Message In A Bottle (John Carpenter's "The Thing" fanfic)

[Junghalli]

A short one-shot fic of mine inspired by me thinking that it was a remarkable coincidence that the ship the Thing was on happened to crash in one of the few parts of Earth that wouldn’t have resulted in the Thing Thingifying the entire biosphere back in the Stone Age.

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READ ME RIGHT NOW! THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF ALL LIFE MAY DEPEND ON WHAT YOU DO RIGHT NOW!

IF YOU’RE READING THIS YOU’RE IN EXTREME DANGER!

THERE IS A LIFEFORM OR REMAINS IN THIS SHIP CLASSIFICATION RAGNAROK TOTALITY INFINITY, EXISTENTIAL DANGER TO OUR CIVILIZATION AND ALL LIFE IN YOUR FUTURE LIGHT CONE!

READ THIS BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING AROUND THE CRASH SITE BEFORE YOU READ THIS!

I left this message in case anybody ever finds this ship. If you’re reading it it means you found the ship, and that means YOU’RE DEALING WITH A LIFEFORM RAGNAROK TOTALITY INFINITY! THAT MEANS EXISTENTIAL DANGER TO EVERYTHING IN YOUR FUTURE LIGHT CONE! I CANNOT OVERSTATE THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE DANGER YOU ARE DEALING WITH RIGHT NOW!

I can only hope that you found this before one or more of you was taken.

This is a record of what happened, so you’ll know what you’re dealing with.

I don’t know how much you know. Even before we left our assigned course – before it started - it’d been hundreds of years since the last time we got a message from home system. We don’t know what happened. Could have been a tracking error, we could have lost funding, or – we didn’t like to talk about the other possibility. The last message we got was routine. We knew what we were getting into when we signed up for a long range survey mission. If you’re reading this I have to assume you can read our characters, but I don’t know what people back home have become by now, if there are any left. It’s been more than 30,000 years since we got that last message now, as of when I’m writing this, and who knows how long this message has been lying on this planet by now.

It started when we were surveying Planet 514,317-2. NOBODY MUST EVER LAND ON THAT PLANET! I’ve left maps showing its position in our planet’s zodiac and relative to the nearest pulsars and pictures of it and other bodies in its solar system so you can recognize it. If I were you I’d sterilize that planet! Deflecting an asteroid into it isn’t enough, unless it’s a REALLY BIG one! You want to wipe out every bacteria, everything alive! I’m not sure how thoroughly you’d have to trash the place, but as long as there’s even a possibility that one microbe is still alive down there that place should be considered an existential threat to everything in its future light cone! And the same goes for the other planets in that system – we know life can be transported on meteors!

The bio people were excited about the life on that planet. Said it was like nothing they’d ever seen. Not really a biosphere in the way we think of it at all. More like one big stew of biomass, almost like one big organism covering the entire planet. They couldn’t wait to get a nice good close look at it. Couldn’t wait to go down.

We were careful, of course. The teams we sent down kept the shuttle and the base camp sealed, the air filtered, they only went out in suits, everything was sterilized before we let it come into contact with the external environment. But that wasn’t enough.

We think maybe it started when something attacked one of the bio people. Tore up his suit pretty good. We kept him in quarantine for a while, he seemed OK, so we let him go back to his work after a while.

It wasn’t until after they’d come back when we figured out what happened. One of our computer people noticed somebody had altered the medical information on everybody who’d been down to the planet. We still had the samples – the med-lab’s under constant automatic surveillance with the recordings all going into a secure black box and they hadn’t gotten to enough people that they could safely get to that yet, and it’s standard procedure to keep medical samples around in cases like this in case something crops up and we want to take a good look at it later. They couldn’t just dispose of them.

Thank God for that. And thank God they hadn’t gotten to all the medical staff yet, and we approached one who hadn’t been contaminated yet. Thank God that so much of the ship is under automatic surveillance – that almost certainly slowed them down a lot. Those bits of luck may have saved who knows how many people by now.

We think what happened is when that biologist was attacked the biomass stew made him part of itself, absorbed him. And then he went on to absorb everyone else on the planet. And by the time we realized what was happening they’d started doing the same to the people that had stayed on the ship. We think it must have gone for key people first – by the time we realized what was happening it’d gotten the command staff and a lot of engineering and med-lab. When it came to a fight we still had most of the crew.

They took control and engineering, but when we saw it was going their way in engineering we scuttled the main drive section. We lost though. We didn’t manage to destroy the magsail. We made three attempts to regain the engineering section before they did their slingshot, but they drove us back each time.

They’d locked us out of all the ship’s systems and pulled the wires, but we managed to hack in through a suit radio. We might have been able to do some minor sabotage, but not enough to do anything more than inconvenience them, and it would have let them know that we still had computer access, and they could easily have cut us off if they’d known we were tapping in. We decided being able to see out of the ship’s instruments and spy on them was more valuable, so we didn’t do anything but look.

We could have guessed they wouldn’t make for home system. The magsail would let them get past solar system escape velocity but it was slow – a trip all the way home would have gone way past the ship’s design lifespan. Too much risk of arriving in a ship too broken down to slow down. They were headed for a much nearer system. It’d never been surveyed – we knew the atmosphere compositions, masses, and temperatures of the planets, and that the third planet had oxygen and vegetation, but not much else.

