Why We Aren't All Things ("The Thing" prequel)

[Junghalli]

I wrote a prequel fic to John Carpenter's The Thing once but didn't think it turned out well, encountering this article inspired me to try a second take on it.

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“Please, kill us…”

There is Joy and Sorrow, and there is a horror. The horror is a mass of limbs, without symmetry, like five or six people fused without care by a bored child of a god. It does not seem to have any head or face. It clings to Sorrowjoy’s back like an overgrown child, violating her mothercomb with wet red tendrils. I wonder if it feels like some terrible child, eating its own auntmother in communion with her.

We do it together, Sister and I. Sister raises and aims the burner and adjusts the focus and frequency. She always had the steadier hand, and the cooler head under pressure. I pull the trigger. We share the action to share the guilt.

Sorrowjoy shrieks as they are cooked alive. The horror … makes a sound. It is not a sound a person would make, even a person in terrible pain. Its mass is shifting, perhaps trying to form strong fast tendrils to pull us into its embrace, or some sort of bone cannon, or some other weapon. Or perhaps it is trying to pull itself apart, into pieces that can climb away to safety. Other things have done those things when cornered.

We keep the burner on the horror and what once Sorrowjoy until there is nothing left but burned matter, Sister and I. Sorrowjoy stops screaming first; the horror outlives her. Of course it would; these things are tough. We thought we had killed the Loudsilent thing when we burned it, but it was only sleeping…

A mercy for Sorowjoy, I suppose, that people are not as tough as things.

We never gave them a name besides things or the enemy. Stillness said that was appropriate. Stillness, who spent the last days of his life afraid of being alone, because the thing that ate Loudsilent impaled him with a spear of bone that exploded from the center of its body, and destroyed half his brain, and in doing so killed his brother. Stillness, who we found in his nest with what was left of his brain flash-boiled because he’d turned his burner on his own head at maximum power and focus. Maybe a thing came to finish him and he killed himself so it couldn’t use his memories. Maybe he just couldn’t take the silence of empty rooms; the silence of brotherlessness.

Brightlight gestures for us to move forward. None of us say anything. It is too painful to talk. We know what to do without having to talk about it.

Sister and I leave bombs wired to motion and pressure sensors at the doors of the climbing tubes leading to the control center, close the doors and lock them down, physically remove the motors, weld them shut. Brightlight helps us remove pieces of pipes and machinery, brace them against the doors, weld them to the frames.

We climb into the control center and Brightlight puts out a hand for my last bombs and the detonator. I give them to them. They put them in their proper places. One to destroy the physical motor of the door. The rest but one to collapse the climbing tubes leading to the control center. The final one, the most powerful, wired to motion and pressure sensors, to give a nasty surprise to anyone – anything – that tries to clear away the wreckage or gets near the control center’s door.

Brightlight finishes their task and climbs into the door, hangs in the doorway, looking down at the detonator in their hand.

From far down the climbing tube I hear the sound of an explosion, and a noise that sounds like something in pain, something that is not a person. Then there is a sound like something much too big and heavy to be a person slamming itself against one of the doors, again and again and again. There is a sound like metal being bent by some enormous force.

A voice speaks out of the air, cool notes like cut glass sculptures in sound; Ignorantknower’s voice. No, Ignorant’s voice now; I have killed her sister, smashed her sister’s heart with a club and ordered her distributed back-ups to perform pointless calculations until they cooked themselves. Ignorant is saying that one of the doors of the control room climbing tubes has been damaged.

Something very strong is battering its way through that door.

Brightlight is hanging in the control center doorway, looking down at the detonator they are holding.

The door will not close while a person is in the way.

I hear the muffled sound of more explosions, more noises that sound like they come from something in pain that is not a person. A second slamming of something powerful against metal joins the first, like a second drum joining the first at a concert.

Ignorant tells us that a second climbing tube door has been damaged.

A moment later Ignorant tells us that somebody is taking a cutting torch to a third climbing tube door.

I wonder if the thing holding that cutting torch still looks like a person. Why bother now? But then it must take energy to change, and perhaps why bother…

There is a loud and awful sound and Ignorant warns us of a free-floating debris hazard in one of the control center access climbing tubes. Some of the things we braced against one of the doors being knocked away, I suppose. I hope…

How big of a hole will that thing need to enter? It sounds very big, but maybe it can turn itself into something long and slim…

I urgently remind Brightlight that the door won’t close with them in it, and they need to move out of the doorway.

