My Sci-Fi Prototyping short story, “D-World,” is included in the anthology “Kagamino kuni no ikimono wo tsukuru” [Creating Creatures in the Mirror World: Stepping into the World of Mirror Image Life Science through SF], to be published on August 31, 2025. This collection was supervised by FUJIWARA Kei, edited by OSAWA Hirotaka and HASEGAWA Ai, and features contributions from authors AKANE Akari, ISUKARI Yuba, SENA Hideaki, MUGIHARA Ryo, and myself.

This story is part of a mirror-image lifeform Sci-Fi Prototyping project conducted at Keio University, centered around the synthetic biology researcher FUJIWARA Kei. I participated as one of five authors who contributed to this project.

Story of “D-World”

In the space colony D-World, a place dedicated to creating novel tastes and scents from mirror-image lifeforms, a researcher stepped into the “forbidden zone.”

Now you can read “Alice’s Guide to the D-World.”

Scientific and Ethical Context

Life as we know it is fundamentally composed of L-amino acids. D-amino acids are substances with a structure that is a mirror image of L-amino acids. If a full set of D-amino acids equivalent to their L-counterparts were available, it should be possible for “mirror-image life,” based primarily on D-amino acids, to exist. Furthermore, for L-based life, D-substances may have similar chemical properties but can differ in smell and taste. At the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno, on the third basement floor of the Global Gallery, there is an exhibit where you can compare the scents of menthol and its mirror-image substance.

Some researchers consider the study of mirror-image bacteria composed of mirror-image substances to be dangerous, and they published a statement to that effect in the journal Science on December 12, 2024. The participants in this project reviewed this statement and wrote these science fiction stories while also consulting with the expert opinion of Fujiwara.