It’d be a long time to hold out, but we had a good defensive position. We’d rigged up lots of booby traps and decompressed the sections between us and the rest of the ship. We had weapons and ammo and we managed to rig up more. We had an auxiliary reactor for power and fabricators for spare parts and food and air and anti-aging drugs so we could last the trip. The hard part would be staying sane. We rigged up a system that could keep us sedated but healthy and wake us up fast and we set up watches.

We made a big raid. We trashed their food fabricators and some critical spare parts fabricators they needed to build new ones. They had emergency rations and lots of biomass in the science samples, but they’d need to sleep too, to ration their energy. It evened us out. Without that, I don’t think we could have survived.

We kept fighting all through the trip. It lasted longer than any war on Ground. 30,000 years of fighting, just us few hundred. Low-intensity, of course, the raids and battles spaced out over many years, them rationing their energy, us rationing our sanity. Often I think many of us would have liked to kill ourselves, or make some big assault on them – basically suicide disguised as a gamble – but we restrained ourselves because we knew weren’t much next to what was at stake. If they win our whole species might be done for, and then who knows how many more. Thanks to us, they aren’t trapped by gravity and the inverse square law anymore. We knew we had to wait for a better opportunity - when we might actually do something more than kill ourselves.

They’re not going for the asteroid belt. They’re going for the third planet. I can guess why. I can see green on it. It’s got life and they want to eat it, just like they ate our crew. It’s a whole planet of biomass for them to eat.

There’s another thing. The ship’s telescopes can see campfires in the night hemisphere. There are people there. We’ve even picked up some pictures of them.

I suppose it shouldn’t matter. We already knew there were aliens out there. Our probes have found dozens of inhabited planets as of the last time we heard from home system, all just stone age hunters, but still people. And our radio telescopes can hear magsails braking, way past the hard data frontier – or at least it was past the hard data frontier the last time I checked, that hello we sent them should have had time for a lot of round trips by now. We know it’s more than just us at stake here.

Still, this makes it more real. They’re the weirdest looking aliens we’ve found yet. They’d be funny-looking – the way they’re built like telephone poles – if they weren’t so ridiculously ugly. Still, they’re people. I was about to say I can’t imagine what God must have been thinking when He created such a thing – but then I remembered that if He exists He probably created that thing on 514,317-2 too, and next to that thing these creatures are practically our brothers. And that thing wants to eat them, just like it ate my colleagues and my friends.

We’re going to stage an assault on control and engineering. We’ll try to get the ship back, and to send a message telling home system what happened, but we don’t rate our chances of actually being able to do either of those things very high. But there’s one thing we’ve got a decent shot at. We’re getting close to the planet now, and if we can get control of the ship for just a little while we might be able to divert it to the planet’s southernmost continent. It’s covered with ice and nothing lives there. We know those things freeze in the cold. It’ll survive, but it’ll be stuck in the middle of a lot of cold nothing, at least until the climate changes or something disturbs it. Hopefully it’ll have degraded into unviability by then, or whoever finds it will find this message first and be able to understand it.

I wish we could do better, but it’s probably the best we can do, the closest we can come to undoing the damage we did when we gave that thing a spaceship. We've been waiting a long time for an opportunity like this to come along.

I’m going to leave this in a place where I hope it can be easily found.

If you find it, remember what we did here. And let’s hope it’s worth it.

Sweet Root Eater
Crewmember 217
UGS Nightswimmer – Designation Number 7
17/7/37,271

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NOTES

I realize the prose is somewhat ... inelegant at times, but it is supposed to be a message composed by somebody who wasn't a professional or aspiring writer and cared more about getting information across and drawing attention than stylistic elegance.

The more culturally specific references should be assumed to be alien terms translated into human equivalents. For instance, the term "Ragnarok" should be viewed as a substitution for an alien word with a vaguely similar meaning, and not a literal translation. I thought that using unfamiliar terms in the same places would detract from rather than enhance the story to most readers.

[Bakustra]

I liked it. It seems to drift between a warning message and a personal reminiscence towards the end, but I assume that was intentional. The prose is a little clunky at points, but not really in ways that a rewrite wouldn't fix- no deep problems.

[Simon_Jester]

Nice, though this does contradict the original Campbell version in which The Thing just happened to crash in Antarctica millions of years ago. This could still have been the reason it happened, though, but there wouldn't have been any near-human life on the planet at the time.

[Junghalli]

Nice, though this does contradict the original Campbell version in which The Thing just happened to crash in Antarctica millions of years ago. This could still have been the reason it happened, though, but there wouldn't have been any near-human life on the planet at the time.

I was going by the movie in which the line was (unless my memory is playing tricks on me) that the ice the ship was buried in was "100,000 years old, at least." I haven't read the original story.

About the prose: I actually deliberately made it somewhat rough as I figured, given what the text is supposed to be in-universe, it realistically probably would be. Perhaps I should have sacrificed verisimilitude to style and not the other way around.

[Ford Prefect]

I have to admit I laughed at 'RAGNAROK TOTAL INFINITY'.

[Junghalli]

I have to admit I laughed at 'RAGNAROK TOTAL INFINITY'.

Lol, I actually gave some thought as to coming up to a code that would fit logically into a system for classifying risks:

Ragnarok = potential civilization-ender
Total = potential extinction event (as opposed to simply civilization-ending)
Infinity = danger to everything in the future light cone, not a (cosmologically) local event

[Simon_Jester]

For this purpose, deliberate roughness is OK, I think. For publication it would be problematic, but that's different.