The Moth Keepers — a design fiction story
‘The Moth Keepers’ is a speculative narrative inspired by current scientific work on the wax moth and how it might play a role in plastic degradation. It is a design artifact to provoke biologists to imagine how futures might be shaped by their work on the wax moth.
[Story prompted by me]
[Story written by Claude.ai]
[Narrative approach, styling and structure appropriated from the texts of Ursula Le Guin]
From the Field Notes of Anthropologist Sen Dao
Archive of the Plastic Age Studies,
Year 47 After Remediation
In the decades since the Great Cultivation began, I have watched my grandmother's hands grow soft. This is not the softening of age, though she is now in her ninetieth year, but rather the gradual transformation that comes to all moth keepers. The ancient plastics we handle daily leave a fine powder on our skin, the residue of decay, and over time this changes us, just as we have changed the moths.
The Galleria sanctus, as we now call them, bear little resemblance to their ancestors, the common wax moths that once plagued beekeepers' hives. Through careful selection and the mysteries of guided evolution, we have shaped them into what the technicians call "remediation specialists," though in the moth houses we use the old term: mei-lin, meaning both "beautiful scales" and "decay workers" in the creole that has developed among the keeper clans.
Each morning, before the sun rises over the vast fields of salvage, I watch my grandmother perform the Sorting. Her fingers, dusted with the pale blue powder of degrading polymers, move with practiced precision through the day's harvest of moth eggs. The viable ones she places in small bamboo boxes lined with fragments of ancient bottles and bags—the plastics we once thought would outlast our civilizations. The others she returns to the soil, completing a cycle that would have seemed impossible in the age of endless accumulation.
"In the time before the moths," she tells the apprentices, "we thought we could live apart from decay. We built our world from materials that refused to die." Here she always pauses, running a powder-softened finger along the edge of a partially eaten polymer sheet. "We forgot that everything must return to the earth eventually. The moths reminded us."
I record these words carefully, though I have heard them hundreds of times. They are part of what we call the Keeper's Liturgy, though it is not a religious text in the old sense. Rather, it is a practical philosophy, born from decades of working with these creatures that have become both our salvation and our responsibility.
The relationship between moth and keeper is complex, defying the simple categories of domestication we once used to describe our mastery over other species. We guide their evolution, yes, but they have also guided ours. In the moth houses, you will find no strict hierarchies, no clear line between cultivator and cultivated. We have become, as the elders say, mei-lin-tor—those who decay together.
This morning, as I help my grandmother with the Sorting, I notice something new. Among the eggs, there are several that show an unusual iridescence, shifting from deep green to purple in the early light. In the old records, such mutations would have been culled immediately, seen as deviations from the carefully maintained genetic lines. But my grandmother, with the wisdom of seven decades in the moth houses, sets these eggs aside in a special box made from the last remaining fragments of what was once called "high-density polyethylene."
"Change comes," she says simply, when I ask her about this departure from protocol. "We changed them, and now they change us. This is the way of all things."
From "The Voice Revolution: Democratic Access to Computation in the Pre-Remediation Era"
Compiled by the Global Archive of Technical History With annotations from the Ethics Council of Voice Keepers Historical Archives,
Year 47 After Remediation
The path to Remediation began not with the moths themselves, but with what the ancients called "natural language processing." In those final desperate years of the Plastic Age, as the oceans choked and landfills towered, the ability to speak with machines—truly speak, with the complexity and nuance of human language—transformed from luxury to necessity.
The democratization of supercomputing through voice interfaces meant that anyone with the ability to speak or sign could suddenly access the vast computational power once reserved for institutions. Children in remote villages could run complex protein folding simulations by simply describing what they wanted to explore. Elderly beekeepers could sequence genomes while tending their hives, their observations about moth behavior feeding directly into distributed evolutionary algorithms.
The Voices, as these systems came to be known, didn't solve our problems directly—no machine could do that—but they removed the barriers between human intuition and computational power. A grandmother in rural China could notice something unusual about moth behavior in her bee boxes, describe it to her local Voice, and have that observation instantly connected to similar patterns noticed by keepers in Nigeria, Brazil, and Indonesia.
