The Spore Project

By Thomas Crancer

What will the human species do when an object big enough to destroy all life on the planet is discovered speeding toward The Earth? With no hope of escape, a desperate plan to ensure the continuation of our species somewhere... else, somewhere safe, is launched.

Earth sent out thousands of 'Spore 'capsules into the galaxy before the object which they called 'Shiva the Destroyer' obliterated all life on the planet. Each 'Spore' capsule contained patched DNA for the construction of 12 genetically distinct humans, thousands of sequences of genetically engineered DNA for food crops and a record of Earth culture. Each spore contained a digital library, stocked with a dozen movies, a hundred audio songs and every book the project creators could think of — 'The Encyclopedia Britannica', 'On the Origin of Species', 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare', 'Also Sprach Zarathustra', 'The Alexandria Quartet', 'Homage to Catalonia' and thousands more.

At least one capsule found fertile ground.

“The Spore Project” is the story of twelve children, 'actualized' from DNA code launched by the visionary humans of Earth, themselves doomed eons before, whose challenge to survive and build a new human culture is slowly revealed in a series of embedded dispatches from their 'parents' on a distant and long-since destroyed home world. But are the transmissions real? Or have they been tampered with, manipulated by a mysterious hacker with an unknown agenda?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Crancer
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463302491

Thomas Crancer

Thomas Crancer's 'Victory Cafe' is a Midwest Writer’s Conference prize-winning short story. He likes science fiction for it's juxtaposition of fragile human nature with rigid technology. He writes fiction and non-fiction, having previously written novels, short stories, plays, a memoir and a children’s story.

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Chapter 1

HOW WE CAME TO BE ON GANESHA

At one time a planet existed called Earth. It was crowded with living organisms. In a great salt ocean that covered most of Earth, one-celled organisms multiplied, mutated and thrived. Multi-cellular organisms evolved and some became land dwellers. One species of these land-dwelling animals, humans, developed tool building, spoken language and later written language. They became the gods of their planet. These Earth gods built incredible machines that flew through the air and machines that imitated thinking, airplanes and computers. They built machines that flew entirely off of Earth and explored the nearby planets, sending back information gathered by sensors.

They began to use their thinking machines to help answer questions that had puzzled them for millennia. How were the various life forms on the planet related? What had been the first living organism? How had non-living matter first become living organisms? Had matter always existed? If not, where did it come from? Why did people fight wars? Could they stop? Why were they cruel to each other? Why were they not still more cruel?

Then, when it looked at least theoretically possible to devise a way to begin treating each other better, they saw the end. Using telescopes orbiting their world, humans detected a huge star-sized object, bigger than their Sun, moving on a collision course with the solar system. They had performed miraculous feats. They had sent instruments and even people out into space but, with all of Earth’s technology, they could never dodge the object they named Shiva The Destroyer.

The first hint of a warning came five years and four months before the collision. Objects move very predictably in space, strictly according to Newton’s laws of motion. Scientists determined down to the hour, down to the minute, when Shiva would destroy all that lived on Earth. Perhaps it would destroy all that had ever lived anywhere. No one had ever seen so much as a microbe from a place outside Earth.

One day about eight billion people on planet Earth were going about their business, working and playing, earning and stealing, planning and regretting; and the next day everyone knew he’d be gone in five years. No amount of luck, charm, intelligence, beauty or wealth could even slightly alter one’s fate.

Suddenly there was no future, no saving for college or old age, no protecting the environment or rescuing endangered species, no sacrificing so your children could have a better life.

In a letter from my father that I read when I was fifteen, he waxed nostalgic about the world that would soon be gone.

Yesterday I stood on a concrete balcony with others waiting to meet a flight from The States. A shiny metal plane stood quietly humming at the end of the runway, a fairly mundane sight in our advanced age. For some reason I began to think about the workers who had put that plane together, who had fitted the plastic and metal, who had welded and glued, and those who had rolled out the hot aluminum before that, those who had operated factories that made plastic pellets out of natural gas and those who had formed the plastic into armrests and overhead bins and all the rest.

