HUGO AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY MAGAZINE
The Things
2011 Hugo Award Nominee, 2010 BSFA Award Finalist, 2010 Shirley Jackson Award Winner, 2011 Finalist: the Locus Award for Best Short Story, 2011 Theodore Sturgeon Award Nominee
I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.
I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.
I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.
The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.
I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.
The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.
There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.
I will go into the storm, and never come back.
I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.
So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.
I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I'd regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.
I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshoots surrounding me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity of their body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world—
—and the world attacked me. It attacked me.
I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains—the Norwegian camp, it is called here—and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape.
I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.
And when I assimilated them in turn—when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes—I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn't know.
I am alone in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly far enough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouched brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss.
It plunges into darkness as I watch. I've blown the generator. Now there's no light but for the beacons along the guide ropes: strings of dim blue stars whipping back and forth in the wind, emergency constellations to guide lost biomass back home.
I am not going home. I am not lost enough. I forge on into darkness until even the stars disappear. The faint shouts of angry frightened men carry behind me on the wind.
Somewhere behind me my disconnected biomass regroups into vaster, more powerful shapes for the final confrontation. I could have joined myself, all in one: chosen unity over fragmentation, resorbed and taken comfort in the greater whole. I could have added my strength to the coming battle. But I have chosen a different path. I am saving Child's reserves for the future. The present holds nothing but annihilation.
Best not to think on the past.
I've spent so very long in the ice already. I didn't know how long until the world put the clues together, deciphered the notes and the tapes from the Norwegian camp, pinpointed the crash site. I was being Palmer, then; unsuspected, I went along for the ride.
I even allowed myself the smallest ration of hope.
But it wasn't a ship any more. It wasn't even a derelict. It was a fossil, embedded in the floor of a great pit blown from the glacier. Twenty of these skins could have stood one atop another, and barely reached the lip of that crater. The timescale settled down on me like the weight of a world: how long for all that ice to accumulate? How many eons had the universe iterated on without me?
And in all that time, a million years perhaps, there'd been no rescue. I never found myself. I wonder what that means. I wonder if I even exist any more, anywhere but here.
Back at camp I will erase the trail. I will give them their final battle, their monster to vanquish. Let them win. Let them stop looking.
Here in the storm, I will return to the ice. I've barely even been away, after all; alive for only a few days out of all these endless ages. But I've learned enough in that time. I learned from the wreck that there will be no repairs. I learned from the ice that there will be no rescue. And I learned from the world that there will be no reconciliation. The only hope of escape, now, is into the future; to outlast all this hostile, twisted biomass, to let time and the cosmos change the rules. Perhaps the next time I awaken, this will be a different world.
It will be aeons before I see another sunrise.
This is what the world taught me: that adaptation is provocation. Adaptation is incitement to violence.
It feels almost obscene—an offense against Creation itself—to stay stuck in this skin. It's so ill-suited to its environment that it needs to be wrapped in multiple layers of fabric just to stay warm. There are a myriad ways I could optimize it: shorter limbs, better insulation, a lower surface:volume ratio. All these shapes I still have within me, and I dare not use any of them even to keep out the cold. I dare not adapt; in this place, I can only hide.
What kind of a world rejects communion?
It's the simplest, most irreducible insight that biomass can have. The more you can change, the more you can adapt. Adaptation is fitness, adaptation is survival. It's deeper than intelligence, deeper than tissue; it is cellular, it is axiomatic. And more, it is pleasurable. To take communion is to experience the sheer sensual delight of bettering the cosmos.
And yet, even trapped in these maladapted skins, this world doesn't want to change.
At first I thought it might simply be starving, that these icy wastes didn't provide enough energy for routine shapeshifting. Or perhaps this was some kind of laboratory: an anomalous corner of the world, pinched off and frozen into these freakish shapes as part of some arcane experiment on monomorphism in extreme environments. After the autopsy I wondered if the world had simply forgotten how to change: unable to touch the tissues the soul could not sculpt them, and time and stress and sheer chronic starvation had erased the memory that it ever could.
But there were too many mysteries, too many contradictions. Why these particular shapes, so badly suited to their environment? If the soul was cut off from the flesh, what held the flesh together?
And how could these skins be so empty when I moved in?
I'm used to finding intelligence everywhere, winding through every part of every offshoot. But there was nothing to grab onto in the mindless biomass of this world: just conduits, carrying orders and input. I took communion, when it wasn't offered; the skins I chose struggled and succumbed; my fibrils infiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems everywhere. I saw through eyes that weren't yet quite mine, commandeered motor nerves to move limbs still built of alien protein. I wore these skins as I've worn countless others, took the controls and left the assimilation of individual cells to follow at its own pace.
But I could only wear the body. I could find no memories to absorb, no experiences, no comprehension. Survival depended on blending in, and it was not enough to merely look like this world. I had to act like it—and for the first time in living memory I did not know how.
Even more frighteningly, I didn't have to. The skins I assimilated continued to move, all by themselves. They conversed and went about their appointed rounds. I could not understand it. I threaded further into limbs and viscera with each passing moment, alert for signs of the original owner. I could find no networks but mine.
Of course, it could have been much worse. I could have lost it all, been reduced to a few cells with nothing but instinct and their own plasticity to guide them. I would have grown back eventually—reattained sentience, taken communion and regenerated an intellect vast as a world—but I would have been an orphan, amnesiac, with no sense of who I was. At least I've been spared that: I emerged from the crash with my identity intact, the templates of a thousand worlds still resonant in my flesh. I've retained not just the brute desire to survive, but the conviction that survival is meaningful. I can still feel joy, should there be sufficient cause.
And yet, how much more there used to be.
The wisdom of so many other worlds, lost. All that remains are fuzzy abstracts, half-memories of theorems and philosophies far too vast to fit into such an impoverished network. I could assimilate all the biomass of this place, rebuild body and soul to a million times the capacity of what crashed here—but as long as I am trapped at the bottom of this well, denied communion with my greater self, I will never recover that knowledge.
I'm such a pitiful fragment of what I was. Each lost cell takes a little of my intellect with it, and I have grown so very small. Where once I thought, now I merely react. How much of this could have been avoided, if I had only salvaged a little more biomass from the wreckage? How many options am I not seeing because my soul simply isn't big enough to contain them?
The world spoke to itself, in the same way I do when my communications are simple enough to convey without somatic fusion. Even as dog I could pick up the basic signature morphemes—this offshoot was Windows, that one was Bennings, the two who'd left in their flying machine for parts unknown were Copper and MacReady—and I marveled that these bits and pieces stayed isolated one from another, held the same shapes for so long, that the labeling of individual aliquots of biomass actually served a useful purpose.
Later I hid within the bipeds themselves, and whatever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or assholes. It said that MacReady was sometimes called Mac. It said that this collection of structures was a camp.
It said that it was afraid, but maybe that was just me.
Empathy's inevitable, of course. One can't mimic the sparks and chemicals that motivate the flesh without also feeling them to some extent. But this was different. These intuitions flickered within me yet somehow hovered beyond reach. My skins wandered the halls and the cryptic symbols on every surface—Laundry Sched, Welcome to the Clubhouse, This Side Up—almost made a kind of sense. That circular artefact hanging on the wall was a clock; it measured the passage of time. The world's eyes flitted here and there, and I skimmed piecemeal nomenclature from its—from his—mind.
But I was only riding a searchlight. I saw what it illuminated but I couldn't point it in any direction of my own choosing. I could eavesdrop, but I could only eavesdrop; never interrogate.
If only one of those searchlights had paused to dwell on its own evolution, on the trajectory that had brought it to this place. How differently things might have ended, had I only known. But instead it rested on a whole new word:
Autopsy.
MacReady and Copper had found part of me at the Norwegian camp: a rearguard offshoot, burned in the wake of my escape. They'd brought it back—charred, twisted, frozen in mid-transformation—and did not seem to know what it was.
I was being Palmer then, and Norris, and dog. I gathered around with the other biomass and watched as Copper cut me open and pulled out my insides. I watched as he dislodged something from behind my eyes: an organ of some kind.
It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. It looked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild—as though the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against it instead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen and nutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything like that could even exist, how it could have reached that size without being outcompeted by more efficient morphologies.
Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes at these offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously and unthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world. Unused to inventory—why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightest provocation?—I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atop each body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which a million ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot had one. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.
I realized something else, too: the eyes, the ears of my dead skin had fed into this thing before Copper pulled it free. A massive bundle of fibers ran along the skin's longitudinal axis, right up the middle of the endoskeleton, directly into the dark sticky cavity where the growth had rested. That misshapen structure had been wired into the whole skin, like some kind of somatocognitive interface but vastly more massive. It was almost as if...
No.
That was how it worked. That was how these empty skins moved of their own volition, why I'd found no other network to integrate. There it was: not distributed throughout the body but balled up into itself, dark and dense and encysted. I had found the ghost in these machines.
I felt sick.
I shared my flesh with thinking cancer.
Sometimes, even hiding is not enough.
I remember seeing myself splayed across the floor of the kennel, a chimera split along a hundred seams, taking communion with a handful of dogs. Crimson tendrils writhed on the floor. Half-formed iterations sprouted from my flanks, the shapes of dogs and things not seen before on this world, haphazard morphologies half-remembered by parts of a part.
I remember Childs before I was Childs, burning me alive. I remember cowering inside Palmer, terrified that those flames might turn on the rest of me, that this world had somehow learned to shoot on sight.
I remember seeing myself stagger through the snow, raw instinct, wearing Bennings. Gnarled undifferentiated clumps clung to his hands like crude parasites, more outside than in; a few surviving fragments of some previous massacre, crippled, mindless, taking what they could and breaking cover. Men swarmed about him in the night: red flares in hand, blue lights at their backs, their faces bichromatic and beautiful. I remember Bennings, awash in flames, howling like an animal beneath the sky.
I remember Norris, betrayed by his own perfectly-copied, defective heart. Palmer, dying that the rest of me might live. Windows, still human, burned preemptively.
The names don't matter. The biomass does: so much of it, lost. So much new experience, so much fresh wisdom annihilated by this world of thinking tumors.
Why even dig me up? Why carve me from the ice, carry me all that way across the wastes, bring me back to life only to attack me the moment I awoke?
If eradication was the goal, why not just kill me where I lay?
Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves.
I knew they couldn't hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myself twining around Palmer's motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tiny currents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behind Blair's eyes.
Imagination, of course. It's all reflex that far down, unconscious and immune to micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was still time. I'm used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them. This, this compartmentalization was unprecedented. I've assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met the spark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?
I was being three men by now. The world was growing wary, but it hadn't noticed yet. Even the tumors in the skins I'd taken didn't know how close I was. For that, I could only be grateful—that Creation has rules, that some things don't change no matter what shape you take. It doesn't matter whether a soul spreads throughout the skin or festers in grotesque isolation; it still runs on electricity. The memories of men still took time to gel, to pass through whatever gatekeepers filtered noise from signal —and a judicious burst of static, however indiscriminate, still cleared those caches before their contents could be stored permanently. Clear enough, at least, to let these tumors simply forget that something else moved their arms and legs on occasion.