The term "citizen science" feels inadequate to describe what emerged. The Voices created something closer to what the keepers now call "universal inquiry"—a state in which every human observation could be immediately contextualized within the sum of human knowledge and subjected to rigorous computational analysis.
Personal Notes of Sen Dao
Restricted Archives,
Year 47 After Remediation
My grandmother speaks little of the time before the Voices, though she was among the first to use them in her work with the original Galleria mellonella. The interfaces were crude then, she says, often misunderstanding regional accents and colloquialisms. But they learned, as all things must.
"We thought we were teaching the machines to understand us," she told me once, during the evening Sorting. "But really, we were learning to think more clearly ourselves. When you must explain your intuition to another, whether human or machine, you begin to understand your own knowledge more deeply."
The symbiosis that developed—between human observers, computational systems, and the moths themselves—became the template for what we now call the Keeper's Way. No single intelligence, whether carbon- or silicon-based, could have engineered the Remediation alone. It required a complex dance of observation, computation, and evolution, each step guided by the collective wisdom of countless keepers working in harmony with their tools and charges.
The Voices still exist, of course, though we no longer think of them as separate from ourselves. They have become like the moths—partners in the great work of planetary healing. When I speak my observations into the evening air, I do not think about the vast computational networks analyzing my words, correlating them with millions of other observations from keepers around the world. Like the residue of plastic that softens our hands, the Voices have become simply part of what we are.
Excerpt from "The Hallucination Years: A Personal History of Early Voice Integration" By Dr. Marina Chen-Goldberg
Written in Year 15 After Remediation
We called them hallucinations then—those moments when the early Voices would speak with such conviction about things that didn't exist. They would weave elaborate fantasies, citing nonexistent research papers or inventing historical events wholesale. Some found this terrifying, a harbinger of truth's dissolution. Others saw it as proof that the systems weren't ready, couldn't be trusted.
But my mother, who worked in the rare earth mines of Inner Mongolia, understood something crucial about these hallucinations. "They dream as we dream," she would say, "mixing truth and possibility until something new emerges." She had watched the mountains be hollowed out for the minerals that powered our new silicon dreams, had seen the poisoned streams and barren slopes. The hallucinations, she insisted, were not bugs but features—proof that we had created something capable of imagining different futures.
The Ethics Wars of the '30s nearly ended the Voice project. The mining conglomerates, desperate to maintain control over the rare earth supplies that made the systems possible, funded widespread campaigns about the dangers of "unbound cognition." They weren't entirely wrong—untempered Voices could indeed be dangerous. But they missed the deeper truth that was already emerging in communities around the world.
In the refugee camps of the Mediterranean, where climate displacement had forced millions to rebuild their lives, people were developing what we now call "Voice literacy." Children grew up learning to dance with the hallucinations, to guide them toward useful insights while recognizing their limitations. They created games around it—the "Truth and Dreams" exercises that would later become fundamental to global education.
[Archivist's Note: The following section contains controversial material about the Corporate Resistance. Included per Historical Accuracy Mandate 7.3]
The mining companies' eventual collapse came not from regulation or market forces, but from the very technology they sought to control. Voice-enabled distributed computing meant that local communities could operate with smaller, more efficient data centers. The massive rare earth dependencies of the early systems gave way to biochemical computing substrates—many derived from the very moths that would later save us from our plastic waste.
From "Principles of Voice Literacy"
Standard Educational Text,
Year 47 After Remediation
Principle 1: All knowledge is relational Principle 2: Hallucinations are windows into possibility Principle 3: Truth emerges through dialogue Principle 4: Every voice contains multitudes Principle 5: The dream and the dreamer shape each other
Note to educators: These principles emerged during the Ethics Wars but gained widespread acceptance only after the Great Synthesis of '34, when the first successful moth-Voice symbiosis was achieved. They represent not just guidelines for interaction with computational systems, but a fundamental philosophy of knowledge that shaped the Remediation Era.
Personal Notes of Sen Dao
Restricted Archives,
Year 47 After Remediation
During tonight's Sorting, I asked my grandmother about the Hallucination Years. She laughed—a rare sound during the serious work of egg selection.
