The Institute for Psychogametous Life emerged from the afterlife of the Novy Mir mission. Launched in 2152 under the Astro-Erotics Initiative, the Novy Mir was a semi-organic vessel built to harvest alien sensations in the Gamma Serpentis quadrant. It vanished soon after arrival. Seventeen years later, a small capsule was retrieved from the Arctic Ocean. Within it were a series of botanical renderings by the mission’s pilot, Zoetica Ebb. The drawings were composed in an unidentified psychoactive fluid that was later found to contain dormant parasitic colonies. Trace material now designated Sample Δ MC-7 had hitchhiked in the capsule and was present as residue within the archive itself. This material is now actively contained and monitored within Lab C at the Institute.

The recovered documents eventually became known as Alien Botany. When first reproduced on Earth, the images began to propagate and evolve. Viewers reported vivid after-images, involuntary motor responses, and an overwhelming urge to recreate the forms by hand. What had been assumed to be a field document revealed itself to be a living system transmitting through human cognition.

In the decades that followed, the archive’s influence spread through both public fascination and scientific alarm. Scholars named the phenomenon psychogametous reproduction, the symbolic germination of alien life through human hosts. To study this process, the Institute for Psychogametous Life was founded as a hybrid research and containment facility combining sensory experimentation, physiological monitoring, and participatory observation.

Today, the Institute houses the original Alien Botany archive along with the residual MC-7 material within its Sensory Pollinarium, a controlled ecosystem designed to simulate the environmental and perceptual conditions of the alien biosphere described by Ebb. Within this living laboratory, the archive continues to interact with researchers and visitors alike, generating new symbolic transmissions and adaptive forms of consciousness.

Through the Sensory Pollinarium, the IPGL safeguards the Alien Botany materials while advancing its central mandate: to study, preserve, and engage with the emergence of psychogametous life on Earth.