Mirrored life

Sometimes the Cheshire Cat, Alan Moore, and Hank Green smash together. Could a magical fumble create a new apocalypse, that’s at the fringes of modern science?

Life on Earth is made of proteins, which are made of sugars, and these could theoretically be either the type we have, or a second type which is a mirror image of the ones that actually exists. This difference is called “chirality” which is Greek for “handedness”. All life on earth all has the same chirality, and for a while when people were looking for life on Mars, one of the things that they thought would demonstrate that it had clearly developed independently would be if it had the opposite chirality. Why life on earth is homochiral, and why it has the particular option it has, rather than the alternative, is way beyond what we need here for gaming purposes.

A long time ago I was reading Alan Moore’s League Extraordinary of Gentlemen: Black Dossier. I have only ever stolen one idea from it for Ars Magica, which I don’t think anyone has ever used, which is that in some covenants people burst into song for no reason. Alan Moore says that Alice Liddell, of Alice in Wonderland fame, died of starvation after her second adventure, because the molecules in her body were isomers of what they should have been, so she could not absorb nutrients from regular food. He published that in 2007.

In 2024 34 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, published an open letter in Science magazine called “Confronting risks of mirror life”. Their key concern is that humans can now synthesize proteins, including reverse chirality proteins, and are making moves toward creating artificial life. There’s the potential to create complete organisms which are made of proteins with reversed chirality. They note that life made with reverse chirality might not be recognized, attacked, or digested by those with standard chirality. This life might still consume carbon and oxygen so they are concerned that even mirrored life didn’t become a plague, that ignored immune systems and standard chiral bacteriophages, it might nonetheless lock a huge amount of resources out of the biosphere.

In Mythic Europe a magus might create mirrored life due to a lab failure, such that player characters need to eliminate it entirely with Perdo magic. Alternatively a magus with mirrors or reflections as a sigil might always create complex mirror life and not notice, because the creatures reach their duration and vanish before they starve. When they try to make a long-lasting animals and their creatures keep starving, they might seek help to explain the odd limit on their spellcasting. A character returning from Twilight might have been reversed like Alice, and need to create inverted food to allow them to survive.

HG Wells has a character who has a similar thing happen to him, and can prove it to others because all of the scars on his body are on the reverse of the side his associates recall. This character, Gottfried Plattner is thrown into a Limbo-like afterlife by an explosive green powder that seems native to this other place. He returns in a similarly explosive way. This is presumably a form of vis.

If antichiral life is not digested normally, this might lead to a local folk saint. One of the easily detected miracles used to determine potential sainthood is incorruptibility. A dead body that doesn’t decay may become a relic, even if it is the body of a magus, because God cheats and makes good the lack on fake relics. If the body has Hermetic makings, like a Criamon magus as an example, what can the players do to keep the order’s secrets? Can you steal a corpse that’s now a relic? Can you change its appearance? Can you reverse its chirality back to normal so that it decays? Has the veneration drawn a faerie or demon that has been supporting the folk cult with magical powers that are misidentified as miracles?