Inconceivable to Socrates or Galileo or Newton, this assemblage must have required, I thought, a hundred thousand workers. At a signal from someone in the control tower the pilot revved up the two big jet engines on the back of the plane, and it began rolling down the strip of wide, gray concrete. The plane gathered speed, and then halfway down the runway almost directly across from where we were waiting, its nose lifted off the concrete. It paused in that position then leaped into the air.

None of this matters, I thought. In three years no one will know or care that we constructed a device such as that plane or that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth or that Kurt Godel proved the Incompleteness Theorem.

In their public consciousness the Earthians could not allow themselves to contemplate an end to humanity. The idea of putting a young man and woman into a spaceship to go out in search of a new planet was attractive but nonsensical. To carry enough food and air to sustain them even twenty years would be impossible, and twenty years was far too short a time to find a hospitable landing place. A thousand or a million years would be more realistic. Better to carry a few frozen, fertilized ovum, but even that wouldn’t work.

People on Earth had built things to use in the future. They’d saved money to spend in the future, and they’d made plans to execute in the future. Then the future disappeared. Not having a future is a bleak, dismal proposition. But it’s also an advantage, a huge burden removed. No need to ration oil reserves or food supplies. No need to prevent erosion of the topsoil or to save the rainforest. Every resource spent ensuring a better future had been freed for something else.

And that something else for millions of Earthians was the Spore Project. On Earth plants called mushrooms grew in the forests. They consisted of mycelia, microscopic threads that ran through the ground, taking nutrients from the soil. When conditions became perfect, this patch of intertwined mycelia sent up a fruit body, a stem, maybe as big as a human finger, with a circular cap a little smaller than the palm of your hand. This fruit body might sprout to its full height in less than an hour and begin dropping the seeds that would be blown on the wind to find fertile ground elsewhere.

Mushroom spores were so tiny that it took half an hour just to drop the four-finger distance from under the fruit-body cap to the earth. By the time they fell to the ground they’d be scattered over hundreds of kilometers. A mushroom spore is not much more than DNA, the instructions for making a new plant.

That’s how the Earthians thought of us. The Spore Spawn are the actualization of the DNA that those who participated in the Spore Project contributed. The Earthians had machines that remembered long sequences of DNA information and could actualize it. These machines could assemble molecules in order from the long descriptors in their memory. One of these actualizers could grow a stalk of rice or a laboratory rat from the information inside it.

The Spore Project built space probes to be sent out from Earth before the Shiva collision. Each probe had a little store of chemicals from which to build DNA from which to build new life. Each probe had sequences to build new human beings and sequences to build specially engineered food for them to eat. Each had sensors to search out a hospitable planet to start the new human race.

The human DNA sequence came from the people who paid for the project. They came to be called Spore Parents. They wrote letters to their Spore Children, to us, the Spore Spawn.

Also stored in the same memory devices that contained the DNA codes were the most important writings of the human race. They gave us The Story of Civilization, Encyclopedia Britannica, On the Origin of Species, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Also Sprach Zarathustra and everything that a committee of Earth scholars thought might be valuable in building a new civilization. In the same manner that a tiny spore carries the essence of the mushroom, the Spore Ship contained the essence of the twenty-first century Earth.

The DNA from which the Spawn would be built was patched. The Earthians took some DNA from the Spore Father and some from the Spore Mother, but any part of the sequence that was suspect they replaced with what was thought to be better code. They wanted to avoid susceptibility to disease and genetic weakness.

The Spore Capsules were launched from Earth eight at a time on big rockets and then sent off each in a different direction to wander the galaxy looking for a place to land. They sent thousands. At least one found a hospitable planet. It drifted down to the surface and began to incubate the first Spore Spawn.

Each Spore Ship was equipped to create twelve Spawn, one every two months, boy, girl, boy, girl. The mom-bot took care of us and tried to protect us as we grew. When the ship landed, she must have cleared the surrounding area, built a fence, prepared the soil and planted crops to nourish us.