Brightlight looks up at me and says nothing.

Something twitches behind Brightlight’s head in a way that does not look right.

It can’t be. We were alone with them for … how long now? Why not attack us before? Why let us plant bombs, destroy machinery, lock down and weld and barricade doors? Why help us? Why not…

I was carrying bombs. I was carrying bombs and the detonator. It didn’t dare. But now…

No, no, I am only imagining it, I cannot…Not because perhaps…

Sister raises the burner in our hands and pulls the trigger and Brightlight screams and shrivels and turns black, and then Sister fires the underslung pellet gun and Brightlight’s fingers disintegrate into floating ash like burned twigs and what’s left of them is pushed into the climbing tube by the force of the impact and now the door can close and all I can do is shriek.

She always did much better than me under pressure.

While I am trapped under the weight of our deed, she is detonating the bombs to collapse the climbing tubes to the control center and jamming the biomechanical tubes of the pilot interface into our mothercomb. It hurts a little. It always does. The Oldest and Motherless made the mothercomb for children, not for machines. We were never meant to be pregnant with spacecraft.

A child on your back is not supposed to be bigger than you. A child on your back is not supposed to see gamma rays and taste the solar wind. A child on your back is not supposed to have a rocket for arms and a bound sun for a heart. A child on your back is supposed to be a small and dependent thing that its auntmother carries, not ten thousand tons of nanocomposite that they are buried within. It is an inversion; it does not feel right.

Ignorantknower shudders violently. Communing with her, we know what has happened: an emergency jettisoning of the engine section, despite our best efforts to make that impossible. The engine section will explode, but the landing section – the crew section – will be far away and survive. The landing section is falling into the gravity well of the third planet of this alien star system – the one we know to have abundant life – and its own main engine is destroyed.

The main engine is destroyed, but the secondaries are coming back on line. They are being fixed. We made efforts to ruin them, but clearly it was not enough. They are being fixed, and they will allow a controlled landing. They will allow a controlled landing on a world full of biomass to absorb, assimilate, overtake, consume.

What will those things do, with the resources of a world?

Sister draws my attention to something in the vision of Ignorantknower. Pictures from the surface of the planet. Tottering things like black sticks that walk. They have hands, and in those hands they carry made things. On the terminator, a group of them sit on a rock, touching a skull of one of their own kind, passing it from one to another. It feels like a reverent ritual. Whorls like the spiral of a galaxy have been carved into the skull.

Siblings who share a body communicate in things that are not half words; they share thought and feeling, and thought and feeling is not half word. Sister and I do not talk to each other; we send each other tapestries of word and feeling and image and sound, woven together. Sister tells me “They are people,” and I know the silent argument worth ten thousand words behind that.

Sister draws my attention to the southern region of the planet, and to environmental data. It is a living world, but it would not be a livable one to our sort of people. Its atmosphere is poisonous to us and thin, so thin it cannot effectively retain and redistribute warmth, terrible temperature variations…

…Vast ice deserts in the polar regions because of this…

Our enemy can survive being frozen, can sleep away killing cold and wait for warmth …but in killing cold it must sleep. It cannot move. It cannot harm.

Sister has already prepared a landing plan; down to the southern ice desert, and burn up all remaining fuel in doing so. Ignorantknower will crash hard – maybe not hard enough to destroy it, which is very unfortunate, but putting it in the middle of that great ice desert should do. If we cannot destroy our enemy, we can force it to sleep the sleep of ages. With luck, it will decay to unviability before it has opportunity to awaken. It must suffer the slow poisoning of background radiation damage, just as we do when we sleep away the long crossings of the interstellar void. Even its tissues must only be able to take so much damage. Sister thinks that in the center of the southern ice desert it may stay entombed for hundreds of thousands of years easily before the slow movement of the ice carries it down to the sea, perhaps in some regions millions of years until the climate changes and the ice desert thaws. Perhaps that will be enough… And such great masses of ice are hard on things trapped in them for so long, it may be crushed, shredded, that may help…

We input the landing plan – the crash plan, really, we do our best to make it as hard on poor Ignorantknower as possible, but she is tough, and her shell may survive anyway – and hard-lock it in, and command Ignorant to commit suicide, to shut down her cooling system and cook herself with useless busy thoughts.