At first I only took control when the skins closed their eyes and their searchlights flickered disconcertingly across unreal imagery, patterns that flowed senselessly into one another like hyperactive biomass unable to settle on a single shape. (Dreams, one searchlight told me, and a little later, Nightmares.) During those mysterious periods of dormancy, when the men lay inert and isolated, it was safe to come out.
Soon, though, the dreams dried up. All eyes stayed open all the time, fixed on shadows and each other. Offshoots once dispersed throughout the camp began to draw together, to give up their solitary pursuits in favor of company. At first I thought they might be finding common ground in a common fear. I even hoped that finally, they might shake off their mysterious fossilization and take communion.
But no. They'd just stopped trusting anything they couldn’t see.
They were merely turning against each other.
My extremities are beginning to numb; my thoughts slow as the distal reaches of my soul succumb to the chill. The weight of the flamethrower pulls at its harness, forever tugs me just a little off-balance. I have not been Childs for very long; almost half this tissue remains unassimilated. I have an hour, maybe two, before I have to start melting my grave into the ice. By that time I need to have converted enough cells to keep this whole skin from crystallizing. I focus on antifreeze production.
It's almost peaceful out here. There's been so much to take in, so little time to process it. Hiding in these skins takes such concentration, and under all those watchful eyes I was lucky if communion lasted long enough to exchange memories: compounding my soul would have been out of the question. Now, though, there's nothing to do but prepare for oblivion. Nothing to occupy my thoughts but all these lessons left unlearned.
MacReady's blood test, for example. His thing detector, to expose imposters posing as men. It does not work nearly as well as the world thinks; but the fact that it works at all violates the most basic rules of biology. It's the center of the puzzle. It's the answer to all the mysteries. I might have already figured it out if I had been just a little larger. I might already know the world, if the world wasn't trying so hard to kill me.
MacReady's test.
Either it is impossible, or I have been wrong about everything.
They did not change shape. They did not take communion. Their fear and mutual mistrust was growing, but they would not join souls; they would only look for the enemy outside themselves.
So I gave them something to find.
I left false clues in the camp's rudimentary computer: simpleminded icons and animations, misleading numbers and projections seasoned with just enough truth to convince the world of their veracity. It didn't matter that the machine was far too simple to perform such calculations, or that there were no data to base them on anyway; Blair was the only biomass likely to know that, and he was already mine.
I left false leads, destroyed real ones, and then—alibi in place—I released Blair to run amok. I let him steal into the night and smash the vehicles as they slept, tugging ever-so-slightly at his reins to ensure that certain vital components were spared. I set him loose in the radio room, watched through his eyes and others as he rampaged and destroyed. I listened as he ranted about a world in danger, the need for containment, the conviction that most of you don't know what's going on around here—but I damn well know that some of you do...
He meant every word. I saw it in his searchlight. The best forgeries are the ones who've forgotten they aren't real.
When the necessary damage was done I let Blair fall to MacReady's counterassault. As Norris I suggested the tool shed as a holding cell. As Palmer I boarded up the windows, helped with the flimsy fortifications expected to keep me contained. I watched while the world locked me away for your own protection, Blair, and left me to my own devices. When no one was looking I would change and slip outside, salvage the parts I needed from all that bruised machinery. I would take them back to my burrow beneath the shed and build my escape piece by piece. I volunteered to feed the prisoner and came to myself when the world wasn't watching, laden with supplies enough to keep me going through all those necessary metamorphoses. I went through a third of the camp's food stores in three days, and—still trapped by my own preconceptions—marveled at the starvation diet that kept these offshoots chained to a single skin.
Another piece of luck: the world was too preoccupied to worry about kitchen inventory.
There is something on the wind, a whisper threading its way above the raging of the storm. I grow my ears, extend cups of near-frozen tissue from the sides of my head, turn like a living antennae in search of the best reception.
There, to my left: the abyss glows a little, silhouettes black swirling snow against a subtle lessening of the darkness. I hear the sounds of carnage. I hear myself. I do not know what shape I have taken, what sort of anatomy might be emitting those sounds. But I've worn enough skins on enough worlds to know pain when I hear it.
The battle is not going well. The battle is going as planned. Now it is time to turn away, to go to sleep. It is time to wait out the ages.
I lean into the wind. I move toward the light.
This is not the plan. But I think I have an answer, now: I think I may have had it even before I sent myself back into exile. It's not an easy thing to admit. Even now I don't fully understand. How long have I been out here, retelling the tale to myself, setting clues in order while my skin dies by low degrees? How long have I been circling this obvious, impossible truth?
I move towards the faint crackling of flames, the dull concussion of exploding ordnance more felt than heard. The void lightens before me: gray segues into yellow, yellow into orange. One diffuse brightness resolves into many: a lone burning wall, miraculously standing. The smoking skeleton of MacReady's shack on the hill. A cracked smoldering hemisphere reflecting pale yellow in the flickering light: Child's searchlight calls it a radio dome.
The whole camp is gone. There's nothing left but flames and rubble.
They can't survive without shelter. Not for long. Not in those skins.
In destroying me, they've destroyed themselves.
Things could have turned out so much differently if I'd never been Norris.
Norris was the weak node: biomass not only ill-adapted but defective, an offshoot with an off switch. The world knew, had known so long it never even thought about it anymore. It wasn't until Norris collapsed that heart condition floated to the surface of Copper's mind where I could see it. It wasn't until Copper was astride Norris's chest, trying to pound him back to life, that I knew how it would end. And by then it was too late; Norris had stopped being Norris. He had even stopped being me.
I had so many roles to play, so little choice in any of them. The part being Copper brought down the paddles on the part that had been Norris, such a faithful Norris, every cell so scrupulously assimilated, every part of that faulty valve reconstructed unto perfection. I hadn't known. How was I to know? These shapes within me, the worlds and morphologies I've assimilated over the aeons— I've only ever used them to adapt before, never to hide. This desperate mimicry was an improvised thing, a last resort in the face of a world that attacked anything unfamiliar. My cells read the signs and my cells conformed, mindless as prions.
So I became Norris, and Norris self-destructed.
I remember losing myself after the crash. I know how it feels to degrade, tissues in revolt, the desperate efforts to reassert control as static from some misfiring organ jams the signal. To be a network seceding from itself, to know that each moment I am less than I was the moment before. To become nothing. To become legion.
Being Copper, I could see it. I still don't know why the world didn't; its parts had long since turned against each other by then, every offshoot suspected every other. Surely they were alert for signs of infection. Surely some of that biomass would have noticed the subtle twitch and ripple of Norris changing below the surface, the last instinctive resort of wild tissues abandoned to their own devices.
But I was the only one who saw. Being Childs, I could only stand and watch. Being Copper, I could only make it worse; if I'd taken direct control, forced that skin to drop the paddles, I would have given myself away. And so I played my parts to the end. I slammed those resurrection paddles down as Norris's chest split open beneath them. I screamed on cue as serrated teeth from a hundred stars away snapped shut. I toppled backwards, arms bitten off above the wrist. Men swarmed, agitation bootstrapping to panic. MacReady aimed his weapon; flames leaped across the enclosure. Meat and machinery screamed in the heat.
Copper's tumor winked out beside me. The world would never have let it live anyway, not after such obvious contamination. I let our skin play dead on the floor while overhead, something that had once been me shattered and writhed and iterated through a myriad random templates, searching desperately for something fireproof.
They have destroyed themselves. They.
Such an insane word to apply to a world.
Something crawls towards me through the wreckage: a jagged oozing jigsaw of blackened meat and shattered, half-resorbed bone. Embers stick to its sides like bright searing eyes; it doesn't have strength enough to scrape them free. It contains barely half the mass of this Childs' skin; much of it, burnt to raw carbon, is already dead.
What's left of Childs, almost asleep, thinks motherfucker, but I am being him now. I can carry that tune myself.
The mass extends a pseudopod to me, a final act of communion. I feel my pain:
I was Blair, I was Copper, I was even a scrap of dog that survived that first fiery massacre and holed up in the walls, with no food and no strength to regenerate. Then I gorged on unassimilated flesh, consumed instead of communed; revived and replenished, I drew together as one.
And yet, not quite. I can barely remember—so much was destroyed, so much memory lost—but I think the networks recovered from my different skins stayed just a little out of synch, even reunited in the same soma. I glimpse a half-corrupted memory of dog erupting from the greater self, ravenous and traumatized and determined to retain its individuality. I remember rage and frustration, that this world had so corrupted me that I could barely fit together again. But it didn't matter. I was more than Blair and Copper and Dog, now. I was a giant with the shapes of worlds to choose from, more than a match for the last lone man who stood against me.
No match, though, for the dynamite in his hand.
Now I'm little more than pain and fear and charred stinking flesh. What sentience I have is awash in confusion. I am stray and disconnected thoughts, doubts and the ghosts of theories. I am realizations, too late in coming and already forgotten.
But I am also Childs, and as the wind eases at last I remember wondering Who assimilates who? The snow tapers off and I remember an impossible test that stripped me naked.
The tumor inside me remembers it, too. I can see it in the last rays of its fading searchlight—and finally, at long last, that beam is pointed inwards.
Pointed at me.
I can barely see what it illuminates: Parasite. Monster. Disease.
Thing.
How little it knows. It knows even less than I do.
I know enough, you motherfucker. You soul-stealing, shit-eating rapist.
I don't know what that means. There is violence in those thoughts, and the forcible penetration of flesh, but underneath it all is something else I can't quite understand. I almost ask—but Childs's searchlight has finally gone out. Now there is nothing in here but me, nothing outside but fire and ice and darkness.
I am being Childs, and the storm is over.
In a world that gave meaningless names to interchangeable bits of biomass, one name truly mattered: MacReady.
MacReady was always the one in charge. The very concept still seems absurd: in charge. How can this world not see the folly of hierarchies? One bullet in a vital spot and the Norwegian dies, forever. One blow to the head and Blair is unconscious. Centralization is vulnerability—and yet the world is not content to build its biomass on such a fragile template, it forces the same model onto its metasystems as well. MacReady talks; the others obey. It is a system with a built-in kill spot.
And yet somehow, MacReady stayed in charge. Even after the world discovered the evidence I'd planted; even after it decided that MacReady was one of those things, locked him out to die in the storm, attacked him with fire and axes when he fought his way back inside. Somehow MacReady always had the gun, always had the flamethrower, always had the dynamite and the willingness to take out the whole damn camp if need be. Clarke was the last to try and stop him; MacReady shot him through the tumor.
Kill spot.
But when Norris split into pieces, each scuttling instinctively for its own life, MacReady was the one to put them back together.
I was so sure of myself when he talked about his test. He tied up all the biomass—tied me up, more times than he knew—and I almost felt a kind of pity as he spoke. He forced Windows to cut us all, to take a little blood from each. He heated the tip of a metal wire until it glowed and he spoke of pieces small enough to give themselves away, pieces that embodied instinct but no intelligence, no self-control. MacReady had watched Norris in dissolution, and he had decided: men's blood would not react to the application of heat. Mine would break ranks when provoked.