The first to be incubated was Jason. Then came Bonny, then Nelson. Nelson died as toddler. I don’t remember him, but Bonny claims to. She says he was an active, curious child. Perhaps he was too curious. Next came Gail, then Karl, then Laura, then me, Maxwell. Then came Penny, Bruce and Faith. Faith didn’t survive childhood either. She and Jason and Laura ventured out of the Safe Zone and were attacked by a ripper. The ripper destroyed Faith while the other two escaped.

The next Spawn incubated was Ron, and then Jill was the last. Ten of us reached our late teens. We knew all new children would be created by us in the same way that most humans were said to be created on Earth, by biological reproduction.

That’s how I came to be here on Ganesha.

Chapter 2

SETTING FENCE POSTS

My favorite activity was conversation with Bonny. Somehow, we had liked each other since the beginning. Bonny read more than anyone else, and she didn’t talk very much when several of us were together, but we had always liked being alone with each other, and she sometimes offered interesting ideas. On this day, a few months before my eighteenth birthday, the two of us would be setting fence posts.

Expanding the fence was an ongoing project. The fence protected us from the native creatures. By building new fence, we made the Safe Zone bigger year by year. It was a good, mindless task. One person jabbed the ground with a sharpened pole, and the other scooped the dirt out of the hole with a piece of the shell of a wood fruit on the end of another pole. When the hole was deep enough, we dropped the fence post in and tamped the dirt around it, setting it up as straight as possible. It was good work for two people to do while talking and listening.

Bonny was passing into adulthood, though, and I worried that this would change her. She might have been ready to pair up with Jason, to become his wife, and I figured once that happened we couldn’t work alone anymore. Bonny didn’t like Jason so much, but I wasn’t sure that mattered; liking and not liking people seemed to mean something different to adults than it does to children.

We strolled out the East Gate, me with the jabber and Bonny with the scooper. Neither of us spoke until we arrived at the spot for the next fence post. Then, as I jabbed away at the ground, I asked, What does it feel like? Now that you’ve turned eighteen, can you feel the adult hormones?

I felt myself being afraid to hear her answer. I wondered if she had entered a world she couldn’t explain to me and worried that I might be losing my best friend. Bonny thought before she spoke as she always does. I expected genetic triggers to be activated by now, and perhaps they have been, but I don’t feel any different.

On Earth sexual maturity happened at age fourteen or fifteen. Biologically we were set up to mature at that age, but somehow the Earthians had delayed our maturation. We developed breasts and pubic hair and descended testicles, but no erotic drives. They must have figured that on Earth there were parents and brothers and sisters who would become grandparents and aunts and uncles. It wasn’t so bad for a fourteen-year-old to have a child there. But here on Ganesha, when Jason turned fourteen, he was the oldest person on the planet. No one here had ever raised a child. The Earthians must have surmised that it would be better to wait a couple of years before we started having children.

I leaned on my stick, and Bonny dropped to her hands and knees. She scooped up the loose dirt and threw it off to the side. After five or six handfuls she stood again. I began to jab at the ground once more.

I had read, of course, about the activities on Earth that led to the creation of new humans, and I had thought briefly about my eventual participation in those activities. I had wondered if my partner would be Bonny.

As I jabbed at the soil in the dimple in the ground that we had created, I glanced at Bonny. Her legs seemed to solidly connect her to the ground. She hooked the thumb of her left hand in the pocket of her wrap just above her hip and leaned slightly on the pole she held in her right hand. Her dark eyes were deep and active.

I knew of the process that caused pregnancy and the eventual birth of a child, and the mechanics of the procedure made sense, but the reports seemed always to leave out something. How did people progress from talking or digging a fence-post hole to coitus? It seemed a strange leap. We assumed that the hormones would be activated in each of us at around age eighteen. If so, then in a matter of months the force that caused reproduction would be activated inside my own body, and presumably would begin to drive me. I tried to imagine myself - what? - looking into Bonny’s eyes and saying, I want you? How could I take myself seriously? I jabbed away at the posthole another twenty or thirty thrusts, then stepped back. Bonny used the scooper this time to remove the loose dirt.