We watch her die. I wonder if she is grateful for dying in communion with us. We killed her other half, the way Stillness’s other half was killed; we left her alone inside herself, the way Stillness was alone inside himself at the end. At least this way she did not die in that terrible loneliness.

Ridiculous, surely. Computers do not have our feelings. I am only projecting what I would feel onto her, perhaps the way people long ago projected what they felt onto the forest and saw gods. But… I am glad she died on our back, and not all alone.

We are in communion only with Ignorant’s bones now; what simple automatic back-ups we did not destroy in our attempt to destroy Ignorantknower. They are enough to let us watch Ignorantknower’s engine section explode far behind us; the explosion that would have killed us if not for the efforts of our enemy. I wonder if the walking stick people on the planet can see it in their night sky, and if so what they make of it. The birth of a god, perhaps, or the death of one.

The planet grows larger and larger in the vision of Ignorantknower’s automatic sensors. It does not look much like the world we came from. The continents are too brown, too barren. I am glad of this.

Sister thinks perhaps we will be reborn here, as walking stick people; it is so much closer than our home system, after all. I wish I could believe the way she believes, in the little gods, in the Oldest and Motherless, in the great journey of souls. I make an effort to believe because death frightens me. She simply believes.

We wonder what it will be like to be one of the walking stick people. They are awkward, tottering things, it is a wonder they do not constantly fall. Perhaps they do. Then, we are awkward things too. Perhaps people are always awkward things. People are inherently awkward, I suppose; every other animal knows what to be when it is born, we have to be told and tell. Perhaps it is fitting that such awkward things always have awkward bodies.

They walk everywhere. We never walked. We always climbed. Our first ancestors lived in the branches of the forest that covered all land on the world we came from, and they climbed everywhere. When we turned forests into orchards we lived in the branches of the orchards and built our cities there, and we climbed everywhere. Now most of us live in space, in cities without gravity, and we climb everywhere.

Sister wishes we could warn them. I do too. Being curious comes with being a person. They may build ships someday, and find the ice desert, and be curious about it. They may find what’s left of Ignorantknower, and be curious about it. They may find our enemy, sleeping the sleep of ages, and be curious about it, and make the same mistakes we did. Sister tells me the ice desert can entombs our enemy for hundreds of thousands of years at least and it is separated from the warm lands by oceans, but how long before the walking stick people learn to build craft that can cross an ocean?

Ignorantknower is almost biting atmosphere now, and there is only one thing left to do. Sister pulls a cutter out of our utility belt. She tells me she will do it; she always had the steadier hand, and the stronger nerves. A short period of oxygen deprivation and there should be nothing left in our brain for our enemy except biomass.

When we were in training Bright and Light used to tell us the secret jokes at the expense of our teachers they made to each other on the privacy of their shared body. Did Bright or Light die alone in his body with the thing? No, that will not happen to either of us!

We take turns repeating the prayer to the Oldest and Motherless to let us be born into the same body again. Do the walking stick people share their bodies, like we do? I hope so. What would people who were all alone in their bodies, like Stillness after the enemy killed his brother, be like?

We finish our prayer, and Sister raises the cutter. I wonder if it will hurt badly. Sister thinks it will probably hurt, but only for a short time. She offers to put me to sleep with a hemisphere-specific ultrasound first, to let me sleep through our shared death, but no, I will certainly not ask her to face the darkness alone!

So Sister cuts our neck-tube with the cutter, and it does hurt but it will be over soon, and we watch the white ice desert rush toward us as we wait to bleed to death together.

Perhaps it is not such a bad fate, really. How many people will be able to tell the Oldest and Motherless that they saved a world when they face her at the end of time?

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The mortal remains of our viewpoint character and her sister, as they might appear if removed from their resting place.

[madd0ct0r]

very intetresting. what suggested the dual conciousness to you?

[Junghalli]

very intetresting. what suggested the dual conciousness to you?

The idea just kind of came to me, really, and the rest flowed from there.

[Starglider]

Good short story.

[LadyTevar]

Fantastic job. I loved the idea behind the aliens, and I'd actually like to see more of these beings.