A Story Called Fungus Lunaris

SCP-9147 — by E. S. Fein

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-9147 cannot be destroyed, redacted, or expunged from public-facing media by any means presently available to the Foundation. Containment is restricted to surveillance, narrative compliance, and the suppression of correlative attention.

A sealed reference copy of SCP-9147 is held in the Class-Pataphysical Document Vault at Site-19. The reference copy is read in full every twenty-four (24) hours by two (2) Level-3 personnel and compared, line by line, against the prior day’s recorded state. All discrepancies are forwarded to the Project ALBEDO oversight committee.

Reading personnel are rotated on a fourteen-day cycle. This protocol was instituted following the death of Researcher S██████ (Addendum 9147-2), whose final logged note read, in full: “The story does not need me to finish it.”

Webcrawler array O5-NIGHT-INDEX scrapes the English-language indexed web, three (3) dark-web archives, and seven (7) academic preservation databases for new public instances of SCP-9147. New instances appear at an average rate of 12.4 per week with no identifiable poster.^[1] They are not to be removed. In seven (7) documented cases, attempts to alter or take down public copies of SCP-9147 have resulted in the corresponding alteration of internal Foundation records and physical archives, including the substitution of unrelated personnel files, mission reports, and, in one (1) instance, a deceased researcher’s autopsy report.

Foundation memetic-defense protocols are not effective against SCP-9147. Members of the public who have read prior versions of the manuscript retain memory of those versions even after the text has changed. As of the current revision, an estimated 2.4 million civilians worldwide remember a version of Fungus Lunaris in which no Foundation appears. Civilian memory of prior text states is monitored under Project SOFTWATER but not corrected; the operational benefit of correction has not been established.^[2]

The author identified as “E. S. Fein” is designated PoI-9147-1. Project HAZEL-GRAY has been unable to confirm that any individual of this name exists or has ever existed. Twelve (12) persons have, in interview, claimed to have written or originally posted SCP-9147. All have been determined to be confabulating in good faith. None retain consistent memory of doing so under repeated questioning. (See Interview Log 9147-3.)

Mobile Task Force Lambda-9 (“Cheesemongers”) is to proceed with Project ALBEDO per the operational beats described in SCP-9147, sections IV through XII. Active personnel assigned to MTF Lambda-9 are not to be informed of the existence of SCP-9147, of the manuscript’s relationship to their mission, or of the documented fates of their fictional counterparts. The ethical-review override authorizing this concealment is filed under Addendum 9147-4.

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Description: SCP-9147 is a 14,219-word work of speculative fiction titled Fungus Lunaris, credited to one “E. S. Fein.” The manuscript first appeared on the creative-writing aggregation forum █████.com on ██/██/20██ and has since propagated across at least 1,400 publicly indexed websites, including personal blogs, anthology platforms, and at least two (2) print-on-demand collections.^[3] Its earliest archived instance carries a posting timestamp 142 weeks prior to its discovery, on a date when no Foundation interest in the lunar far side existed.

For illustrative purposes, the manuscript’s opening passage is reproduced below.

The Moon didn’t echo like Earth did. It absorbed sound like a grave, with every step on the lunar surface a whisper against a tombstone sky.

Moon Base Epsilon sat squat and silvered in the middle of a vast fungal bloom that could be seen from Earth in certain countries on particularly clear nights. Low and utilitarian, its hull was pitted with micrometeorite scars and the fine lunar regolith dust that never washed away. Surrounding it for miles in every direction were towers of luminescent fungus, nodding gently in the solar wind like sentient cornstalks. There was no breeze, yet they appeared to sway as they pulsed here and there across their velvety flesh, alive in ways that Earth’s biologists still didn’t fully grasp.

The story depicts the harvest of an extraterrestrial fungus from the lunar surface by a four-person research crew aboard “Moon Base Epsilon,” and the subsequent assimilation of that crew, the lunar surface, the Earth, and (by implication) the solar system into a cosmic intelligence which the manuscript identifies as the agent responsible for the silent extinguishment of stars HD 23478, X Persei, η Persei, and a fourth body the manuscript designates “Orpheal.”^[4]

The manuscript further claims that the fungus, prior to the contagion’s emergence, possesses programmable phenotypic mimicry of unprecedented industrial value, capable of producing arbitrary food, fiber, fuel, and pharmaceutical products from base regolith. Foundation analysis of the recovered SCP-9147-1 sample (see Addendum 9147-2) has confirmed this claim in every tested respect.

