Alastair Mayer - Light Conversation

I almost missed it. If I’d looked away as I closed the refrigerator door, 1 would have. But the light didn’t go out. Poly explained later that they (he? it?) had shorted out the switch (at some personal sacrifice) to keep it on, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

People joke about whether the refrigerator light really goes out when the door closes. If you look, though, you’ll see it turn off just before that, when the door pushes the switch in. But this time it didn’t. I’d been getting a late-night snack, didn’t bother turning on the main kitchen light, and the refrigerator light stayed on right up until the door seal hit the frame.

“That’s odd,” I said to myself, aloud. I do that. I opened and closed the door again, watching closely. The light stayed on.

I didn’t know that the closed refrigerator was still illuminated, any more than Schrodinger knew if his cat was alive or dead, but a half-dozen schemes to decide came to mind. If I could find my meter I could check the current draw, but I’d have to drag the fridge away from the outlet. There was enough shelf space between the milk carton, the pickle and jam jars, and yesterday’s leftovers to put my camcorder, but the battery wasn’t charged. Out in the garage I excavated the weed whacker and unreeled a foot of monofilament from the business end. Now I had a crude fiber-optic cable. I closed the refrigerator door on the nylon line, one end protruding. The tip glowed; the light was still on.

I opened the door and squatted down to examine the switch. I pushed it a few times to no effect. 1 didn’t want to commit appliance repair at this hour, but neither did 1 want to leave the light on all night. As I reached in to unscrew the bulb, I saw Poly.

My first reaction to the yellow-green slime growing on the fridge wall was to recoil in surprise and disgust. I’ve heard of weird things growing in the back of the refrigerator, but this! Resigning myself to the cleanup job, I moved the big pickle jar aside, then went to get a sponge and disinfectant spray.

Back at the fridge, I noticed that the slime mold—it resembled chartreuse pudding—now had a raised pattern on its surface. I knew a little about slime molds—that they can move and change shape—but I’d never heard of one creating on itself the diagonally barred circle, Ø, that usually means NO. “Odd,” I said to myself again. And yes, again aloud.

I started to reach in with the sponge, and the slime rippled and changed as I watched. I hadn’t thought they could move that fast, and was even more surprised when the surface formed, in raised ridges, the letter N. It held that for a few seconds then morphed to show the letter O.

“ ‘No’?”

The slime mold raised two dots and a curved line within the O, like this: ☺. A happy face? Had it heard me?

“Can you hear me?” 1 must be crazy, I thought, talking to a slime mold.

The mold shaped the letter Y, then E, then S. Then: D, O, N, T, then went flat for a bit, then H, U, R, T, flat, U, S.

“ ‘Don’t hurt us’?”

“☺”

“But I only see one of you.” A detail like that shouldn’t have worried me when here I was talking to a slime mold, but 1 was grasping at the mundane. This was getting decidedly weird.

“C, O, L, L, E, C, T, I, V, E,” flat “O, R, G, A, N, I, S, M” it spelled out. It was getting faster.

“You’re a collective organism?”

“☺”

“But, what are you? Who are you?”

“Physarum polycephalum sapiens,” it said. Well, spelled out.

“That’s quite a name.”

“Don’t have name. Intelligent slime mold.” How about I just call you Poly?”

“☺”

So, I had an intelligent slime mold named Poly in my refrigerator. I had too many questions to know where to begin—most concerning my own sanity. I needed more data.

“Excuse me a moment,” I said. Politeness, even to a slime mold, couldn’t hurt. “I’ll be right back.” I headed for my computer.

There was no such thing, according to Google, as “Physarum polycephalum sapiens.” There are many kinds of slime molds, organisms with many nuclei in a single blob of protoplasm. Plain Physarum polycephalum is a yellow slime mold, easy to grow in the lab. It had been the subject of numerous experiments involving intelligence, of a sort. Years ago, Dr. Toshiyuki Nakagaki in Nagoya had shown that a slime mold could determine the shortest path in a maze. That might be a chemical tropism rather than “intelligence,” but I’m no expert. In 2006, Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southhampton built a robot controlled by Physarum polycephalum. But that mold—and the robot it controlled—avoided light; why was mine huddled up to the bulb in the fridge? Warmth?

I’d have to ask it.

“4 NRG.” Now it was using texting shorthand. I’ll translate.

“For energy? Photosynthesis?”

“☺”

“How?”

“Absorbed chloroplasts.”

It was much greener than the web pictures I’d found. That’s when I noticed that the salad greens in the vegetable crisper were now salad whites. I’d have to toss those.

“But why are you in the fridge?”

“Need cooling.”

That made sense. This communication must take a lot of energy. I didn’t know how it was intelligent, but I knew that our brains and computers both need considerable cooling. So too must intelligent slime molds.

We chatted in that vein a bit. Poly explained how they (he, it, whatever) had gimmicked the light switch, and assured me that it was reversible.

Slowly I realized that 1 was missing the big questions.

“Where did you come from?” I asked. “How did you get here? What do you want?”

“Too much philosophy. Want to go home.” “Oh.” I was tired from the late hour and my mind was numb. In my dazed state I didn’t ask where “home” was. Another planet? A parallel world? Dr. Nakagaki’s lab?

“How will you do that?”

“Recharge,” it began, then “O”, “o”, “.”, “*” followed. This last sequence was animated, not spelled out. The circle shrank to a dot, then radiated out and went flat.

“You explode? Disappear? Beam up? What?”

“☺”

“But—”

As I watched, the raised circle outlining the face flattened, fading, leaving just the eyes and mouth. Then the eyes went, leaving just the smile. A Cheshire slime mold.

That was more than I could handle. As I closed the refrigerator door, I said to Poly: “Okay. But when the last of you leaves, please turn out the light.”