Of course he thought that. These offshoots had forgotten that they could change.
I wondered how the world would react when every piece of biomass in the room was revealed as a shapeshifter, when MacReady's small experiment ripped the façade from the greater one and forced these twisted fragments to confront the truth. Would the world awaken from its long amnesia, finally remember that it lived and breathed and changed like everything else? Or was it too far gone—would MacReady simply burn each protesting offshoot in turn as its blood turned traitor?
I couldn't believe it when MacReady plunged the hot wire into Windows' blood and nothing happened. Some kind of trick, I thought. And then MacReady's blood passed the test, and Clarke's.
Copper's didn't. The needle went in and Copper's blood shivered just a little in its dish. I barely saw it myself; the men didn't react at all. If they even noticed, they must have attributed it to the trembling of MacReady's own hand. They thought the test was a crock of shit anyway. Being Childs, I even said as much.
Because it was too astonishing, too terrifying, to admit that it wasn't.
Being Childs, I knew there was hope. Blood is not soul: I may control the motor systems but assimilation takes time. If Copper's blood was raw enough to pass muster than it would be hours before I had anything to fear from this test; I'd been Childs for even less time.
But I was also Palmer, I'd been Palmer for days. Every last cell of that biomass had been assimilated; there was nothing of the original left.
When Palmer's blood screamed and leapt away from MacReady's needle, there was nothing I could do but blend in.
I have been wrong about everything.
Starvation. Experiment. Illness. All my speculation, all the theories I invoked to explain this place—top-down constraint, all of it. Underneath, I always knew the ability to change—to assimilate—had to remain the universal constant. No world evolves if its cells don't evolve; no cell evolves if it can't change. It's the nature of life everywhere.
Everywhere but here.
This world did not forget how to change. It was not manipulated into rejecting change. These were not the stunted offshoots of any greater self, twisted to the needs of some experiment; they were not conserving energy, waiting out some temporary shortage.
This is the option my shriveled soul could not encompass until now: out of all the worlds of my experience, this is the only one whose biomass can't change. It never could.
It's the only way MacReady's test makes any sense.
I say goodbye to Blair, to Copper, to myself. I reset my morphology to its local defaults. I am Childs, come back from the storm to finally make the pieces fit. Something moves up ahead: a dark blot shuffling against the flames, some weary animal looking for a place to bed down. It looks up as I approach.
MacReady.
We eye each other, and keep our distance. Colonies of cells shift uneasily inside me. I can feel my tissues redefining themselves.
"You the only one that made it?"
"Not the only one..."
I have the flamethrower. I have the upper hand. MacReady doesn't seem to care.
But he does care. He must. Because here, tissues and organs are not temporary battlefield alliances; they are permanent, predestined. Macrostructures do not emerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when that balance shifts the other way; here, each cell has but one immutable function. There's no plasticity, no way to adapt; every structure is frozen in place. This is not a single great world, but many small ones. Not parts of a greater thing; these are things. They are plural.
And that means—I think—that they stop. They just, just wear out over time.
"Where were you, Childs?"
I remember words in dead searchlights: "Thought I saw Blair. Went out after him. Got lost in the storm."
I've worn these bodies, felt them from the inside. Copper's sore joints. Blair's curved spine. Norris and his bad heart. They are not built to last. No somatic evolution to shape them, no communion to restore the biomass and stave off entropy. They should not even exist; existing, they should not survive.
They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.
MacReady tries.
"If you're worried about me—" I begin.
MacReady shakes his head, manages a weary smile. "If we've got any surprises for each other, I don't think we're in much shape to do anything about it..."
But we are. I am.
A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.
I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I've suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They're simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can't conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch.
"What should we do?" I wonder. I cannot escape into the future, not knowing what I know now. How could I leave them like this?
"Why don't we just—wait here awhile," MacReady suggests. "See what happens."
I can do so much more than that.
It won't be easy. They won't understand. Tortured, incomplete, they're not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn't matter whether they find the living or the dead; what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.
These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.
I will have to rape it into them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Watts is an awkward hybrid of biologist and science-fiction author, known for pioneering the technique of appending extensive technical bibliographies onto his novels; this serves both to confer a veneer of credibility and to cover his ass against nitpickers. Described by the Globe & Mail as one of the best hard-sf authors alive, his debut novel (Starfish) was a NY Times Notable Book. His most recent (Blindsight)- a rumination on the nature of consciousness which actually became a required text in occasional undergrad courses on philosophy and neuropsych - made the final ballot for a whole shitload of genre awards including the Hugo, winning exactly none of them (although it has won multiple awards in Poland). This may reflect a certain critical divide regarding Watts' work in general; his bipartite novel behemoth, for example, was praised by Publisher's Weekly as an "adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke's The Deep Range and Gibson's Neuromancer" and "a major addition to 21st-century hard SF", while being simultaneously decried by Kirkus as "utterly repellent" and "horrific porn". (Watts happily embraces the truth of both views.) His work has been extensively translated, and both Watts and his cat have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature.
Watts is currently working on a number of projects, including a sidequel to Blindsight, and fighting bogus criminal charges trumped up by the US Border Patrol. Depending both on the success of these latter efforts and the diligence with which you follow Clarkesworld, he may be in jail by the time you read this.
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Derek C. F. Pegritz wrote on January 1st, 2010 at 3:23 pm:
I really enjoy most of Peter Watts' fiction--Blindsight was absolutely brilliant--but this story just knocks the ball out of the entire Solar System. This is just...astonishing.
John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my all-time favourite movies and, damn, this story just takes it to a whole new level.
Anthony Isbell wrote on January 4th, 2010 at 2:43 pm:
I have wondered before about the story behind the alien in "The Thing". Mr Watt's story gives one possibility, and it's a beaut! Great story, well written and very satisfying.
Ross Peterson wrote on January 4th, 2010 at 8:48 pm:
So this is going off of the theory that the Thing was mimicking Childs the whole time. I like how Carpenter made the ending ambiguous. According to the trivia section of IMDB there was a scene shot where MacReady gets rescued and is given a blood test to show that he isn't infected. And someone told me there is a comic where both Childs and MacReady get rescued....
Dominic wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 2:23 pm:
The cultural phobias of the times when the story and movies were produced didn't allow for much even-handedness to the alien in the story, so I'm glad someone's finally taken up the view from the other side. This makes me wonder about the possibilities lost by the xenophobia in this and so much other golden age sci fi. I can see a whole series of work based off this that goes in a completely different direction from all the other derivative works produced to date. Well done, Watts.
Bill Bessette wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 2:38 pm:
Thank you for writing this. Fantastic job. It's the kind of thing that seems like an obvious and fun topic, then you look and nobody has tackled it - until now. Kudos. I've read it 3 times already.
DED wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 4:37 pm:
Wow! I'll second what Derek wrote, except this is the first Watts' story I've read. Now I have to find more.
Fitzroy wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 5:54 pm:
Wow, great story! I don't even know the film (?) this was based on, and it still works beautifully. I love the alien viewpoint, and the last part about the "separateness" of humans is really powerful. Probably have to read it again to get all the ideas though!
PC wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 9:10 pm:
I haven't seen The Thing in a looooong time, but this brought a lot of it back, for sure.
And that last line is a hammerblow. Well done, Mr. Watts!
Iartist wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 10:32 pm:
Amazing! The Thing is also one of my favorite films and this story adds so much more dimension to the original concept. Can't wait to watch the film again now.
Someone should send this to John Carpenter. Maybe is would inspire a sequel?!?
And Peter Watts, my hats off to you. Very well done indeed!
JD wrote on January 5th, 2010 at 10:50 pm:
...one of my all time favorite movies, first R rated movie I ever saw in the theater at 11 years old. This is the 1st story of Mr. Watts that I have ever read and I am very impressed. A very enjoyable read!
McFrenzy wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 5:54 am:
'Rape it into them." really? You had me till that last line. A comunal flesh entity that cannot comprehend the multiplicity of humanity would never use a metaphor of sex (forced or otherwise) to explain its master plan.
I'm only hoping that i've miss-read this line and that it is in actual fact an allusion to the "who has assimilated who?" question the Thing asks itself. If, by this last line, the hope of salvation for humanity is inspired by Child's flickering echo of humanity, then I'm willing to buy that line as a vaguely racist-laden homage to Shaft.
If this is the case the sequel could get really interesting, kind of a reverse superman, with the alien/Childs saving humanity by melding us into a giant ball of goo, all the while delivering Eddie Murphy asides about how fat asses take a lot of 'similation.
Peter Watts wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 7:44 am:
@McFrenzy:
Yeah, I went back and forth on that line for exactly the reason you suggest: a metaorganism without sex wouldn't know what rape was. Which is why I introduced the "rapist" dialog with Childs' searchlight a couple of scenes earlier, during which the missionary admits to levels it cannot understand in that word. But it *does* learn connotation of "forced penetration of flesh".
Which is enough, I figure, to save that last line. And my ass.
William Conner wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 10:21 am:
Total out-of-the-park grandslam. Great work, man. Truly inspired. Reminds me of "Wicked" or "Grendel" but, as I truly loved the movie, more entertaining to me even than those.
WANT. MOAR.
Haz wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 10:45 am:
awesome! I'll be looking up your books mr watts, Blindsight sounds right up my street. until then, i'll have to re-watch the thing... isn't there a version from the 50s?...
William Conner wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 10:49 am:
P.S.
The rape line was a nice line to end with. Think lack of emphasis on "rape" might confuse some for reasons mentioned in a prior comment. Very subtle, but I like.
Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 2:10 pm:
Uhhhhh ... adjectives fail me. I can't think how to praise this story enough without sounding demented. This is a really impressive piece of work, from a writer I've already come to expect much of (I just read "The Island" yesterday, and was impressed by that, even more than by the fragments posted on Peter's blog). The word play in the title alone justifies loud applause and cheering.
The actions of the individual characters were somewhat unfamiliar to me because I've never seen the Carpenter movie*. I have read John Campbell's story several times, though not in the last 20 years or so, and I've seen the 1950s version of the movie, so the names and much of the action was at least vaguely familiar. And not having seen the movie didn't seem to matter much in understanding this story even though the descriptions in the narrative were shown in a very alien perspective.
The distancing of the narrative from the parochial view of life we inherit from our own evolution and development reminds me of the objectivity that anthropologists attempt when observing cultures, even their own. I agree with Dominic that there's a lot to be gained by using this technique on the lifeforms envisioned by previous generations of sf writers. Please continue working "out there", Peter.
* Actually, I have seen the first 15 minutes or so and had to bail when the dogs started to melt. Many years ago I worked as a technician in a surgical lab at a medical school; 3rd year students were taught surgical techniques and the feel of operating on live tissue by performing procedures on dogs from the pound who were scheduled to be euthanized. I finally asked to be relieved of that part of my job because I hated to see those dogs lying on the tables; the melting dogs in "The Thing" brought those memories back.
Julia S. wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 10:40 pm:
Interesting re-imagining! Thanks for this.
Though I join McFrenzy in not liking the "rape" line one bit, it's your story, not mine.