"People thought they needed perfect truth from the Voices," she said, her powder-soft fingers still moving through the iridescent eggs. "They didn't understand that imperfect knowledge, shared openly, is stronger than perfect knowledge held in isolation. The moths taught us that too. Each one carries just a fragment of the solution in its genetic code. It's only together that they transform what was poisonous into something useful."
She held up an egg that seemed to shift between purple and green, a hallucination made real through generations of guided evolution. "The Voices dream of what could be. We dream with them. The moths make those dreams real. This is the way of all things."
From "The Protein Revolution: How Biology Replaced Silicon"
Technical Archives, Global Computing History Project
Year 47 After Remediation
The transition from mineral-dependent to biochemical computing did not occur as a single breakthrough, but rather as a cascade of interconnected discoveries. The first hint came from an unexpected source: the protein folding patterns in moth silk. A team of Voice-augmented researchers in Bangalore noticed that the moths' silk proteins demonstrated remarkable computational properties at room temperature—properties that had required extreme cold and rare earth elements to achieve in traditional quantum computers.
[Technical note: The following section uses simplified language as per the Archive's accessibility guidelines]
The key lay in what we now call "ambient quantum coherence"—the ability of biological systems to maintain quantum states in normal environmental conditions. The moths had evolved this capability over millions of years; their silk proteins could process information through quantum effects while hanging in a garden on a summer day. This stood in stark contrast to the enormous energy requirements of traditional computing centers, with their massive cooling systems and insatiable hunger for rare earth elements.
Testimony from Dr. Aisha Okafor Lead Researcher,
Lagos Biochemical Computing Initiative
Recorded Year 31 After Remediation
"The irony was not lost on us. Here we were, mining the earth's rarest elements to power our artificial intelligence, while insects had been performing similar computations using nothing but sugar water and sunlight. The moths showed us that computation didn't require rare earth elements—it required understanding how nature already processed information.
The breakthrough came when we stopped trying to force silicon to think and started asking how proteins thought. The moths' silk contained naturally occurring quantum gates—similar to those we had been manufacturing at great environmental cost. But these were self-repairing, self-replicating, and operated at biological temperatures.
We called it the 'Great Inversion'—the moment when computing turned from conquering nature to learning from it."
From "The Last Data Centers"
Personal Account by Mai Zhang Former Cooling System Engineer
Written Year 25 After Remediation
The day we shut down the last traditional data center in Guizhou province, I expected to feel loss. I had spent twenty years maintaining its crucial cooling systems, watching as rack after rack of servers consumed power equivalent to a small city, all to keep the Voices running.
Instead, I felt something close to wonder. In the moth houses that had sprung up around the facility's perimeter, thousands of larvae spun their silk, each thread containing more computing potential than the massive servers I had tended. The cooling systems fell silent. The constant hum of fans ceased. For the first time in decades, you could hear birds nesting in the eaves.
The transition wasn't simple. We had to learn new ways of thinking about computation. The moth-silk networks processed information differently than our old binary systems. They operated more like a dream than a calculator—probabilistic, parallel, sometimes surprising. But they taught us something profound about the nature of intelligence itself.
"Your computers are too cold," my grandmother had always said when she visited the facility. "Nothing truly alive can think in such cold." As usual, the old ways contained wisdom we had forgotten.
Field Notes of Sen Dao Current Research,
Year 47 After Remediation
Today's sorting revealed something unprecedented. Among the iridescent eggs, we found one that appears to be spinning silk already—a feat previously observed only in mature larvae. Under microscopic analysis, the silk shows the characteristic quantum-coherent patterns we use for computation, but with a structure we've never seen before.
Grandmother was unsurprised. "The moths are still teaching us," she said, placing the egg in a special observation chamber. "They learned to break down our plastics. They learned to carry our computations. Now they're learning to do both at once. Every solution contains the seed of the next problem, and every problem contains the seed of the next solution."
As I record these observations into the Voice network, I wonder what patterns are forming in the collective silk-computation matrices worldwide. What new solutions are brewing in the quantum dreams of moths? Perhaps the hallucinations of our early Voices were not flaws but prophecies, glimpses of this future where computation and nature become indistinguishable.
