"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive." – Stewart Brand
In Myrmecopolis, a letter is a seed. A spore-letter begins as a pheromone message written by an ant scribe onto a wafer of dried fungal culture. The wafer is sealed in a resin bead and sold. When the buyer cracks it and wets it, the culture wakes, grows for a day and a half, and the mycelium lays itself out along the message's chemical gradient – so that the reader, on the second morning, finds the words written in living white thread, which can be smelled, touched and, with practice, seen. On the third day the culture dies and the message goes with it. Nothing in the Sporemarket is meant to last more than three days. That is the market's discipline and its business model. The market sits under eleven resin domes in the middle of the city, around the foot of the Symbiosis Engine, and it trades in four goods: news, rumour, forgery and silence. News is cheap and comes from the Engine itself. Rumour is dearer, because it must be cultivated. Forgery is the dearest legal good in the city:...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.