GrownHome™ – Custom Living Homesteads: Confirmation of Your Order

Congratulations on the purchase of your new home (embryo)! Even as you read this brief a HouseSeed will have been set on a ballistic trajectory, weather permitting, through our beautiful red sky to the location of your choice (or suitable alternative). In some rare cases we may deviate the initial homestead site of your choosing to an equally fantastic one based on our own proprietary databases. This ensures good access to local methane vents and water supplies and ensures that it will be a carefully calculated minimum safe distance from any reported semi-sentient mining equipment gone rogue, without threatening other company interests or negotiations. You will join many satisfied GrownHome™ owners who have chosen to trade the hustle and bustle of the city for simple, luxurious country living. A true “home away from dome”, your new house will be completely self-sufficient from the day you first move in. Gone are the days when the dream of a Martian homestead to call your own meant relying on a weekly (expensive) supply of essential goods by rocket delivery from the city.

Tired of ordering from a paltry catalog of choices between nondescript, lyophilised nutrient dust on the one hand and greenhouse veggies that cost an arm and a leg? Nobody wants to pay those prices, even if you’ve got a whole vat of extra limbs at your local BodyBank™, and now you won’t have to. After a short (and mostly harmless) calibration period your house will adjust to perfectly match your specific caloric and micronutrient needs, producing a range of pleasing colours and flavours of fruiting bulbs. Your GrownHome™’s homegrown food is a hardy engineered derivative of Terran mushrooms, algae, and other organisms and it’s so good we’ve taken to calling it MarsManna (patents pending). We think in time that you’ll feel the same way, and the mild calming psychoactive compounds produced in the bulbs guarantees you will!

You would think that surely this food-production process must be expensive, and well, you’d be dead wrong*! Every bite of food you eat will first be processed on site by regenerative processes in your new home’s cloaca. Smart and efficient! Clean, fresh drinking water is similarly maintained in a closed loop system. After an initial searching phase in which a network of fine rhizomorphic fibrils starting at your home site permeates the nearby countryside, scavenging all available moisture sources, your house will iteratively re-cleanse your water supply ad infinitum.

The initial growth phase of your abode is powered from orbit by our network of orbiting microwave lasers, but as the house begins to undergo differentiation we follow a precise schedule of decreasing power designed by our expert engineers. This generates selective pressure on the population of cells making up the outer walls of your home to produce pigments more suited to harvesting energy from the dim sunlight and ionising radiation environment of Mars. Your new house’s unique skin (as no two houses evolve to produce exactly the same pigment repertoire) generates energy while protecting you and your family from the deadly exterior environment. A dense layer of Mars dust (locally sourced and absolutely sustainable) is collected by architectural mucous membranes during the embryonic growth phase, providing additional radiation protection. Native bacteria in the dust undergo a rapid metabolic burst when they encounter the nutrient-rich membrane, producing excellent insulation in the form of a carbon dioxide bubble matrix, before the house envelops this with a thick protective skin. The bacteria expire naturally and harmlessly as a result of their own production of reactive oxygen species, leaving no clean-up and posing absolutely no health risk**!

After the orbiting power source is removed (and allocated to other GrownHome™ homesteads- you won’t be all alone out there forever!) patterned waves of epigenetic control molecules permeate the floorplan. This drives segmentation and specialisation of your home sweet home. No boring spherical hermit huts here! Unlike our small-dreaming competitors, Mars Hermit Huts Ltd., all GrownHome™ houses develop at least three distinct sections with no limit to the creature comforts therein.

Each house is unique, but depending on the developmental regime you selected you can expect to come home to a fine kitchen, cozy living room, and a classy bar. Your new home even produces its own ethanol as a metabolic byproduct***!

When your home reaches its final form, a genetically engineered Brilliant Actually alIve Neural Network (BRAINN) will awaken to control life support, airlocks, and communications interfaces to the outside world. You won’t even have to bother with the hassle of a thermostat because your house is smart enough to select the perfect temperature for you. Rapidly learning from your natural speech patterns, your house will soon be able to tell you about your schedule, the news and weather, and as an added bonus, tell jokes! It may feel awkward at first talking to an empty house but before long your new home will talk back! Note that your home’s nervous system is classified as a Type III non-sentient software under Article 7 of the Turing convention. If your home begins to display any of the following traits, please contact your local authorities: sarcasm, angst, possessiveness, jealousy, depression megalomania, malice, introspection, vanity, or free-will.

Welcome to the GrownHome™ family. We just know you’ll have no complaints!

*Figuratively, in most cases.

**If you notice green or black spores or experience internal bleeding of any kind contact your physician for immediate sterilisation.

***For a subscription to one or more of our palliative mixture juices or fusel detox drops, visit our website.