We take for granted that the Earthians should be honored, that they were concerned with us. Maybe not. They wanted humans to be living somewhere until the heat-death of the universe. But why should that matter? Why, just because the Earthians couldn’t abide the thought of no more beings like themselves, should we do their bidding? Maybe I don’t want to give myself over to involuntary contractions and push baby humans out of my vagina.

Vagina was a funny word to hear. I’d read it a hundred times, but to hear it as the name of a body part from a person who possessed one suddenly made us seem to be mere biological creatures rather than the children of the gods who had built the Spore Ships and written the Upanishads.

I said, Every creature on Earth and, I guess, every creature here lives its whole life for the purpose of leaving its offspring on the planet. Creatures eat from sunrise to sunset to create eggs to lay. The males of some Earth insects offered themselves up to be eaten alive by the female to increase the chance of their progeny surviving. Humans concentrate more effort on fewer offspring, but the idea is the same. So maybe you’re saying that game is a little too desperate for you to jump into with enthusiasm, huh? You’re a little reluctant to risk your life producing the next generation?

We went through a whole cycle of me jabbing and Bonny scooping before she spoke again. She said, We’re someone’s project. We didn’t spontaneously appear on this planet. Someone is using us for some purpose. Perhaps the official story is true. People on a planet thousands of light-years away and maybe a million years ago saw the end coming and sent out the Spore Ships. But how about Laura’s idea that we’ve been deceived and we are an experiment being used to understand human nature? The Earthians’ science had progressed a long way. They seemed to become more interested in how they themselves worked and less interested in pushing back the frontiers of math or physics as they progressed. Wouldn’t it be logical for them to perform a real experiment on real people?

Perhaps they found a nearby planet. Perhaps they are here on Ganesha two hundred kilometers that way. Bonny waved a little north of east. They actualized twelve human beings here, twelve more a hundred kilometers away, and so on. Maybe this planet has a thousand experiments going just like this one, each with slightly different details.

What details? I asked.

Maybe they’re repeating the same experiment with different DNA. Maybe they provide different food to different sets of Spawn. But my guess, if I believed this theory, would be that they’re trying different ideas in the letters from Spore Parents.

That would be an interesting question to the Earthians. What sort of parental expectations or encouragement causes what kind of behavior in the offspring?

Bonny said all of this slowly, pausing between sentences in the way she often spoke when we worked together. The thought that my Spore Parents were not flesh-and-blood humans, much like I am, who stood on a planet and felt the breeze against their skin as I was feeling it then, was unsettling. That their letters had been concocted by technicians in order to mold my personality was outrageous.

In one of Bonny’s long pauses I asked, "If you question the official story, why not question the Encyclopedia Britannica? Do you think that’s real?"

Well, you could question it. She thought and dug a little more. Everyone organizes the observations that reach her senses according to a grand scheme, according to a personal religion. You believe the official story. Laura believes we’re guinea pigs. Jason believes that the god of the monotheists on Earth is watching over us. Once you install your personal religion everything else needs to make sense according to that scheme. Or maybe added beliefs need to be minimally nonsensical.

"I spend a lot of time reading the writings of Earth, and they seem real. They seem to be what they claim to be, the stories told by word of mouth by people who hadn’t perfected the art of writing to the degree that they would trust it, like The Odyssey and The Long Dialogues of the Buddha, that were finally written down after thousands of tellings. A Room of One’s Own seems to be the musings of a woman contemplating the role of her gender in the literary world a hundred years or so before the Spore Project. The Encyclopedia Britannica seems to be an alphabetical arrangement of much of human knowledge."

Writing is difficult. Every person who writes has a different style, a different voice that you can feel as you read. It would be almost impossible to put together the purported literature of a whole civilization and have it be convincing and fake - too many opportunities to be tripped up. I think I would have seen something or maybe felt something. It all rings true. I think the mass of words the Earthians have given us really is the selected writing of a whole planet. I don’t think they could fool me.