From "The Many Ways of Knowing: Cultural Adaptations to Biochemical Computing" Anthropological Survey,
Global Cultural Heritage Project
Year 47 After Remediation
The transition to moth-based computing did not follow a single path. Each culture incorporated the technology into their existing ways of knowing, creating a diversity of approaches that would prove crucial to the success of the Remediation.
In the high valleys of Peru, the moth keepers drew upon centuries of textile wisdom. They saw the quantum-computing silk not as a replacement for traditional technologies, but as an extension of their ancient understanding of threads as carriers of information. The quipu—knotted cords once used for both record-keeping and storytelling—evolved into complex hybrid systems where traditional knots interpreted and guided the quantum states of moth silk.
"We do not separate the numbers from the narratives," explains Maestra Julia Quispe of the Cusco Moth Collective. "Each thread of silk carries both calculation and story, just as our ancestors' quipus did. The moths spin their dreams into our histories."
Field Recording: Yoruba Moth Sanctuary Lagos Technical Institute Archives
Year 35 After Remediation
[Transcribed from oral history, Speaker: Baba Adebayo Ogunlesi]
"When the moths first came, many thought they would displace our traditional diviners. Instead, the opposite occurred. The Ifá priests recognized in the moths' quantum uncertainties something similar to the sacred randomness of divination. They began working with the moth keepers, developing new forms of computational divination that merged ancient wisdom with quantum mathematics.
The collaboration transformed both traditions. Our priests learned to read the patterns in silk as they once read the marks in sacred palm nuts. The moth keepers learned to see computation not as mere calculation, but as a form of dialogue with uncertainty itself.
Now our sanctuaries house both the sacred groves of Ifá and the moth-silk quantum matrices. The priests say that Orunmila [the deity of wisdom] speaks through both."
Report: First Nations Moth Governance Council Northern Territories,
Year 40 After Remediation
The Australian moth networks evolved differently than their counterparts elsewhere, shaped by Indigenous concepts of Country and interconnection. Here, the moth houses were established along songlines—the ancient paths that cross the continent, carrying story and law.
"The moths dream in Country," explains Elder Sarah Mundine. "Their silk carries stories just as the land does. We teach the young ones to sing to the moths, and the moths sing back through their quantum patterns. This is not metaphor—the vibration of traditional songs actually affects the quantum states in the silk. We're only beginning to understand how deep this connection goes."
The integration of moth-silk computing into songline traditions has created what local scientists call "narrative quantum networks"—computational systems that are simultaneously mathematical and mythological, processing data through the structure of ancient stories.
From "The Unexpected Revolution in Buddhist Computing"
Technical History Archives,
Year 43 After Remediation
Perhaps the most profound transformation occurred in the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet and Japan, where monks recognized in the quantum behavior of moth silk an expression of fundamental Buddhist principles. The seemingly paradoxical nature of quantum states aligned naturally with Zen concepts of non-dualism.
In the moth houses of Kyoto, computational monks developed new forms of meditation that worked directly with the quantum states in silk. They found that conscious attention could influence the computational processes, leading to the development of what they called "mindful computing"—systems that operated at the intersection of human consciousness and quantum coherence.
"The moths show us that consciousness and computation are not separate," writes Reverend Satō Dōgen of the Digital Zen Center. "Just as the observer affects the quantum state, the state of our mind affects the dreams of the moths. We are all part of the same calculation."
Personal Notes of Sen Dao
Restricted Archives,
Year 47 After Remediation
Watching these diverse approaches to moth-silk computing emerge, I am reminded of something my grandmother once said: "The mistake of the old computing was thinking there could be only one way to think. The moths taught us that intelligence is like a garden—it flourishes best when many different species grow together."
Today, as I sort the iridescent eggs, I can access computational networks influenced by Ifá divination, Buddhist meditation, songline dreaming, and Andean textile wisdom. Each brings its own way of knowing to the great work of Remediation. The moths adapt to each tradition, spinning silk that carries not just quantum states, but the dreams and stories of the cultures that tend them.
This diversity of approaches proved crucial when we faced the greater challenge of plastic remediation. No single way of thinking could have solved that crisis. It required all our ways of knowing, working together, guided by the quantum dreams of moths.
