I haven't mentioned it in awhile, but one of the big projects floating around in the back of my mind (and story archive) involves colonizing a pristine wilderness. I love books like Genesis by Ken Lozito (here's [my review](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/genesis-by-ken-lozito/)) and games like Rimworld. Unfortunately, "let's make a new colony" stories are pretty politically fraught right now, and I'm not much of a survivalist expert, so I've mostly pivoted. Still, I do enjoy the genre; if you click through to that review, above, it'll send you down a link chain of various articles I've written while researching colonization. The premise of my extremely unfinished novel _Jia's Cove_ is that a group of genetically modified humans get "teleported" (scanned and re-printed) to planet that was terraformed via a teleporter that scans people and transmits the data through space at lightspeed, then prints new bodies at the destination. Not too different from how Angiers performs the Transported Man in _[The Prestige](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film))_, I guess. The original conception of _Jia's Cove_ had nothing to do with androids, but I wound up stumbling across a writing prompt involving sandwiches and androids and had the idea for _Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats_. The only problem was that a key plot point was that the bio-printers couldn't handle a lot of metal. So, true to form, I did a little digging and found out about the current state of [organic robots](https://www.boldbusiness.com/health/organic-robots/). Turns out scientists can grow living, programmable organisms — they're useful for things like making better drug delivery systems and improved artificial kidney replacements. Some of these organic robots (xenobots) are grown from frog stem cells. They're so small (less than a millimetre) they remind me of the nanobots I've read about in scifi stories. It's a little surreal to realize they kind of already exist. But obviously the organidroid in _Can Andooids Cope with Tiny Goats_ is bigger than a millimetre, so I kept on looking. Somehow this didn't make it into the [fungus](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/fungus/) %% ( [[2021-06-21 Fungus]] ) %% edition of this newsletter, but I found fungal electronic devices during my research. They're flexible, smart electronics that can grow and repair themselves. Fungal fruit bodies can generate current, which means they can function as memristors. What is a memristor, you might ask? I certainly did. Most of the explanatory articles are way over my head, but luckily I married an electrical engineer, so I tried to get him to explain their significance to me. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, hobbyists electrical engineers can't buy one. They seem pretty new? There's a bunch of debate about whether they're a "fundamental" component of electronics or not, which doesn't matter to me very much, but what _does_ matter is that they've got the capacity for memory. Fungi can be used for biological circuits, including the sorts of Bloolean circuits modern computers need to function. They not only sense light and pressure, their electric potential changes in response to those stimulus. Basically, [fungi can be used as components in electrical analog computers](https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=57502), which is why the organidroid in _Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats_ looks like it was made out of mushrooms and frog bits.