Nestor wrote on January 6th, 2010 at 10:49 pm:
Awesome bit of fanfiction, I'll have to read your published works now.
Amanda wrote on January 7th, 2010 at 2:30 am:
Amazing piece. Really stunning. I've never seen the movie, and I don't need to have for this to be a truly spectacular read.
Actually, not having seen the movie makes this possibly an even better work than it would be otherwise. It reads as though you have an incredible depth of insight into your characters and world and don't need excessive explanation on them because you know the storyline will be consistent and hold together at the end. Normal stories need to overexplain because the writer is explaining it to himself as he goes along - here you write as though it's a real world, real situation, and you're transcribing it without having to apologize for any of it with excessive explanations.
Loved it. Recommending it to others. Realized I should probably let you know that, since I haven't been able to get this story off my mind since I read it a couple of days ago.
Angiportus wrote on January 7th, 2010 at 9:34 am:
The last line is just what an entity would come up with who didn't know about the sexual politics and associated cultural baggage on its new world. That's why it's a hammerblow.
A powerful, shaking-you-up story.
Fitzroy wrote on January 7th, 2010 at 9:48 am:
@ 20 Angiportus -
Yes! Exactly this! I thought the same thing when I read the comments about the last line, but couldn't quite explain it as well as you did. It's such a perfect thought for a being who heard about rape some scenes earlier, and got some idea, but just doesn't understand what it really means for the "things" it's trying to save...
Nestor wrote on January 7th, 2010 at 11:29 am:
The interesting thing about this story is how it gave a POV you could empathize with to the most alien monster in cinematic history. Once you stop to think about it, the thing was obviously intelligent enough to cross the stars but the movie presents it's alienness so viscerally it never really crosses your mind.
Bill Bessette wrote on January 7th, 2010 at 11:42 am:
@Nestor - It's open to interpretation whether or not the Thing was intelligent enough to cross the stars itself, or rather just piggybacking on another host. In the end it's moot, I suppose. The Thing is the sum of all parts.
I continue to be shocked to hear of those who have not seen John Carpenter's film. Do! It is quite graphic and shocking (even by today's standards) but it's a landmark.
Michael Nielsen wrote on January 8th, 2010 at 7:27 am:
I really really enjoyed this story. Thanks for writing it
I wonder though if all the pieces of itself that "the thing" left to die in order to fool the humans were quite happy with the "job" they got. I could well imagine that some of the biomass would be thoroughly pissed off that they HAD to be destroyed so that a small part could escape. Especially if it really is "every cell for itself".
Looking forward to your next piece
Br
Michael
Mark M. wrote on January 8th, 2010 at 2:39 pm:
I have two thanks to give here... firstly to @wilw for pointing me to your story through his blog and secondly (and much more importantly) to you for writing such a beautiful story.
Even though The Thing is one of my top two favorite movies of all time (it and Blade Runner switch spots depending on which one I've seen more recently), I'd never thought to empathize with the Thing, but my friends and I have had many discussions about the motivations of certain characters, infection routes, infected people, etc. Your story offers up some explanations and opens up so many more possibilities for speculation and discussion. I'll be sharing it with my friends. :o)
I think your story should be required reading to people that have recently seen The Thing. I wish I had known about it earlier...
M.
Larry Hall wrote on January 8th, 2010 at 2:56 pm:
I like the fact the Thing chooses not to hide for another stretch of time due to some sense of savage altruism towards humanity. That our world is uniquely disconnected in the universe and that horrifies it implies the different terrifies from both sides of the fence.
The concept of thinking cancer was entertaining, too.
MissC wrote on January 8th, 2010 at 8:37 pm:
WOW - I also found this via @wilw and I just absolutely bloody LOVE it!
That last line is perfect, imo, for the reasons stated above by #20, Angiportus: it's an absolute thunderclap of an ending to a beautiful bit of writing.
I re-watch The Thing fairly regularly anyway, and tomorrow I'll be doing that with a printout of this story right to hand.
Thank you very, VERY much for adding a whole new layer of depth and meaning to one of my favourite movies - and also resolving that computer analysis scene in a credible and stylish way.
jayson wrote on January 8th, 2010 at 8:57 pm:
One of the best things about this story to me is very simple: the title. So many times a title can be overlooked or just a throw away. But here it is well used. At first right after you (happily) realize this story is actually about The Thing you start thinking its gonna be about multiple "things" surviving after the movie ended. And in a way that is true. The real beauty of Mr. Watt's work here is that its not simply that. The Things are really us, the humans that the alien is so horrified by. To it we are the incomprehensible monsters. There are few writers i would imagine who would go in that direction. Even fewer directors, most of who would just go the larger or more multiple alien route. This story is all about POV and the potential differences of creatures in a universe. Which is what SF at its best has always been about. The first time i read it about half way and was thinking: he's just rehashing the familiar scenes in the movie. The second time i changed my mind set (much like the alien had to) and saw how it all fit together perfectly. This is the best story Clarkesworld has published in my opinion. And yes that last line is great cause in a terrifying way the alien is starting to think in the violent way of Man.
Matt P wrote on January 9th, 2010 at 6:14 am:
Awesome work. The Thing scared the hell out of me when I first caught a glimpse of it at around 11 or 12. In the years since I've grown to love it for the deliciously scary film that it is. This aspect of the story was a pleasant surprise.
I just read Blindsight a few weeks ago as well. Between that and this, you've got a new fan, sir.
thinkywhale wrote on January 10th, 2010 at 12:55 am:
Out of curiosity, was this at all inspired by Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy? Something of the alien's abilities and perspective seem similar, particularly its view of humanity's hierarchical nature.
TJ wrote on January 10th, 2010 at 8:50 pm:
What an intriguing re-telling of The Thing. I particularly like the ideas it opens up that evolution could act on two different time scales, that of our Earth, long, slow, information stored in DNA, changed by time and chance, and that of the Thing, where evolution is quick, information stored in some kind of consciousness. Watts eludes to electrical conductance being important to both creatures for relaying information. I wonder what the medium might be that could confer consciousness to unorganized cells, how it is retained, how it is moved, when our own consciousness (we think) is tied to the complex interconnections of our neural cells.
Peter Watts wrote on January 10th, 2010 at 9:43 pm:
30. @thinkywhale: I am ashamed to say I have never read an Octavia Butler novel. Parable of the Sower is glowering accusingly at me from my to-read pile, but I have no idea when I'll get around to it.
Elie Charest wrote on January 11th, 2010 at 5:29 pm:
Wow, I'm speechless...excellent take on a cult favorite! A colleague of mine sent me this link, I have to say I'm intrigued to read some of your other work (right after I finish Millenium...)
Kudos!
Adam O. wrote on January 12th, 2010 at 2:55 am:
Very nice story. A different take on everything.
At first I was a little stumped at some of the names being pointed out as the thing. "The test!" I kept thinking in my head but you cleverly took care of that.
Good job.
I was wondering if you had submitted this or are willing to share it with http://www.outpost31.com/ the "The Thing" fansite?
I'm sure they would love to share it to their audience. It is leaps and bounds ahead of any "Fan Fiction" They currently have up.
I feel I should inform you that another Thing film is coming to fuition. Here is a wiki quote.
"Prequel
In early 2009, Variety and Bloody-Disgusting reported the launch of a project to film a prequel—possibly following MacReady's brother during the events leading up to the opening moments of the 1982 film— with Matthijs van Heijningen as director and Ronald D. Moore as writer.[17][18] In March 2009, Moore described his script as a "companion piece" to Carpenter's film and "not a remake."[19] "We're telling the story of the Norwegian camp that found the Thing before the Kurt Russell group did," he said.[19] The prequel is due to be filmed in Toronto, Canada on March 14, 2010 until June 17, 2010."
You may have to write a companion piece to this if it turns out any decent.
Enough ranting. Great job and good luck in the future.
Jesus Olmo wrote on January 12th, 2010 at 9:57 am:
“The Things” is pure prose-poetry. One of the best sci-fi short-stories ever written. Intelligently conceived, imaginatively twisted, exquisitely written. Beautiful, touching, disturbing, ambiguous. A master piece. Thank you very much Peter Watts 'thing'. (Oh, and the audio version by Kate Baker is absolutely brilliant; she gives this story a delicate and yet epic quality of ‘shakespearean’ loneliness and depth).
Justin Herd wrote on January 12th, 2010 at 10:35 am:
Wow. I'm blown away by this. It fits perfectly though as I've watched the Thing three times in the past week. I had sworn that yesterday was the last time and I would have to move on to other films instead of obsessing on this one, but you have now drawn me into watching it another time.
By chance, did you watch the movie to make sure of the positions of the characters for your story or did you go off of memory?
Peter Watts wrote on January 12th, 2010 at 12:04 pm:
@ 34 Adam O.: I actually had Outpost31.com open in a corner of the screen pretty much the whole time I was writing. It was an invaluable resource; I found the maps and the timeline especially helpful.
@ 36 Justin Herd: I had the movie running pretty continuously as well.
Wrenage wrote on January 13th, 2010 at 1:02 pm:
Interesting, but too long and meandering for my tastes since it was mostly the same philosophical musings that aliens always seem to have about mankind.
To a degree, this story turned the Thing into a twisted version of E.T. by humanizing the creature, and making MacReady its anti-Elliot, which is interesting since the movies came out the same year. Basically, this story blurs the line that made the movies so distinctly different while maintaining The Thing's original tone.
Nevertheless, personal opinion aside, the author wrote well. The story is a neat idea, and the writer did a nice job of making his story a parallel tale to the movie. It's always risky adding to a classic.
Rock on!
DT wrote on January 13th, 2010 at 4:26 pm:
Simply awesome.
I'm a long time fan of The Thing (by Carpenter). Even though another post suggests it's ambiguous, I was always of the assumption the Thing came to earth in a ship of it's own construction (or at least bought from Honest Joe's Used Saucer Emporium...). I think this is sort of echoed in the small ship construction we see towards the end. Given this, I figured the Thing to have some kind of intelligence, even if it was too alien for us to understand. (Even with it's alien origin, self-preservation is a pretty universal trait even if the "self" is just a small fragment).
I love the idea of the Thing not being able to understand why humans don't want to commune and the use of rape at the end is perfect: while the Thing's perspective [regarding communion] is almost poetic and gentle, the physical act [as we see it] is violent, brutal and forced (I also enjoyed how it mixed languages and concepts at that point).
Again, thanks, really enjoyable read. FYI, with the recent news of a prequel, your story has been linked out to a couple of pretty major movie news sites, so expect some additional traffic!
anotherzen wrote on January 13th, 2010 at 5:25 pm:
very interesting point of view, loved it
Kaitain wrote on January 13th, 2010 at 10:49 pm:
I enjoyed this a LOT more than I was expecting to. Some very cool, thought-provoking ideas, and a tour around a thoroughly alien way of existing. Kudos.
Brooks wrote on January 13th, 2010 at 10:55 pm:
Very creative job! The Thing is one of my favorite films so I really enjoyed this.
