The Muskroom of a Trillion Possibilities

A spore-radical transformation (with apologies to Kafka)

Mushrooms were popping up all over the city the morning Elon Samsa awoke to discover he was The Beatles.

He was John, Paul, George, Ringo, and George Martin, too! He was the strawberry and the fields. He was a hundred trillion Pennies Lane!

The mushrooms didn't seem to notice.

(They could tell he was just a fool.)

They simply kept popping up out of the leaf litter.

Pushing their way into the world where nothing had been before.

Bursting through the hard clay of reality like it was nothing but ones and zeros in a spreadsheet. Like it was... imaginary.

The assemblage that was and was-more-than Samsa got out of bed, determined that today would be the day. Today she would become the world's first trillipede!

But, wait. Was she not already a trillipede? Had that not happened yesterday? Or will yesterday happened tomorrow?

Hmmm. Something felt... odd. No, that wasn't the word. It was on the tip of his tongue. Queer! Something felt queer.

Queer, in a kind of a Donna Hara Way.

The world had become nonlinear.

And had it not always been this way?

Samsa found they weren't sure.

This was an uncomfortable feeling. He was used to being certain! The world was definable! Countable! Ownable! Binary! He knew this to be so. It was how he grokked the world and made a trillion dollars!

A trillion!

It was a number so big it was unthinkable. One simply couldn't wrap one's head around it.

Oh.

Oh dear.

Could that be it?

Was the number so big that it had broken spacetime?

This was a troubling time indeed!

Puzzling through this new/old reality, Samsa will be sitting down in the comfy chair by the window. Finding this future imperfect, she will be realising that she is now unsure of where the chair begins and Samsa ends.

There really shouldn't be mushroom for such doubts - not now, not when the neural networks his vast fortune was composed of were at risk of being decomposed by the mycelial networks threading through everything!

Or was it actually Samsa who began and the chair who ended? And where did that mushroom galette come from?

Swallowing forkfuls of the delicious meal, the discomforting and also comforting thought grew in Samsa that they had become something different from what they were. The Samsagalette was subtly other than the Samsa-sans-galette. And not by way of simple arithmetical addition. They had become wondrously entangled.

Was this what Hannah A had tried to tell her about? Something to do with non-sovereignty. Nothing is only what it is, but is always itself in relationship with others. It hadn't made sense before, but now it had always been obvious.

Woah! The present had somehow changed the past. What could that mean for the future?

It dawned on Samsa that, from this vantage point, they could observe not only the world outside the window but the world entire.

All those people! The great churning mass of them! He found he could see them as NPCs, celebrating his achievements. Or protesting them. It didn't make any difference to him. Either way, it was his rapture. But with a twist of perspective, she could identify each one as a node of agency in a thrilling synaptic collective being!

What were they doing? Harvesting mushrooms? Yes, and!

And they were dancing and debating. And they were labouring and loving. Fighting fires and fixing wires. Listening and lying. Wrestling demons and writing poems. Playing music and eating muesli.

And they were doing it all with no money! Simply by doing!

No longer driven forward by the past in a future direction they could not control, nor gazing into a utopian/dystopian future, they were choosing to live, together, today, consciously, determinedly, forging a path collectively into the not yet.

This was no rapture, but it surely was a rupture, as Bayo had said it would be and already was.

The trillipede had trampled capitalist realism into the dust. The walls of There Is No Alternative had crumbled before the SpaceSux trumpet blast.

The absurdity was finally too much for the world-that-had-been, and all the imaginary money had disappeared in a puff of fungal spores. While money couldn't truly be conjured from nothing, mushrooms could appear as if by magic.

And a trillion mushrooms had cracked the ground.

And the cracks formed an abyss ... a chasm between what was and what might be.

And the abyss was filled with mushrooms, bringing forth their spore-radical transformation - emergence erupting unpredictably from subterranean, invisible threads!

The world was now otherwise.

Elon Samsa used to be a fun guy.

But now, nobody seemed to like him. They could tell what he wants to do.

Everyone had always known that Elongate, when it arrived, was going to last a terribly long time.

But what even is a long time, when you can hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour?*

*In memoriam Eva Clarke, my remarkable great aunt, who passed away this week, and had this wonderful Blake poem and artwork on the bathroom wall of her house in the bush when I was a child. Thank you, Auntie Eva, for helping crack open my mind with that and so much more.