While Bonny worked, I leaned on my tool and glanced around at the tallest trees, their slender trunks a dusty tan color, holding a crown of green leaves up against the light-blue sky. Scattered among them were the dark-skinned, thick trees with their rustling leaves spread out wide like giant bushes. Vines, covered with green needles, hung from their branches and connected to the soil, looking like props holding up the far-reaching tree branches. The low bushes poking out of the sandy soil were the dominant vegetation. Pink-colored rocks, most of them taller than a man, were about as numerous as the thick trees.

Bonny dug quietly for a minute, then said, That’s all I believe, though. I don’t know about the rest. It’s religion. You have something solid that you believe. That’s your anchor, and you hang everything else off of that. I’m open to any story that includes millions of people living on a planet somewhere and writing for thousands of years, creating more stories than any of us can read in a whole lifetime.

Like I was saying, she continued, we are certainly someone’s project. But we are also independent beings. We don’t have any duty to anyone, not long-dead Earthians, not experimenters on this planet. We own our lives in the same way every human who ever lived was the rightful owner of her own life.

Chapter 3

A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

Bonny and I had set three fenceposts that day. After dinner Bruce and Gail played Go and the others played bocce ball. I lay on my back on the ground and thought about not much of anything.

Each of us slept on a cloth bag filled with fibers that we harvested from one of the vines that grew near the compound. We all slept in one hut. The mom-bot usually stood at the door of the hut as soon as the first of us lay down on his mattress. I fell off to sleep as I always did almost as soon as I became horizontal.

Hours later I dreamed of a crushing pain in my throat. I tried to cry out but my voice had stopped working. I heard myself desperately groaning as if the sound were coming from someone else. My will was unable to make its normal connection to my limbs. I wanted to kick my feet and grasp with my hands, but my body didn’t work. A dark spot like the opening of a cave grew in front of me and seemed desperately important. Somehow I was sure that the expanding darkness was my death and that when it covered my whole visual field, I would be gone.

Then a voice, Karl’s voice I thought, shouted from the back of the cave, Stop now! I know him; he’s almost a friend. The pain softened. Then the voice said, You must leave quickly.

I kicked my feet as if running. The pressure at my throat ceased. I felt cool air wheeze past the pain. My mind seemed to reconnect to my limbs. I reached my hands toward the place on my neck from which most of the pain radiated. I opened my eyes to the interior of the dark sleeping hut and became wide awake. It was either before or after my eyes opened that I saw a man-like figure flutter through the curtain and out the door.

I held my throat and croaked, It wasn’t a dream?

I heard Karl mumble, You can’t move there; you’re in check.

No, of course it wasn’t a dream. I’m awake and still feel the pain, I thought. Someone tried to kill me. I hadn’t recovered my waking rational faculties, though, and somehow the idea stayed with me for a few seconds that some unknown assailant had entered the sleeping hut through my dream. But that was absurd.

The hands of one of my nine fellow Spawn had been on my throat. Karl talking in his sleep must have scared him off.

Since had the feeling that my attacker slinked out the door, I decided to see whose bed was empty. I pulled the cloth curtain away from the door frame, letting in enough starlight to see who was sleeping. All there. Unconvinced, I went to Jason’s bed and rolled him onto his back. He sputtered out sounds of irritation.

The person in Jason’s bed was Jason. Apparently he’d been sleeping.

I didn’t want to lie down again. I walked toward the South Gate with no thought as to what I would do. I wanted to walk and think, but didn’t want to stay in the compound, walking back and forth over familiar ground. We hardly ever went out alone, though, and I’d never gone out at night by myself. We had seen rippers only during the day, but that could have been because we rarely went out at night.

I gazed at the gate for a very long time, afraid to pass through it, but more afraid to sleep again. The bright stars cast a bluish hue on the ground. Shadows of trees and bushes were deep black. I believed a creature had attacked me, but it seemed more likely to have been formed in my dream than to have come from outside the Safe Zone. Sleep felt more dangerous than the outer world. And we knew we were the only humans on Ganesha.

I slipped the loop off the post and opened the South Gate. I swung it open wide and studied the shadows nearby. I passed through and latched the gate again. I found my club in its usual place leaning against the fence just to the right of the opening. As my fingers wrapped around the solid handle, I felt a warm wave of comfort.