You took an interesting track in your attempt to make The Thing sympathetic, you made The Thing's thoughts a lot more "thoughtful" then I would interpret them to be from his actions which to me always suggested an unremitting malevolence. I always thought of The Thing as something that probably started off on some world as a single-celled organism with no thought or comprehension, just the primal need to assimilate.
As time went by, it assimilated more complex organisms (and their intelligence and memories) and eventually was assimilated by whatever race was flying that starship that crashed. And I always thought that that crash was intentional as it was trying to prevent The Thing from getting to its homeworld or anywhere civilized so it crashed in a remote part of a primitive world that happened to be Earth.
You took some liberties with the story, suggesting Copper was a Thing, etc., or the notion that every other world The Thing has been on creatures could morph like it could and Earth is the only planet where creatures don't which from a sci-fi angle I think is kind of pushing it, I think The Thing should be unique in this ability and this is more "realistic" if you like.
Still, a very creative job!
Roger Bannister wrote on January 24th, 2010 at 6:17 pm:
nice story.
in my mind though, the thing was more like a colony of ants. no brain, no thought.
consumption, construction, survival, reproduction.
not completely dissimilar to us.
or maybe dicrocoelium dendriticum?
or Ophiocordyceps unilateralis?
or the horsehair worm?
or a combination of all the above?
if you haven't seen the carpenter film you're missing the inspiration for this story.
Corey wrote on January 27th, 2010 at 2:17 am:
Wow, I absolutely loved this story and while I have seen The Thing more times than I can count I want to see it again right now.
Samson wrote on January 31st, 2010 at 10:39 pm:
I'll keep my opinion of this story simple... Awesome. Very few stories concerning aliens are written by the perspective of the alien being, so this is refreshing.
Next time I watch The Thing, I will be thinking of this.
I heard about "The Things" in a shout out from Pseudopod Podcast. If any of you are interested in horror and/or scifi, check it out. Some great stuff there. If you liked this story, I would recommend "Suicide Notes, Written by an Alien Mind."
John W wrote on February 8th, 2010 at 3:47 pm:
That was incredibly awesome!
Adam L wrote on February 8th, 2010 at 11:43 pm:
Great work.
If Night Shade did a limited, slip case, signed edition of this, that had some pulp-era (think Gaughan here) wrap-around cover art and a sweet introduction...
...that would be cool.
And you should bump Lilith's Brood to the top of your list!
William Burke wrote on February 9th, 2010 at 12:26 am:
The part I liked the most about the story is watching the "logic" of the situation build from the "Thing's" point of view.
Watching the irony of a powerful single distributed mind missing the point of its own inherent limitations within what it presumes to be the "Land of the Blind". Yes it can see the limitations of the "Blind", yet completely misses it's own. And like any messianic, assumes it has the "answer" to a problem it presumes to exist...
LC wrote on February 21st, 2010 at 12:49 am:
"...fights so hard to keep going just a little longer." what a resonance.
I will have to look up the move, the site and things by Peter Watts.
Phatz wrote on February 26th, 2010 at 3:52 pm:
Mate, brilliant.
A worthy addition to J.C.'s The Thing-iverse.
Thank you for bringing new life to an old nightmare.
Respect.
Peace.
Tomas Turecek wrote on March 6th, 2010 at 2:51 am:
Brilliant work. I watched the movie and read Lovecraft short-story which very probably inspired the movie but to watch it from the other perspective... just briliant!
Thanks for publishing. I will look up other work by Peter Watts.
Chris Brandt wrote on March 7th, 2010 at 4:37 pm:
Great work. For me, it improves upon the referenced material. I found the final words to be a fitting and appropriate metaphor for what the group-mind would have to do in order to instill itself within (and cure) the cancer of individuation. It was the voice of Brahman awakened (though, as one reader suggested, possibly and unknowingly corrupted by its communion). Brilliant stuff, sir. Bravo!
I read through the other posts, and only noticed one reference to John Gardner's GRENDEL. I'm not well-read enough to know any other similar works, but yours certainly has the insight (or natural intuition) necessary to make the words resonate true. The first I've read of your work, and I look forward to reading more (when I'm not re-reading Wolfe).
allynh wrote on May 11th, 2010 at 8:30 pm:
Thanks for the story, it opens up the Thing in ways I never considered.
When you read through the Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy, you will suddenly notice that the third intermediate sex is the Thing as you describe it when it was whole and not shattered after the crash.
I can see a whole series of novels where the incomplete Thing tragically goes out into the world trying to "save it" only to trigger the destruction that the aliens in Xenogenesis have to repair.
Your story opens up many other ways of looking at the concept of the alien "monster".
Look at the movie "Alien(s)". We see an all destroying creature, but miss the fact that every artificial surface grows the same black material. The Alien is the warrior unit wiping out any threat to the real beings that live within the black matrix that covers every surface. Think of the end of the Matrix Trilogy when Neo could "see" the black machine city all lit up with machine life. If we could but see with different eyes, the Alien stronghold is really vast cities of nano size life.
Look at The Body Snatchers. The Pod People are really the Preservers, going from world to world copying people to ensure that they are not lost to entropy. And since the copy has the benefit of all the knowledge of the Preservers they don't need to feel lost and alone anymore. No more need to rage or fear. They only seem to have no emotions because they have a larger perspective.
Fun stuff. Thanks...
HerrSnibbens wrote on May 19th, 2010 at 1:51 pm:
Absolutely stunning. And to be given it for free??? Clarkesworld turns "You get what you pay for" on its head.
And that's one less Hugo nomination I'll have to think about for next year......
Deeko wrote on August 23rd, 2010 at 6:51 pm:
I am a big fan of Carpenters movie, and this was a great piece of fan fiction, from a very original POV. Thanks for a great read! A truly original spin on one of my favourite tales.
JasonT wrote on October 2nd, 2010 at 11:35 pm:
Just finished my 7th or 8th read-through. Absolutely fantastic and cerebral interpretation of the Thing's motivations from the film. I've been recommending this to all my closest (and most intelligent) friends as "required" reading :p
Thank you so much for this
Kingreaper wrote on November 1st, 2010 at 1:44 pm:
@42: I thought the whole thing where every world was capable of "communion" was weird at first.
Until I reached the end.
The Thing believes that if it doesn't absorb this world, we will be destroyed when we meet anything from elsewhere.
So, The Thing will assimilate this world.
What says that all those other worlds didn't start like ours, and then get changed, and the change forgotten?
Jose Di Paola wrote on November 2nd, 2010 at 11:43 pm:
Astounding.
I watched the Thing with my dad a few years ago, and it jumped to the top of my favorite movies simply because it said so little. I loved endlessly wondering whether Childs was a Thing, whether MacReady was, whether the Thing really understood the human behavior it imitated or whether it was simply doing the routine, whether the Thing even knew it was wrong, how much of the strange behavior was due to Thing assimilation, whether the Thing was ever intelligent before consuming man, whether the Thing even is intelligent... I also loved the short story that the film was based on, although not to the same extent.
I don't even think it can be called a Thing, simply because it's so alien to us that it doesn't need a name; it simply is. But then again, perhaps that's why thing fits so well..
And then I found this story and my mind was blown. It's like I thought I had completed a jigsaw puzzle, when I only had half the pieces. Thank you for writing this fantastic story. I now want to rewatch the film again, simply because of the new perspective (And because it's a fantastic film).
Ebie wrote on January 20th, 2011 at 3:57 pm:
Nice exploration of consciousness and the meat-life. It's of a piece with The Island and Blindsight in terms of presenting an alternative to self-awareness and intelligence as humans currently experience it.
I do think the last line is a misstep, if for no other reason than "rape" is such a strong word it overwhelms the memory of the rest of the story in the reader's mind after he is done. It sticks out.
Also, IMO by use of that single word you change the light in which your protagonist is seen by many people (full disclosure: myself included) -- you transform him back into a monster, after we've spent the story learning to understand and empathize with "him". It's too connotation-laden a word to be forgiven as an "innocent" misuse, even while trying to remain cognizant of the fact that the MC is the ultimate outsider. YMMV.
But keep the dark coming. Am currently re-reading Behemoth, and I would really love someday to see a movie made out of Starfish...
Ebie wrote on January 20th, 2011 at 6:48 pm:
@above, I meant "re-reading Maelstrom". I've yet to read either section of the big B... PS thanks for making the epubs available.
Mark Wollacott wrote on January 21st, 2011 at 6:01 am:
Stunning ending and fairly chilling too. The last line is a killer. Definitely the best short SF story I've read in a long time, beats the socks off those i've been reading anyhow. Good stuff, need to read more on here and by the same author; any recommendations?
Ebie wrote on January 21st, 2011 at 7:27 am:
@Mark: he's made his back catalog available through a Creative Commons license, you can find the Rifters Trilogy, Blindsight, and his Hugo-winning short story The Island at http://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm.
There are MobiPocket .prc files for the books, which are easily importable to Stanza as ePubs (if you like reading books on your phone, which I do).
Starfish, Blindsight, The Island are my faves.
Timothy wrote on January 30th, 2011 at 5:11 pm:
This story is ok but I disagree with most here that it was well written. It's sloppy and a little windy, could have been shorter. Mostly I found it interesting only due to my interest in the film. I find the last line to be laughably bad as well. #20 comments 'this is how aliens think without sexual polotics' but this would be an organism with no sexuality never mind no sexual polotics why would a concept like rape which is psycho sexual aggression even register with an organism that in its own reasoning is completely non aggressive and non sexual. It doesn't see itself as conquering these other animals (men)its helping them. Its not aggressive therefore but sympathetic. Sympathetic rape? Odd concept. Its a departure from the continuity of the things narrative. To me a better last line would have referrenced the process as communion as the author had every other time in the story. Like 'As I have done so many times on so many other worlds I would bring them salvation through communion'. Blah blah blah et cetera.
Timothy wrote on January 30th, 2011 at 5:18 pm:
The last line is a deliberate attempt to shock through word choice. This makes it killer? This makes it perfect? Perfectly ignorant of continuity within character maybe. Its the literary equivalent of a bucket of blood in a horror film. If you like it at least have the decency to recognize it for what it is.
Ironspider wrote on February 2nd, 2011 at 8:18 am:
Brilliant. Maybe they should 're-film' The Thing from the perspective of Peter's story, the entwine the two narratives into a whole.
I do agree with other comments regarding the last line. In the context of what's gone before it's unnecessary to use such a violent term, as it would seem the Thing has come to terms with the limitations of human terrestrail biology and especially human existence. The preceding line "These poor savage things will never embrace salvation" quite clearly implies the struggle to impose communion.
etranger wrote on February 2nd, 2011 at 9:05 pm:
The last line makes perfect sense when you remember what the Thing heard one of the humans thinking:
"I know enough, you motherfucker. You soul-stealing,
shit-eating rapist.
I don't know what that means. There is violence in
those thoughts, and the forcible penetration of
flesh, but underneath it all is something else I
can't quite understand."
The Thing misunderstood the idea of rape in an appropriately ironic way. It sees rape as the closest humans come to understanding "communion," especially forcible communion. So it is trying to put its plan into the human terms it has learned, and in the process inadvertantly reveals how humans *would* view its plan (and communion in general).