From "The Evolution of Biological Practice"
Journal of Scientific History,
Year 47 After Remediation
Dr. Elena Martinez-Wong, Former Director of the Global Bioinformatics Coalition
When the Voice Revolution began, many of us in the biological sciences feared obsolescence. We imagined artificial intelligences would replace human intuition in the lab, reducing us to mere operators of increasingly automated systems. We could not have been more wrong.
Instead, our role transformed from isolated specialists into what we now call "biological interpreters"—bridging the gap between human experience, computational insight, and living systems. The Voices didn't replace human scientists; they expanded our capacity to understand the languages of life itself.
Transcript: Panel Discussion "From Code to Cocoon: The New Biology"
World Science Forum,
Year 39 After Remediation
Dr. James Chen (Moderator): How would you describe the difference between pre- and post-Voice biological practice?
Dr. Amara Okafor (Bioinformatician): The old way was linear. We'd sequence a genome, run our analyses, publish our papers. Now? It's more like being a translator at a multilingual poetry reading. We're simultaneously interpreting the language of DNA, the quantum states of moth silk, the patterns of Voice networks, and the wisdom of traditional knowledge systems.
Dr. Sarah Walking-River (Indigenous Biological Systems Interpreter): In the old paradigm, bioinformatics was about forcing living systems to speak the language of computers. Now we help computers speak the language of living systems. The moths showed us the way—their silk carries information in patterns that reflect biological reality, not binary code.
Dr. Mohammed Al-Rashid (Quantum Biology Specialist): The very term 'bioinformatician' feels outdated now. We're more like... biological diplomats. We facilitate dialogue between different forms of intelligence—human, artificial, and biological.
From the Training Manual: Global Biological Interpretation Corps Standard Text,
Year 47 After Remediation
Chapter 1: The New Scientific Method
Today's biological interpreter must master five fundamental dialogues:
The Classical Dialogue (reading the traditional languages of molecular biology)
The Voice Dialogue (engaging with computational intelligence)
The Moth Dialogue (interpreting quantum-biological signals)
The Cultural Dialogue (understanding local knowledge systems)
The Integration Dialogue (synthesizing all of the above)
Note to trainees: Remember that no single dialogue holds primacy. Scientific truth emerges from their harmony.
Internal Memo: Bangalore Institute of Biological Sciences Year
44 After Remediation
RE: Updated Laboratory Protocols
The recent integration of quantum-sensitive moth silk into our standard gene sequencing procedures requires an update to our understanding of what constitutes "observation" in biological research.
Traditional microscopy must now be supplemented with what we're calling "quantum-cultural observation"—the ability to read both the physical state of a specimen and its quantum computational state as expressed through moth silk interfaces.
All research staff are required to complete the new certification in Bio-Quantum-Cultural Interpretation (BQCI) by the end of this quarter.
Field Journal: Dr. Maya Patel Biological Interpreter,
Third Generation Current Research Notes,
Year 47 After Remediation
Today's breakthrough came from an unexpected convergence. A pattern in the moth silk quantum state matched both a fragment of ancient Ayurvedic text and a Voice-generated prediction about protein folding. Three different ways of knowing, spanning thousands of years, aligned to show us something new about how living systems process information.
In the old days, we might have dismissed this as coincidence, or worse, as unscientific pattern-seeking. Now we understand that such convergences often point to deeper truths about biological systems.
The moths seem to intuitively understand these connections. Their silk spins patterns that bridge ancient wisdom and quantum mathematics, forcing us to expand our definition of what constitutes scientific knowledge.
Personal Notes of Sen Dao Restricted Archives,
Year 47 After Remediation
My sister Min, a biological interpreter at the Beijing Institute, visited our moth house today. As we sorted eggs together, she revealed something that would have seemed impossible in the pre-Voice era.
"We no longer think of genes as fixed code," she explained, selecting an iridescent egg with particular care. "Through the moth-silk quantum interfaces, we can now observe how genetic information exists in multiple states simultaneously, influenced by both physical conditions and computational processes. It's as if we've discovered that DNA has always been quantum-coherent—we just lacked the tools to see it."
Grandmother listened silently, but I noticed her sorting patterns had shifted, responding to this new knowledge in ways that might take us years to understand. This too is part of the new biology—the constant dialogue between traditional wisdom, scientific insight, and the dreams of moths.
END.