Maybe this strangulation involved Jason. I’d been uneasy about the sexual maturity the older Spawn must have been experiencing. Something about my friendship with Bonny conflicted with the hormones that were tainting Jason. But Jason wasn’t the only possibility.

There were ten humans on this planet, perhaps the only ten in the universe. Why didn’t I check the others? How do you know if someone is really sleeping anyway? Was Jason sleeping or just performing a good act? Who else could it be? Maybe Karl.

Maybe Karl was strangling me in his sleep. Maybe he wasn’t talking in his sleep. But why would he stop? If Karl wanted me dead, why not just finish the deed? Maybe someone stirred, and Karl started sputtering out the sounds of talking in his sleep.

I thought this as I moved carefully, walking around shadows, wondering what might be under a nearby bush.

What did I smell? I asked myself. Each person has his scent. I would know instinctively if Karl’s hands were on my neck. I would know if it were Jason too. A shiver ran up my spine and tingled at the base of my neck at the repetition of the thought that something had jumped out of my own dream and attacked me. Why didn’t the mom-bot intervene? Isn’t that her job? Where was she?

Crazy thoughts.

I made my way to a spot that I often visited alone, a place where I liked to sit and think. It had the attractive feature of a rounded boulder in the middle of a large clearing, a place where nothing could sneak up on a person meditating. It felt safe even at night. I still imagined creatures in the shadows, but the nearest shadow was twenty meters away. The only dangerous creature we knew of on Ganesha was the slow-moving ripper. There were also thick, four-legged creatures. We hadn’t named them because we knew them only by footprints and scat and one glimpse years before.

I stared up at the bright night sky and wondered what had happened to the others, wondered if Spore Ships had landed elsewhere perhaps thousands of years ago, wondered what had become of them and what would become of us. I watched the stars slowly pass over the top of a tree in the distance as Ganesha rotated.

Eventually the sun began to light the sky and dim the stars, and I walked back to the compound, eager to read a letter that I knew would be available that morning. The attack seemed remote now, almost as if I’d imagined it.

When I leaned my club against the fence outside the gate and unwrapped my fingers from the handle, I noticed a pulsing ache in my hand. I must have been squeezing the club more tightly than usual.

Chapter 4

A LETTER FROM EARTH

No one was stirring when I strolled through the compound. I opened the keyboard cover, rested my fingers on the keys and stared at the black-streaked skin of the Spore Capsule without thinking.

I typed in my name and password and asked for my latest letter. It flashed onto the screen. The words were barely readable in the early light:

Dear Max:

I am lying on the grass in back of our house looking out over the lake. The sun is low in the sky, reflecting from the water in bright ripples onto the house. Trees line the lake, tall and green leafed this time of year. Houses crowd around the shore.

I’m deeply sad that this will all be gone in eight months. An idea hangs in the air here that we are now fully appreciating this, just as we are about to lose it. Not completely true, I say. I’ve lain in this very spot before, contemplating the works of nature and man, overwhelmed with the realization of their beauty. I didn’t need Shiva The Destroyer to spark my gratitude for Earth.

It’s pleasing to think about you on a planet orbiting a distant star. I wonder about the mountains and forests and rivers and oceans of that planet. I hope it gives you as much pleasure as this planet gives me.

Certain information has been held back from you and presented only when we thought you would be ready for it. You weren’t told about disease until you were twelve, about war until you were fourteen. Forgive us if our timing is bad, if we’ve revealed these facts too early or too late. We don’t know what it’s like to be in your circumstances. We know more about the Neanderthals than we know about you.

Three months from now you will be eighteen years old. Congratulations on having lived so long. No more secrets after that. Not that you won’t have plenty to learn, but nothing more will be intentionally hidden from you.

Love, Dad

Dear Son:

I woke in the early morning concerned about you. Your father seemed to understand and without waking he found my hand and squeezed it. I wonder whether you have good food to eat, a comfortable bed to sleep on, interesting friends to talk to, and now I think