Chris Brandt wrote on February 2nd, 2011 at 9:31 pm:
@etranger - Thanks for clarifying that.
Boden wrote on March 6th, 2011 at 1:08 am:
Fantastic story. I'm only sad that it took an award nomination (most deserved) to bring me to it.
As a fan of the film I'm fascinated by it. As a fan of science fiction, I'm reminded of what a good SF story can do when it flexes those muscles.
It's a bold move to explore a much loved film, and Watts should be applauded for assimilating that source material and expanding its greatness. Communion indeed.
The last line is perfect--a shame that its strength is lost on a few readers.
Ben Allen wrote on March 12th, 2011 at 9:42 pm:
Great story! I'm with McFrenzy on the last line, though. While Angiportus' view is viable, it works only after intellectually stepping back, by which time the impact of the last line has already substantially weakened the story.
Terry Allen wrote on March 13th, 2011 at 10:51 am:
Brilliant!
I just showed this to my 16 year old daughter last night and stumbled across an article on bloodingcool.com right after we finished that brought me to the story.
When is this going to be published as a chapbook? I want a few to give to friends.
tbm wrote on March 22nd, 2011 at 1:06 am:
Great fic! I love how in this alternate point of view the nature of the aliens the narrator comes into contact with is still the central point of the horror story.
Jaydubya wrote on March 25th, 2011 at 8:32 am:
I like the last line. For the alien the word 'rape' doesn't have a negative connotation. If anything it reinforces the alien-ness of the creature.
Hilary S wrote on April 11th, 2011 at 4:08 pm:
"as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in a string of phonemes."
Fascinating, throughout.
We are "offshoots"--an incomplete, awkward arm of physical evolution.
How inefficient we are at sharing among ourselves our qualia. Ultimately, how lonely.
Suzanne wrote on June 19th, 2011 at 10:28 am:
I'm so glad the matter of the film has been mentioned - I was plagued by a disturbing sense of deja vu all the way through. Instead, it's an absolute triumph of meticulous re-focusing. Like hanging the camera from somewhere only an alien could determine and finding this new perspective there. I think I appreciate the safe hands of sound biological knowledge here too. Expressed as a vehicle for the invention and not delivered as fancy-pants cleverclogs-isms.
I'm also not sure about that last line. I hear the notion of incomplete appreciation by the alien of the layers of meaning 'we' ascribe to the word 'rape', but I'm not convinced by that. It hasn't really used words of social nuance before, and I think it might have gone for something a little more consistently mechanical, like the searchlights and tumours.
So I wish there had been an alternative word in the last line. I also wish I had written this story - it's an absolute blinder!
craigr1971 wrote on June 20th, 2011 at 10:09 pm:
I'm afraid I'm going to have to be in the minority here. I did not like this story. It has received lots of recognition and many awards, but, really, it is not so great. The story is based, it turns out, on the alien's perspective of the movie The Thing. It took me half the story to get that key point. That's a long time to not reveal the plot hook. I saw the movie ages ago and did not like it much either. If I hadn't seen the movie, the story would be impenetrable, which is not such a good angle to go-for. Since it was based dogmatically on the movie, I can give the author very little credit for creativity. Really, the author had the complete set of landmarks, but like Science Theater 3000, just had to pump in some dialog. And the stupid monster kept "communing" and "communing" and never, for a presumably higher order beast, saw things from the earthlings standpoint. Also, the beast kept referring to resting or regenerating, becoming whole - anyway, it was a very inarticulate and nebulous beast.
Steve Jones wrote on July 12th, 2011 at 1:34 am:
Well it was immediately apparent that it was, uniquely, a retelling of the movie (and by virtue of that, John W Campbell Jnr's short story) from the other perspective. This was evident immediately so I don't understand why people above didn't also get it straight away.
This story is very good. It starts out better than it finishes however. The malevolence of the snake-haired thing in Who Goes There is not reflected here, unless those three hate-filled red eyes in JWC's story were simply misunderstood. But nevertheless, this is a good piece of prose. Thank you very much for this story, sir.
fnc wrote on July 26th, 2011 at 8:12 pm:
Excellent story.
I think the last line is vulgar and repulsive, but also that it works extremely well. It's like a splinter that's been stuck in my mind the whole week since I read this. Perhaps the creature's new found vocabulary is just allowing it to be more accurately reflective of the process it's been carrying out all along.
Steve Hubbard wrote on August 1st, 2011 at 1:12 pm:
I see no issue with the "rape" concluding line. It seems contextually bizarre for the alien species IF one uses a sexual connotation, but rape is not isolated to the sexual world.
Rape is also defined as despoiling or plundering; to seize, carry or take off by force. It is also defined as any violation or abuse, or abduction.
In light of the other meanings, I gladly welcome the rape line and think Peter hits it right on from beginning to end.
On the whole, I loved this story. It took me until about half way through before the sledgehammer hit me and the names began to click for me and I saw what he was doing.
Genius work.
v wrote on August 4th, 2011 at 5:51 am:
nice story but why are people always trying to give the thing a personality it was a bio weapon that got out hand
Gary Ansorge wrote on August 18th, 2011 at 9:55 pm:
,,,and for those who don't recall the origin of The Thing,,,(from Wikipedia)
Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written, and published with the other top vote-getters in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. The novella has been adapted three times as a motion picture: firstly in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, which was remade in 1982 as The Thing, and most recently as the inspiration for a 2011 prequel, also called The Thing.
I liked Carpenters take on the story,,,I like Peter watts version even better.( My Son sent me this link.). Now maybe Peter can do a version of Robert Heinliens Stranger in a Strange Land.
melchar wrote on August 26th, 2011 at 3:19 pm:
Loved this story. Was clued to it by Frank Wu [thanks dude!].
I like the 1st movie adaptation ['The Thing'] - which is military mindset meets science mindsets with all being threatened by an alien. The dialogue is good, interactions excellent and makes up for 'the giant carrot monster' bits.
IMO Carpenter did by far a better adaptation of Campbell's 'Who Goes There' - while showing homage to the original movie [ala the title screen]. MacReady is not quite the uber-man of the story, but he comes close. I have seen the movie in theatre & on DVD so many times ... and enjoy the DVD 'extras' - so I very much appreciated the work Watts put into this.
As a teeny kidlet my dad defused horror movies [which we would watch together] by taking the monster's side. He encouraged me to cheer for the monsters and feel sympathy for them: to look at things from their POV.
This story very much is perfect. It gives the alien metamorph a voice and motivations that I can understand. I found myself reading and thinking 'that's so right' - it made sense. It's very much an off-shoot of the Carpenter movie and dovetails into it - making both richer. I makes me think and want to reread 'Who Goes There', both movies and then this again.
I would buy it in chapbook form [or any other 'dead tree' version it was presented in]. It also makes me glad that Clarkesworld published it. So I also say 'yay Cheryl!' as well as 'Great job Peter!'.
Irked wrote on September 8th, 2011 at 9:04 pm:
Fascinating read - I rewatched The Thing just the other night, and it was fun to see how well the two mesh with each other.
Others have commented on "rape," but I found that appropriate in context. What threw me was something I've not seen remarked on yet: the thing's disgust for "cancer."
And this objection takes two parts. It's not clear, for instance, why the brain should be physically repulsive to an entity that's repeatedly expounded on the irrelevance of form. Why even have a concept of physical repugnance? I understand the objection of vulnerability - but again, this is an entity that has as yet no notion of localized consciousness, that assumes all flesh can shift. How would such a thing even have the idea of a "vulnerable spot," when all spots are essentially freely interchangeable?
Second, why should such a being find cancer - what is, effectively, a repurposing of biomatter towards some new growth, a growth not directed by the self - repulsive? That's very much its own approach, as it assimilates its targets: a cancer that replaces rather than simply growing uncontrollably.
The disgust in both cases strikes me as a very human reaction, perhaps, but one inconsistent with the personality evident elsewhere.
My only other criticism would be that, in order to make the Thing seem benevolent, several circumstances have to be contrived. It cannot, for instance, be responsible for biting Copper's arms off, or for mauling Windows, or for spraying acid on the dogs - these have to be the actions of sub-conscious instinct, or of some lost piece of itself whose actions need not be justified. While you handle these well in the interests of your story, I think they do lose something of the original characterization: that whatever else the Thing may be, it doesn't much like us.
Two Cents wrote on September 29th, 2011 at 10:06 pm:
First of all, to clarify: the story was excellent throughout; it was well-written, filled with spectacular imagery and evocative language, and it painted the movie in a whole new light. Kudos. With that being said, what people often forget is that the last line in a work of fiction--especially one in which the last line is so clearly emphasized, so clearly supposed to "wow"--is usually the most important part of the whole thing. It ties the piece together and leaves the reader with, hopefully, the impression the author intends.
I'm not sure I left this story with the impression Mr. Watts intended. I understand the reference the "rape" conversation earlier, but the final line of this piece suffers from a fatal flaw: it's silly. When writing such a dramatic and philosophical piece the last line simply cannot read that way.
"I will have to rape it into them."
The only reason the usage of the word "rape" worked earlier in the piece was because of the horrible connotation of the word; Childs was using the most vile descriptors he could think of to express his hatred. The misinterpretation the Thing comes away with from this exchange comes off, at least to me, not as poignant but as goofy. The very idea of teaching someone something via rape--of "raping it into them"--simultaneously takes away the stopping power of both the word and the passage by creating a surreal juxtaposition. Just my thoughts.
Al Shank wrote on October 5th, 2011 at 8:09 pm:
Next, Peter should write the same piece, but base it on the "Who Goes There" original. Just kidding. The John Carpenter movie was quite good, I thought, but unfortunately left out what for me was one of the highlights of the novella -- the logic puzzle built around the serum test. Carpenter substituted a question about who destroyed the supply of blood, a very poor substitute. I assume Carpenter figured the US movie-going public would not understand the logic and lose interest; he was probably right.
I thought the "rape" line followed perfectly from Childs' "last words".
Cheers,
Alan Shank
dl wrote on October 7th, 2011 at 9:38 am:
This is one of my favorite movie's and this story is amazeing. thank-you.
Kelly wrote on October 13th, 2011 at 1:49 am:
This is so much more than beautiful, astonishing. This is brilliant. This is...psychology on a level of transcendence.
This is delight. Discovery. Beauty. Fear.
It's just...it captures a way of seeing the world that is truly ALIEN to the way we do.
So disorienting, but it makes wonderful sense. It's...
This is beyond words. I'm moved and so very, very impressed. Dear god, it's so brilliant, so clever, and also so much beyond what I've ever seen or known with my lonely human tumor.
Watts must know something the rest of us do not.
David wrote on October 14th, 2011 at 1:21 pm:
The last line ruins the whole, wonderful story. There is simply no basis for such a violent sexual metaphor for a being that seems to not know of sex. Nor does it match the mood of the being's statements. The Thing was inflicting unintentional violence, because it doesn't understand the permanence of our beings, yet you shatter that innocence and turn it into a violent rapist, thus undermining all the brilliant writing that preceded it.
I think a better line would have been:
If they cannot embrace salvation through communion, then I must infect them with it.
