” Butler prophesied the beginning of a brand new “mechanical kingdom” of our personal creation, which might tackle a lifetime of its personal alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these previous few ages, a completely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as but have solely seen what’s going to in the future be thought of the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We’re ourselves creating our personal successors; we’re every day including to the wonder and delicacy of their bodily organisation… every day giving them higher energy… self-acting energy.” With a watch to the evolution of consciousness, he requested: “Why might not there come up some new part of thoughts which shall be as completely different from all current identified phases, because the thoughts of animals is from that of greens?” Greater than a century and a half earlier than our trendy worries about synthetic intelligence, Butler apprehensive that this new kingdom of life can be parasitic upon us. He apprehensive that though the human thoughts has been “moulded into its current form by the possibilities and adjustments of many tens of millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom advanced in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time previous made so speedy a motion ahead,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”

Maybe we’re getting ready to dwelling Butler’s prophecy as a result of we modeled our machines on the incorrect kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our personal, solely to seek out that they’re as parasitic and predatory as we’re, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the proper mannequin was at all times there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time now we have been constructing and strolling and warring over Earth’s authentic networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the sign of life by way of the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, by way of the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “synthetic” intelligence turned pure, constructed on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into an ideal circle with no sides to take?

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