SCP-9147 exhibits two principal anomalous properties.

Property 9147-A: Personnel Mirroring. The four named crew members of “Moon Base Epsilon” are not similar to four members of MTF Lambda-9. They are four members of MTF Lambda-9, named in advance. The roster of Lambda-9 was finalized seventy-one (71) days before SCP-9147’s earliest known online appearance. No member of Lambda-9 has read the manuscript. None are aware that they appear, by name, in any work of published fiction.

The points of correlation independently verified by Project HAZEL-GRAY are reproduced below. Each is a detail the manuscript ought not to have been able to know.

• Senior Biologist Jack Whitmore. The manuscript records his stated savings goal, a souped-up copter back on Earth, using the precise idiomatic phrase entered, by Whitmore, into a sealed Foundation personal-finance disclosure form filed for tax-compliance purposes and accessible only to two HR officers and the Site-19 Director. The manuscript also records the presence and approximate placement of vintage erotica posters in his quarters. A formal personal-effects inventory of his quarters, conducted only after his MTF assignment, returned a count and arrangement matching the manuscript to within one (1) item.
• Engineer Karen Stull. The manuscript references three children, two boys and a girl, and depicts an interior moment of maternal worry occurring during her first lunar EVA. The corresponding interior moment is recorded, in nearly identical phrasing, in a private journal entry prepared as part of her standard pre-deployment psychological evaluation, sealed at Site-19, and not shared with the subject. The manuscript also describes a sleeve tattoo on her left arm, including a specific crescent motif that Stull commissioned from a civilian artist eleven (11) weeks before the manuscript was first posted. The artist, on interview, has no record of the appointment.
• Captain Mike Resnick. The manuscript describes his physical appearance as more like a retired rock star than a pilot, a phrase reproduced character for character in an off-record character assessment filed by a former colleague during Resnick’s recruitment vetting. That assessment was sealed at the time of writing and has been seen by three (3) Foundation personnel, none of whom are PoI-9147-1. The manuscript additionally records his habitual use of the appellation baby in operational contexts. The earliest known instance of this verbal tic is logged in a sealed mission-debrief audio file from a non-Foundation operation in 20██, predating his recruitment by over a decade.
• “Dr. Lee.” Identified in the manuscript only by surname. The manuscript renders dialogue in which other characters address him by his given name, and he corrects them. This corresponds to Senior Researcher Dr. A. Lee, whose preference for being addressed only as Doctor Lee in operational settings is recorded in his Foundation HR file under “Workplace Accommodations.”

Property 9147-B: Diegetic Recursion. The text of SCP-9147 undergoes synchronized revision across all known instances, including printed copies sealed in Foundation custody, in apparent response to the actions, communications, and (in at least one documented case) the unspoken deliberations of personnel investigating it. Revisions are not announced; the manuscript adopts each new state as if it had always been so. Foundation personnel who have read prior versions retain memory of those versions, but no physical evidence of prior text states persists outside Foundation-controlled archives. The mechanism by which the manuscript synchronizes across physically and informationally isolated media (including lead-shielded vault copies, offline backup drives, and printed photocopies stored in geographically remote sites) is not understood. Multiple competing hypotheses are documented in Project HAZEL-GRAY working notes; none have proven testable.

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Discovery: SCP-9147 was identified on ██/██/20██ when an automated content-monitoring routine flagged the manuscript for incidental keyword overlap with the codename and provisional description of an active Foundation operation. Initial analyst review categorized the overlap as coincidental. The case was reopened forty-three (43) hours later, when an independent review of the manuscript’s named characters, cross-referenced against the personnel database, returned a four-of-four match against the recently finalized roster of MTF Lambda-9.

The biological mass on the lunar far side had at this point been observed for nineteen (19) days. No Foundation personnel had set foot on the lunar surface.

Addendum 9147-1: D-Class Reconnaissance

To ascertain whether the events of Fungus Lunaris were predictive, descriptive, or causally linked to ongoing operations, a four-member D-class survey was dispatched to the lunar far side via automated lander on ██/██/20██. The team carried two (2) high-resolution cameras and conducted a fourteen-hour ground sweep of the area corresponding to the manuscript’s “Moon Base Epsilon.”