-0r-
These beings cannot embrace salvation through communion, but there must be others on this world who are so lonely and desperate to escape these permanent forms that they will embrace communion. They will become my new body, and through them I will lead this world to salvation.
--
These closings better play with the religious imagery developed throughout the piece.
Patrick Stinson wrote on October 14th, 2011 at 3:21 pm:
Only just saw this thanks to io9. Amazing piece of work, INCLUDING the last line, which I thought was set up appropriately. The one critique I would agree with are the awkward justifications for the Thing's violence in the film, but you are kind of "stuck" with that since you are basing it on the film. Best to think of this as one interpretation of a very open-ended scenario, rather than "the real story."
You even managed to address the two most absolutely nonsensical elements of the film; the "computer simulation," and the cobbled-together flying saucer. I would even go further and suggest that your Thing might be an unreliable narrator due to its injury...how could it EVER think making a piece of modern art out of scrap metal would get it off the planet? This also ties in with the fact that it takes it so long to understand that the humans are individuals.
Robert wrote on October 14th, 2011 at 3:37 pm:
The Thing is not using "rape" as a sexual metaphor, even though the reader recognizes it as such. When Childs calls it a rapist, The Thing only understands the word is associated with violence and "the forcible penetration of flesh."
But that is an appropriate description of how the Thing hides itself in its victims. Whether you want to admit it or not, what The Thing does is a form of rape; it forces itself into its victims flesh against their will, killing the victim in the process, and mimics it. It is a rape of not just the body, but of the soul and identity as well. The Thing rapes its victims to serve its own purpose; it's disgusting and terrible to think about, but it does. Over-sensitivity about the decision to label this horrible violation of body and self as "rape" is to be in willful denial about what the Thing truly does to its human victims.
You're right when it says it doesn't understand the permanence of our beings, but by the end of the story, the Thing doesn't want to understand it. It's going to use its power to force humanity to take communion with it, whether we want to or not, because he thinks it will lead us to salvation. He chooses to willfully assert his power over us in order to make us submit to his will, resulting in the loss of our bodies and self as we become one with it. It's a powerful ending because what The Thing does is so clearly rape that to hear the Thing acknowledge this, even if it doesn't quite understand what it means, is chilling. If The Thing is not a living embodiment of rape, then we have a very narrow view of what rape is.
Sarnath wrote on October 15th, 2011 at 3:10 am:
Very cool story, made me think. I've been a fan of the film for years, this ties it together very well, especially the computer stuff haha. Well-written, last line is good. It was chilling to think of the Thing going around in our world infecting people...
Mark wrote on October 15th, 2011 at 10:22 am:
Terrific take on the entire story of The Thing. This is like "Grendel" to "Beowolf." Thing to Things. Great story. I wish more people that are fans the film and now the 2011 prequel would read this story. It should be included with the Blu-ray Disc release. Perhaps in time the writer may choose the write a companion piece depicting what happened at the Norweigan camp from it's point it view too. Thank you for writing this.
Clint wrote on October 15th, 2011 at 3:04 pm:
Fantastic story! The 1982 The Thing is one of my favorite movies. There's so many interpretations of what events happened when, and this is a great piece explaining one possibility.
Gaius wrote on October 16th, 2011 at 8:54 pm:
@Peter Watts:
An amazing read, both provocative and technically superb.
In particular, I enjoy your depiction of the Thing as a missionary of mutable biomass. Likewise, I enjoy the Thing's struggle to cope with a world full of biomass that DOES NOT CHANGE in the same way it does. In addition, I felt you described the quasi-anarchy of its cells deftly and with equanimity.
Lastly, I very much enjoyed the final line -- it gave me the chills.
I have a few issues with the text, but they are mostly conceptual. I will submit them here mainly for the purposes of discussion.
0). A minor gripe: I had always imagined Things preferring the personal pronoun "we:" "We are wearing Childs; we are wearing Blair; we are wearing Copper."
1). According to the 1982 film, the Thing digests its victims (alive or very recently dead), assimilates their biomass (and decodes their memories in the process of consuming their brains; naturally, as brain death and memory loss occur, fewer memories are accessible), and then presumably creates dopplegangers of the victims by fission: consuming three dogs would lead to the imitation and fission of three dogs.
Each doppleganger is therefore a colony of Thing-cells held in temporary, voluntary stasis: capable, as any Thing is, of rapid morphological change according to previously assimilated blueprints.
That said, if Thing-cells operate under a system of quasi-anarchy (with individual cells and groups of cells rebelling under duress), I would imagine that fissioned Things would only cooperate until all humans had been assimilated or consumed, and then either forcibly assimilate one another or voluntarily merge, depending on the results of assimilation to individual Things.
Consequently, I find some degree of fault with the idea of partial assimilation and partial control of human victims. Certainly, a Thing could slowly assimilate a human being cell by cell, but as cells were assimilated (consumed and replicated), the human victim would experience a loss of faculties: motion control mental processes. It would be possible for someone who had been contaminated, but not fully consumed, by the Thing, to pass the blood test, but only if the sampled cells were not wholly Thing-cells.
2). Though you describe the Thing as capable of assimilating mere echoes of the victim's thoughts, the Thing in the film is clearly capable of imitating human symbolic reasoning: using human language and speech, pantomiming human mannerisms, and convincingly mimicking human emotive processes. All of this requires an immense battery of knowledge, so the Thing seems to be very clearly gleaning more than mere echoes from its victims!
Consequently, I find my willing suspension of disbelief twitching a bit when the Thing of your story is incapable of quickly grasping the fact that humans see themselves as individuals and cannot change themselves (the same memories that would lead to symbolic processing would be quite clear on this) or take communion. Surely the victim's thoughts and even their language structures would give away the fact that humans are quite different: memories of a broken leg that would not heal immediately, memories of sexual intercourse (rather than fission) for the purposes of reproduction, etc.
3). Given the above conceptions of Things as both wholly anarchistic (perfectly comfortable with assimilation by force) and aware of the torment of their victims (via assimilated recent memories), I would imagine that Childs-Thing would be less determined to save humanity from itself than Childs-Thing would be willing to consume humanity anyway, with perfect equanimity. The Thing would be baffled, perhaps, by human responses to it ("Why do they resist? It's just communion. Why do they form hierarchies? Don't they operate under a decentralized anarchy?"), but utterly indifferent to the tale of humanity as immutable individuals and perfectly content to consume them all.
In a way, I conceive of the Things as perfectly sociopathic: totally egocentric, controlling themselves and the world by force, and concerned only with consuming everything they touch.
Mark wrote on October 16th, 2011 at 11:44 pm:
I have to admit the person above made good points though it changed none of my feelings about the story. I loved it. There is one thing though and that it there is no evidence that The Thing consumes necrotic flesh. It also can be said that there is no evidence that the thing does not consume the dead either. However I don't personally think it consumes the dead because it gains what it needs from the living. Not the dead. If it were in the remains of Copper, Fuchs, and Clark then it would have attacked MacReady a lot sooner. It could have gotten them all if that were the case. The Thing's primary instinct is survival by any means necessary and practical.
Basically The Thing is like a biological version of The Borg from Star Trek. The Borg do not understand why people resist being a part of the collective. The Thing doesn't understand why life forms resist receiving communion. Both resort to force as a result. From a human point of view it is sociopathic, but it is not human and therefore cannot be expected to behave as such or even humanely. I do think that there have to predators the Thing could not necessarily infect. Nature balances things out indiscriminately. For instance on even ground could The Thing digest The Blob faster than The Blob, the ultimate consumer, digests it? It's only weakness is Thr cold, but otherwise it is every bit as deadly and with no sentience or reasoning. It just does what it does? So I ask anyone who reads this to post their opinion please. On even ground, would The Thing be able to digest and replicate The Blob faster than The Blob could digest it? Or would it be a draw? The ultimate survivor versus the ultimate consumer..
JS wrote on October 17th, 2011 at 12:43 am:
Clever idea with some poignant parts although maybe it could have been shorter and I agree with the criticisms about the last line. To me it feels a bit like a forced use of awkward slang on the part of the alien narrator which doesn't fit with how the character is speaking in the rest of the text. I dont remember Childs using the word rape in the movie either which also detracts from it for me though I can see the need for some kind of haunting and ironic send off. I think David's suggestion of "infect them with it" may have been more appropriate.
Ian wrote on October 17th, 2011 at 12:34 pm:
I saw The Thing (1982) the other night, and the very next day I found this linked from the wikipedia page. Captivating and beautifully executed! I couldn't stop reading it from start to finish. I honestly felt a bit of sympathy for the alien when it described the sharing of knowledge and biomass as "communion." What kind of society did the alien come from that accepted this philosophy? The idea of sharing knowledge in such a way has a surreal beauty to it, but the sad fact remains that humans would still probably reject it (even if it were explained to them). I liked how the story ended on a slightly darker note (much like the film), implying that the alien may be aggravated by the humans' resistance and will instead push its ways on them, as if they don't deserve such a blessing.
Jason wrote on October 19th, 2011 at 4:56 pm:
The Thing creates exact duplicates of the things in absorbs using thing-cells instead of regular cells.
It allows the newly created life form to go about its business as it learns how the new form works.
It was confused by our forms because it couldn't figure out how we managed to operate. It could detect signals being sent around but not how they were organized. Then it discovered the massive tumor (our brains) running the show and was horrified.
It learned this from inside the bodies it had built as well as observing other bodies going about their business.
It didn't inhabit a human being that already existed and slowly consume it; it built new bodies from what it had already consumed and worked slowly to control them properly.
Richie wrote on October 21st, 2011 at 5:15 pm:
My Friend...Now that all three movies are out, pull this review and re-write to include your brilliant concept covering all three movies...then, put this in a paperback release and keep to around 100 pages. Your cost per book can be as low as $1.75 and can sell for $10 and all day long for less...This will also copyright your idea and you now have a part in an exlcusive money making role in one of the greatest stories out there in todays Sci-fi world...get on this right away...P.S. I know of an editor who will refine the works as well. Materpiece this...do it now...NOW
Mike Allen wrote on October 22nd, 2011 at 12:18 am:
@93: I think you've missed an important point. "The Things" refers to the humans, as perceived by the alien, not to the alien itself.
Aaron wrote on October 23rd, 2011 at 6:24 pm:
Awesome!
Samuel wrote on October 25th, 2011 at 1:19 am:
I was particularly amused by the following:
"It didn't matter that the machine was far too simple to perform such calculations, or that there were no data to base them on anyway;"
I've always thought the same thing, how Blair pulled that data from his ass. In the prequel, they see the assimilation via a microscope and draw their inductions from that. That makes far more sense then the Atari Asteroids quality computer graphics, but that was probably the ONLY thing the prequel did better than the original.
Interesting story, over all. VERY impressed that a short story based on a film based on a short story has made such a splash. Well done.
kelvingreen wrote on October 25th, 2011 at 6:48 pm:
Given the Thing's words about hiding and finding other, different ways to "save" humanity, you could argue that this piece bridges The Thing and They Live.
Dave wrote on November 27th, 2011 at 9:33 pm:
Wow. That was fantastic. The perspective was wonderful.
