Nastasya Filipovna: A New Mother Nature Taking Over

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She was called Nastasya Filipovna, and she had a room at the back of the house where all the cultures ended up. Not the sort of culture you find in opera houses, although Nastasya Filipovna had plenty of that too. These were living cultures, collected from beneath rocks, rotting logs, deep caves, freshwater streams, and the blackest recesses of the oceans.
She corresponded with scientists throughout the world. Marine biologists sent glass sponges, cave explorers mailed peculiar fungi, and Russian schoolboys discovered freshwater cnidarians beneath stones and received envelopes containing astonishing amounts of rubles.
Nobody quite understood how she managed the payments. Somehow the correct currency always arrived.
She never published her findings.
Her laboratory contained equipment so advanced that university geneticists would have sold their grandmothers for an afternoon with it. She had mastered cellular fusion and could map genetic activity in real time, watching chromosomes rearrange themselves like dancers changing partners at a Viennese ball.
But collecting specimens wasn't her purpose.
She believed consciousness existed as an immense interconnected web, extending through every living organism. Scientists sometimes admitted such possibilities at parties, usually after their fourth drink, before remembering their reputations.
She wanted to bring the whole thing together.
Consider a forest. People paint trees without noticing that much of their colour comes from lichens. A dark forest may be dark because of the organisms growing upon it. Another forest glows pale green for precisely the same reason.
The trees are merely providing accommodation.
Now imagine combining lichens, corals, glass sponges, fungi, and creatures from the Mariana Trench into something entirely new.
A chimeric organism capable of reproducing itself.
A reef that didn't require an ocean.
She imagined it spreading across continents, covering buildings, mountains, abandoned automobiles, and eventually entire cities in a magnificent living architecture.
The oceans were dying from warming. She intended to rescue them by teaching the reef to live elsewhere.
But there was another kind of culture.
Every winter she opened the grand hall of her ancestral house. Military officers arrived wearing medals from wars nobody remembered. Aristocratic women floated across the marble floors in satin dresses, their jewels glittering like microscopic organisms beneath laboratory lights.
And the music!
It sounded as though somebody had cracked heaven open and allowed the celestial choir to pour through the fracture separating the haves from the have-nots.
Nobody noticed the orange tendrils growing through the gilded ceiling.
Nobody questioned the delicate turquoise networks appearing beneath the wallpaper.
By midnight the chandeliers were breathing.
She stood among her guests, wearing black lace and pearls, with something resembling coral growing from her magnificent dark hair.
The general kissed her hand.
"My dear, what extraordinary decorations!"
She smiled.
"They aren't decorations, General."
Outside, the forest was beginning to glow.
And somewhere beneath the ballroom, ten thousand separate organisms had discovered that they were dreaming the same dream.