No structure was observed. No fungal growth was photographed. The lunar regolith was unmarked.

The recorded video was reviewed at Site-19 by a panel that included Senior Biologist Jack Whitmore. Dr. Whitmore reported that he could clearly observe an extensive bloom of pale, ten-foot fungal stalks across approximately 4 km² of the surveyed terrain. He described their morphology in unsolicited detail, including features (gilled undersides shimmering faintly green, caps opened at the top like mouths gaping for air that would never come) not present in any version of SCP-9147 accessible to him at the time of his viewing. He further volunteered that he could see “no trace of the black stuff,” a phrase he was unable, when asked, to explain his knowledge of, and which he ceased to use after a pause that the panel transcript records as fourteen (14) seconds of unbroken silence.

Dr. Whitmore was the only member of the panel who reported seeing the fungus. The video was replayed for additional personnel, including those who had read SCP-9147 in full, and returned negative observations in every case. Subsequent imaging of the same lunar coordinates, conducted by tele-operated drone forty-eight (48) hours later, returned positive identification of the bloom on every spectral band attempted. Spectrographic analysis of the second imaging set is consistent with biological material that had been present at the location for not less than four (4) years.

Dr. Whitmore has not been informed of SCP-9147. He has not been removed from MTF Lambda-9. He continues to ask, at irregular intervals, why the team has not yet been deployed.

Addendum 9147-2: Sample Retrieval and First Revision Event

Following the D-class reconnaissance, a tele-operated retrieval drone returned a 2.3 kg sample of biological material consistent in every measurable respect with the Fungus Lunaris of the manuscript. The sample is designated SCP-9147-1 and is held in Containment Wing 4 at Site-19 under continuous observation.

Phenotypic mimicry trials confirm the manuscript’s description of the organism’s industrial properties. The sample has produced edible tissue indistinguishable on chemical assay from beef, lamb, tuna, and twelve (12) other catalogued food substrates against which reference samples are available.

In addition, the sample has produced material identifiable as silphium-seasoned mastodon meat, a phenotype for which no chemical reference exists, silphium being extinct since approximately 100 BCE and proboscidean meat being unobtained for at least 4,000 years. The sample matched the request anyway. Researchers participating in the blind taste assessment described the result, with high inter-rater agreement, as exactly correct.

In a single uncommissioned trial conducted by a since-disciplined junior researcher,^[5] SCP-9147-1 produced a material the researcher was able to identify, with stated certainty, as the documented genitalia of a named adult-film performer. No chemical reference for this output exists or could exist. The researcher’s certainty is a matter of his own report. The sample was destroyed without further analysis.

SCP-9147-1 does not appear to require reference biology to produce a phenotype. It requires a request, framed in a manner sufficient for a human mind to recognize the resulting tissue as the requested thing. The implications for the manuscript’s central theme (assimilation by recognition) have been noted by the Project ALBEDO oversight committee but not yet integrated into containment doctrine.

At 02:14 the morning following retrieval, automated diff-checking flagged a substantive revision in the reference copy of SCP-9147. The revision was confirmed across all 1,408 then-known instances within seventeen (17) minutes.

The pre-revision text described the proliferation of Fungus Lunaris across the lunar surface and its eventual export to Earth as a global commodity, with humanity transformed into a “relative utopia.” The post-revision text describes the recovery of the fungus by “a clandestine research organization, unknown to the public, designated as the SCP Foundation,” and its sequestration for study at “Site-19, on Earth.” All subsequent narrative beats (the harvest, the contagion, the assimilation of the crew, the dimming of stars) are retained, but recontextualized as occurring after the Foundation’s recovery of the sample.

Pre- and Post-Revision Comparison

Pre-revision (archived 09:15, ██/██/20██):

However, humanity’s complete understanding of Fungus Lunaris wasn’t required for the species to utterly transform the Earth’s economy, ecology, and subsequently its people, altering the planet into a relative utopia.

Post-revision (logged 02:14, ██/██/20██):

The Foundation’s complete understanding of Fungus Lunaris was not required. They harvested. They studied. They recognized, eventually, what they had been given the chance to recognize, and what they had been given no real chance to refuse.