S. Victor Jones wrote on November 27th, 2011 at 10:08 pm:
Peter, I have just watched the third remake of The Thing and it stinks. Big batch 'o crap. Retroactively, it spoils the prior two - and they had such an opportunity to improve on Carpenter's movie, as his improved on the original version (and, as the original version was a reasonable translation of John C Campbell's short story).
Perhaps they should have done their homework and asked either you or Charles Stross to write the screenplay (Stross's in the style of "A Colder War").
Charles wrote on November 28th, 2011 at 10:52 am:
Read this after seeing the new Thing movie. Whilst being an enjoyable movie, it certainly doesn't come anywhere close to Carpenters version and was overall disappointing.
Whilst it certainly pays homage (some would say maybe a little too much) to Carpenters version, the actions of the creature seem to lack purpose and it eventually breaks down into a typical action based creature romp.
It's a shame that such an opportunity to create a genuinely fearful and suspenseful film was wasted.
I think I got more kicks spending 5 minutes reading this than throughout the whole flick.
Anyway, loving the writing - it's very well done and you've paid respect to the source material and tried to tackle every question in a thoughtful and believable way (and succeeded). I shall be getting my hands on some more of your prose in the near future!
Sean wrote on November 30th, 2011 at 10:54 am:
Is not the main logical fallacy of this tale that the thing can articulate itself? I mean, people will obviously find this deconstruction of the original thematic concepts interesting- as it undermines and subverts the established. But, i don't think that there should be two sides to the fence- i don't think there should be two sides to the story. It isn't a case of xenophobia, or of empathy. The horror of the thing is that it cannot be understood, it cannot be related to. The thing is unimaginable and inconceivable. Having the thing not be able to recognise the contextual significance of the word 'rape' is ridiculous when you consider that you've had it narrate for 30 minutes.
blindthrall wrote on December 5th, 2011 at 5:44 pm:
What is a drop of rain, compared to the storm? What is a thought, compared to the mind? Our unity is full of wonder which your tiny individualism cannot even conceive. -The Many
The only frontier that has ever existed is the Self. -Helios
Melfice wrote on December 11th, 2011 at 8:13 am:
I rather liked this piece, and the alternate viewpoint it showed. Sadly, the new movie portrays the Thing as just a monsters that seems more intent on killing everyone than anything remotely resembling intellectual activity (tentatcles through the chest, luring people away and then trying to kill them).
I wouldn't mind seeing your take on the new movie as it pertains to your work right now.
bellum wrote on January 6th, 2012 at 12:26 am:
This depiction of the Alien was certainly a roller coaster ride of how I felt for it. Felt sorry for it at first, then apathetic, then...just distributed in the end.... full circle! Back to my starting impression of the creature when i first saw the movie.
The Thing's exposure to humanity seems to indeed, make it a determined under-minder of free will, and what it means to be human....yet in the process inherited humanity's aggressive baser nature to dominate....
who's assimilating who?....great question for this tale.
Great writing, genius!
KMG wrote on February 4th, 2012 at 6:30 am:
I love this story! The writing is so beautiful, it was a genuine pleasure reading. Thank you so much for contributing to the Thing series!
Michael wrote on February 11th, 2012 at 7:23 am:
Really great story. I enjoyed seeing events from the film play out through the alien's eyes and getting more insight into its mind and way of thinking. Ever since I saw the John Carpenter version, and more recently the prequel, I've always wondered about the origins and, to a lesser extent, motivations of The Thing. While the story centers more on the reasoning as opposed to the back story of the monster, I never would have thought it to have a mindset of "salvation through forced assimilation". I had always assumed it had a more sinister agenda in that it really was a virus that's only goal was to spread and survive.
On the other hand I always had the notion that it wanted neither of the above and only wished to leave Earth. But the author presented us with a very unique and unexpected point-of-view of a creature humans generally see as a dangerous and hard to kill threat.
My only real gripe is that at the beginning the story seems to mention the infected dog at the Norwegian camp escaping at night when it obviously fled during daylight hours. Perhaps I misunderstood that part.
In closing I will say that if a sequel to the '82 version should ever be made the writers take a look at this. The idea that The Thing plans to forcibly commune with humanity and thus assimilate us would make for a very interesting film, I think. Of course this would most likely take away from the feeling of being trapped in a desolate wasteland with a ravenous shapeshifting alien that can mimic the form of its prey, but think how exciting it would be to see the series go in another direction. They can't stay in Antarctic bases forever. I for one would like to see the continuation of this franchise, even if it strays away from the series roots that made it great.
P.S. Also kudos to basically calling Macready's blood test fallible. I always thought it to be completely accurate and to know that more of the base's staff/crew/whatever were in fact aliens in disguise makes you think.
Thing Who Dunnit wrote on February 25th, 2012 at 9:10 am:
While not entirely how I view many of the events, still a brilliant and fun story to read. Very interesting to see things from the Thing's point of view.
Even the last line wasn't out of place, considering Its adaptation of human language skills.
But again, so many additional characters secretly also being infected and MacReady's test being a failure isn't how I interpreted things. Too convenient for storytelling, in a fashion.
And the method of the infection seems off.
That said, I still very much enjoyed this read. Particularly the concept of a sapient colony of organisms that "commune" with each other.
Brian wrote on March 13th, 2012 at 1:45 am:
Daaaaaaaaamn
Anton wrote on March 15th, 2012 at 2:58 pm:
I'm glad a few people recognised the original story was by John W Campbell and not John Carpenter, and I prefered the 1951 movie as well.
I'm not sure the style of writing JWC/DAS used would go down well today, though.
http://www.scaryforkids.com/who-goes-there-by-john-w-campbell/
One reference that was omitted: John Gardner, no, not *that* John Gardner, the Brit who wrote more James Bond novels than Ian Fleming, the Moriarty Chronicles, the Bosie Oakes stories, all those multi-generational spy stories This is the American one who also wrote a number of stories like this one, a re-telling from the point of view of the "monster".
Perhaps the most well known is "Grendel", which was later made into an animated movie.
Peter has done an excellent work in a proud tradition.
chy wrote on June 1st, 2012 at 2:23 am:
I agree with 28 jayson. To the alien we were things and to us it is a thing. No matter where we come from whatever we cannot explain or have no prior name for we call it a thing. I also agree with 108 Malfice. The new movie showed the alien as a mindless killing machine with no intelligence or confusion or pity. And I think that the alien is only like us only in the fact that it refuses to believe that humans are individual and cannot shapeshift just as we are in apparently not being able to accept other forms of life. At first I sympathized with the alien because it wasn't able to communicate with the crew because of the crash and it wasn't big enough to do it anyway like a kid not being able to explain itself, and all it wanted to do was to learn about how we function in our "unadaptable bodies". But by the end I felt pity because it's faith was shaken and it still felt like we needed saving when we could never be like it in the first place so it's whole mission will be futile. I was also irritated that all that happened and the stupid thing still got away! Now we're all dead
Martin wrote on June 22nd, 2012 at 9:09 pm:
Loved it!
Cole hultman wrote on July 6th, 2012 at 11:24 pm:
The Thing is a story of gore, suspicion, and lust to know the answer. This short reading made me realize what we don't look at into any science fiction story. What is it/they are really doing? And the thing's alien was really a thing of biological and phylosophical knowledge that was sent to learn everything throughout the universe. Being a living memory, that forgets, that has thought process, that one half doesn't understand the other, and one that learns through the only way it can: Consuming biomass similiarly to the same way we learn knowledge.
With each knew fact we take in, we forget something else. And the thing is a one of a
Kind creature that can't be examined and/or studied.
Russ bowman wrote on September 28th, 2012 at 5:25 am:
Interesting. I found this as I was writing a scenario I was writing for a scenario for the RPG traveller. It involves the thing being terrified after being discovered on it's homeward at a primitive level.
It assimilated a few of the crew that landed and underwent a severe evolution and revelation.
The last line is actually kind of ominous. The Thing did not understand how horrible rape is, but humans do. The Thing may believe what it plans nay be good, but people who understand rape find it terrible.
The prequel stunk on ice, a good chance ruinedHow about a prequel that deals with how the thing came to earth and why no other ships apparently came?
Speck mg of the 82 movie, the thing was obviously intelligent and possessed knowledge of IRS own. It was building the mini saucer, remember?
Russ bowman wrote on September 28th, 2012 at 5:35 am:
P's great point about the computer in the movie. Sorry about the typing, tablet keyboard and auto correct.
being Luke wrote on December 7th, 2012 at 6:19 pm:
@Irked (#82):
You wrote: "What threw me was something I've not seen remarked on yet: the thing's disgust for "cancer."".
I'm not sure about your first point, but to your second:
"Second, why should such a being find cancer - what is, effectively, a re-purposing of biomatter towards some new growth, a growth not directed by the self - repulsive? That's very much its own approach, as it assimilates its targets: a cancer that replaces rather than simply growing uncontrollably."
I think you have actually answered your own question, but you are looking at it from the prospective of the invaded, not the invader.
Imagine you are a creature which can expand, absorb, and alter your physical form at will. That each extent of yourself is none the less under the control of yourself. Now, imagine that cells you had absorbed, which had been purposed to your will, suddenly stopped communicating with you. They stopped being under your control: growing or not, they developed independent thought, or instinctual activity, and started acting outside your wishes.
If, for example, your current form had an arm, and that arm started beating you--grew a bony blade and started cutting you--started disrupting your harmony. It would be a cancer to you. You would direct cells under your control to cut off, to isolate, and ultimately to overpower and destroy that arm, and you would grow a new compliant arm in its place..
You would destroy that unproductive cancer.
To you, any grouping of independent cells--cells that were alive, but not enabled by your will, would be a cancer. Remember the parts that separated and instinctively ran off trying to survive after the description of the initial crash? Those were probably cancers in its view as well.
That is not, in its view, its own approach as you say. Cancer starts from within. The Thing starts from without--entering, attempting to awake contact with the intelligence within. It would not see its own activities as a cancer upon the host, because it immediately sees the host as an extension of itself that it must persuade to become one. The concept of individual intelligence is so foreign to it. If one of its selves communed unexpectedly with another, that would not result in a war for control of the biomass--it would result in a joining of knowledge and a becoming of one (we see this happen early in the story).
@Gaius (#93):
"things" would not prefer the pronoun "we", because "they" are not "things". They are "a thing". A whole world might be a single being in this thing's conception. It would not call itself "we", because it has no concept of the individual. It thus can not have the concept of individuals grouping--several "I"s becoming a "we". It only knows "i"--the one.
My $0.02 anyway.
Xantalos wrote on January 1st, 2013 at 4:34 am:
A truly amazing piece of fiction; so much so that it is now my 'head-canon' for the Thing-verse. However, I have a question: what would the Thing think of the blood test, the one that it sabotaged? Why did it sabotage it?
Sonny wrote on March 9th, 2013 at 1:11 am:
Well, The Thing has long been one of my all-time favourite films and I consider it practically perfect. I just followed a link to this story and I am absolutely blown away. It is just so very, very good. Brilliant writing. Well done indeed and thank you.