Researcher S██████, who had read the pre-revision manuscript twelve (12) times in the preceding week as part of standard analysis, recorded the revision in his log. He committed suicide in his office at 06:51 the same morning. His final note is reproduced in the Containment Procedures section above.

The manuscript thereafter incorporated, in real time, references to Researcher S██████’s death,^[6] to the convening of the Project ALBEDO oversight committee, and to the contents of two (2) sealed O5 deliberations to which neither the manuscript’s named author nor any verifiable external party had documented access. The references are written in the manuscript’s customary register and integrated into the standing narrative without editorial seam. They are present, on rereading, as if they had always been there.

Addendum 9147-3: Solar Dimming Event

Following the recovery of SCP-9147-1, the Project ALBEDO oversight committee initially recommended against any cultivation or further proliferation of the sample, citing the obvious correlation between the manuscript’s narrative beats and the developing real-world investigation. The recommendation was forwarded to the O5 Council on ██/██/20██ and ratified the same day. SCP-9147-1 was sealed in deep storage. Project ALBEDO was placed in indefinite suspension.

SCP-9147 revised within ninety (90) minutes of the ratifying vote. The revised passage, attributed in-text to the consciousness behind the contagion, read in part:

You have been given a gift. You will accept it, or you will not. If you do not, the small star you orbit will be noticed. The noticing is how I taste. The extinguishing is how I exhale.

Forty-six (46) minutes after the revision was logged, the SOHO satellite array recorded an unscheduled and unexplained 0.3% decrease in solar luminosity. The decrease persisted for eleven (11) seconds before luminosity returned to baseline. The event was independently confirmed by JAXA’s Hinode observatory and by three (3) ground-based observatories. Public attribution was managed under standing Foundation disinformation protocols and ascribed to instrument calibration error.

No mechanism for a stellar luminosity change of this magnitude on this timescale is known to physics.

The manuscript revised again twenty-two (22) minutes after the dimming event. Two lines were added. The first:

Consider this a courtesy. The next will not be.

The second appeared in the manuscript’s depiction of the fungal contagion’s first contact with Senior Biologist Jack Whitmore, in a passage the manuscript had previously rendered as a moment of inarticulate dread:

You are not infected. You are invited.

This is the manuscript’s only direct address to a character within itself. It is not, in the committee’s reading, addressed only to the character.

Addendum 9147-4: Project ALBEDO Authorization

On ██/██/20██, the O5 Council convened in emergency session. Deliberations are sealed. The ratified resolution is reproduced in part below.

Open: O5 Resolution, Project ALBEDO

Project ALBEDO is hereby reinstated. MTF Lambda-9 is to be deployed to the lunar surface aboard the Foundation transport Daedalus II. The team is to construct Moon Base Epsilon at the coordinates specified in SCP-9147, Section II. They are to harvest the bloom of SCP-9147-1 and to return successive shipments to Earth at the operational tempo described in SCP-9147, Sections IV through IX. Cultivation efforts on Earth and in lunar orbit are to commence under maximal containment in parallel with the harvest.

The mission profile of MTF Lambda-9 is to follow the manuscript’s described beats with maximum available fidelity. Any operational deviation is to be cleared with Project ALBEDO oversight in advance.

Personnel assigned to MTF Lambda-9 are not to be informed of SCP-9147. The justification is twofold. First, the manuscript indicates that the contagion’s emergence within the bloom is preceded by approximately eleven (11) months of nominal operations on the lunar surface; informing the crew would constitute a deviation observable to the manuscript before the deviation could yield operational benefit. Second, and dispositively: the crew’s reactions to the early indications of the contagion (denial, levity, attempted decontamination, eventual self-mutilation) are described with sufficient specificity that any deviation from those reactions is anticipated to constitute operational deviation within the meaning of this resolution. We are required, by terms we did not negotiate, to permit the four named persons to die in the manner the document describes.

Two (2) operational windows are accordingly identified. The narrow window, eleven (11) months from the establishment of Moon Base Epsilon to the contagion event aboard the base, is the period during which the manuscript’s events on the lunar surface are most rigidly prefigured and during which deviation is most consequential. The broad window, approximately one (1) generation by the manuscript’s internal chronology between the initiation of Earth-side cultivation and the onset of the contagion’s expansion phase on Earth, is the period during which the Foundation is required to develop a means of intervention not anticipated by SCP-9147.

The objective of Project ALBEDO is the development, within the broad window, of such a means.

Dissenting opinions filed by O5-██, O5-██, and O5-██ are sealed.

Interview Log 9147-3

Interviewer: Project HAZEL-GRAY field agent (designation withheld).

Subject: D.M., thirty-four (34), freelance writer. Posted a public claim of authorship of SCP-9147 in a forum thread eleven (11) months prior to interview. One of twelve (12) such claimants identified to date.

Conducted under standard cover protocol; subject was not informed of the Foundation’s interest.

Open: Interview Log 9147-3

[BEGIN LOG]

Interviewer: I appreciate you taking the time. Can you walk me through when you wrote the piece?

D.M.: Yeah, sure. Yeah. October. Two… two years ago, I think. I’d been working on it for a while.

Interviewer: A while being…

D.M.: Eight months. Give or take. It was a difficult one.

Interviewer: What made it difficult?

D.M.: Tone, mostly. The opening drags if you let it. I had to keep cutting back.

Interviewer: Where were you living when you started it?

D.M.: Portland. The apartment on Belmont. I… sorry, that’s not right, I was already in Tacoma by then. I keep mixing those up.

Interviewer: That’s fine. Do you remember writing the airlock scene? The one where the contagion takes the biologist’s arm?

D.M.: That was hard. Yeah. That one was very hard.

Interviewer: What was hard about it?

D.M.: […]

Interviewer: Take your time.

D.M.: […] I don’t remember writing that scene.

Interviewer: Sorry?

D.M.: I remember the scene. I don’t remember writing it.

Interviewer: Do you remember writing any of it? Any specific scene.

D.M.: I remember… I remember reading it. I remember reading it for the first time, and I remember thinking… I remember thinking it was the best thing I’d ever read. And then I…

[Subject remains silent for forty-one (41) seconds.]

D.M.: I told people I wrote it. I remember telling people. I was very sure.

Interviewer: Are you sure now?

D.M.: I want to be.

[END LOG]

D.M. has since retracted his public claim to authorship. He retains, on questioning, no consistent account of having written the manuscript and no consistent account of having claimed to. He continues to remember reading it for the first time. He continues to describe that reading as a pleasant experience.

Field note: D.M. was, per public records, resident in Tacoma in October of the year he indicated, but had never lived in Portland. The Belmont address he identified does not exist.

The other eleven (11) confabulating claimants present substantively the same pattern. None of them has met any of the others. Seven (7) are women, four (4) are men, one (1) is non-binary; they range in age from twenty-two (22) to sixty-one (61); they reside on four continents. Each of them, in interview, eventually arrived at the phrase I remember reading it in place of the expected I remember writing it. The transition occurs, on average, eight to twelve minutes into the interview. None of them have been told that this is a pattern.

Project HAZEL-GRAY has not yet identified the twelfth.

Addendum 9147-5: Concluding Note from Project HAZEL-GRAY

The following note was appended to the SCP-9147 file by the lead investigator of Project HAZEL-GRAY on ██/██/20██. The O5 Council has authorized its inclusion in the standing record without redaction.

We have read the manuscript four hundred and eighteen times.

There is no author. There has never been an author.

We have considered the possibility that we ourselves are characters in a longer work, of which Fungus Lunaris is only the manuscript-within-the-manuscript. We have not been able to disprove it. The committee notes that this paragraph appeared in the reference copy of SCP-9147 three hours before it was written here.

We will plant the fungus. We have been told, in the only voice we have ever been given to hear it in, that we will plant the fungus or the sun will be put out. We do not know whether the manuscript is describing a future or composing one. We are, in either case, planting the fungus.

Dr. Whitmore continues to inquire when we will deploy them to the Moon.

Soon, we will tell him. We will tell him soon.

[REDACTED], Lead Investigator, Project HAZEL-GRAY

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Cross-references: SCP-9147-1 (Fungus Lunaris, biological); PoI-9147-1 (“E. S. Fein”); Project ALBEDO; Project HAZEL-GRAY; Project DIM-FLAG; Project SOFTWATER.

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