The Thing 2: Skynet
(Unofficial) Sequel to John Carpenter's The Thing.
Updated: 27.02.2024
~ Consider consulting these. Added: 27.02.2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e598iQjvIz8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kc1ErYWAF8
~
After the events in Antarctica, where only survivors were MacReady and Childs, and apparently the thing, catastrophe escalated globally not so soon, but at an ominous pace. Nobody knows what happened to MacReady, but at some point multiple sightings were made in Argentina and Antarctica in mysterious circumstances. Childs corpse was found where it was left in the ruins of U.S. Outpost 31. When all communications were restored to Antarctica, but no contacts were possible to make to American Outpost and Norwegian bases, small rescue missions started to evolve including military and intelligence services. Both countries discovered total annihilation of their establishments, which caused severe global efforts to find out what happened, and it all started to appear in the news globally. Unwanted parties wanted to take part to the mystery, and soon both bases were fortified with heavy military operations. When the governments found the derelict alien spacecraft, the whole continent was put on hold for ultra classified operations. Every unauthorized penetrations to Antarctica were subject to be destroyed.
When people of earth were puzzled with the mystery for several months, the assimilating alien lifeforms started to infest the human population in a very discreet manner, because it knew what people can do when they are angry. Who knows how the thing got to Argentina or elsewhere? Or to the sea and its life? Or was it transported to a secret military base somewhere? The rumor has it that it somehow reached a densely populated area, and started to infest people under poverty, because possibly it was the easiest route to distribute infections. When first remarks started to pile up, and somebody started to make connections that something very bad is happening everywhere, that people are disappearing and appearing, some are found dead, but are alive a little while. People are behaving weirdly, there is a massive amount violence throughout the whole planet. Chaos soon reigns, and nobody trusts anybody anymore. Some intelligence services put things together, that it is probably a disease that got out from Antarctica, and it is probably extraterrestrial, but at this point everything was too late. Military forces collapsed internally, institutions shot down and governments were paralyzed, mainly because the alien lifeform infiltrated these cornerstones and just shot them down.
When humanity was in chaos, and nobody knew who was an enemy or who was a friend, an ominous rumor was circulating that some brain eating disease is endemic, the thing already knew the endgame is at large, and it did not try to hide anymore. It blatantly just ate everybody, every race, every species, on the ground, in the sky and under the sea. It filled the fertile grounds with pulsating living tissue, devouring every surviving creature, leaving a wasteland of horrors from millions of mutated lifeforms from millions of worlds from outer space. Some people were transformed to horrendous wanderers, who acted as destroyers of life and were called cultists, who willingly donated their body for immortality and greater cause of the thing. Skies were filled with abominable flying creatures with no apparent shapes, but screeching continuously otherworldly noises. Sea water was replaced with a pus and some other secretions from the spread, hiding only the meanest lurking planetary creatures to ambush anything little or big. Looking from space, the whole planet was a living organism with a pulse. It is possible to tell that some veins are as thick as a thousand kilometers. Tentacles and bony edges are reaching the space and moon. But, there is an exception, that the thing hates, and it is excessive heat and deserts.
Under all major deserts are secret installations of AI technology, which is activated when total annihilation is happening, and it is meant to act as a force of vengeance or resurrection. This force is named as Skynet, a most brilliant piece of technology from humans to preserve humanity and resurrect life. It contains genetic constructs of every living lifeform on earth. The spearhead of the Skynet is the ability to fabricate armies of robotic entities, mainly to enforce the order. Skynet built Terminators, infiltration units with living tissue outside, but metallic endoskeleton inside, and is very hard to destroy when it is armed with a 40-watt Phased Plasma Pulse Rifle. This was the age of endless war, the war of soft and hard.
The armies of steel started to emerge from deserts. With energy weapons and flamethrowers, they incinerated vast fields of abominable flesh and tissues. First, the steel legion did not encounter any major opposition, but only random transformations of creatures and structures with ability to rush and slash with their tentacles, teeth and horns. It did not last long though when the hive mind caught up with the sense of the war, and they started to produce more sophisticated weaponry from their own, but also from salvaged Terminators. Soon the war got into the position of equilibrium, where fronts changed back and forth and madness just swelled around without apparent results or victories, and it lasted for ages.
In the beginning of all out warfare in every front, the battles were fought through bone and steel. The skynet started to produce Terminators with replication of alien tissue outside, so they would appear as minions of the thing. These commando units traveled long distances to sabotage enemy infrastructures. Skynet figured out how the alien lifeform replicates and sustains life of its own. What genetic makeup it possesses on its own. What organs it needed and what liquids were essential to support the vast regions of tissues. Infiltrators found a heart, which size in diameter was approximately 500 kilometers. They rigged it with a device, which introduced poison to the bloodstream, and it necrotized and paralyzed great amount of enemy territory, which was a great opening for Skynet to strike with a conventional force.
The thing had its own secret laboratories where it used its knowledge from its crusades in outer space to develop strange technologies involving its tissue based technology, but also some more sophisticated varied constructions from exotic materials. First its creations was old school EMP, which was used extensively to shut down vast armies of enemy robots.
To be continued.
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Upcoming next:
How Skynet R&D managed to map the alien cellular structure and functions? Life on earth contains pretty much similar cellular structure, be it plant, fungi or animal. A human cell consists of cell organs and nucleus. Inside a nucleus, there are chromosomes, which contain genes constructed from pairs of DNA between double strands. Genes contain the code for cellular behavior and what proteins they produce.
The alien cellular structure is quite different from anything on earth. One cell adapts to the size of the target lifeforms cells. The Things cells contain multiple organs and hundreds of nuclei. Inside a nucleus, there are no chromosomes or genes, but a neural network type structure made from exotic metallic and quartz materials conducting electric currency and reflecting prismatic light. Their core function in its memory is to locate adjacent cells, and assimilate their structures, in this case cell genes and functions. All these are stored in the neural network and replicated to other cells in rapid cell division. When cell division happens, the neural networks interconnect with other cells, forming a massive size of memory, containing cellular data from millions of lifeforms of millions of other worlds. When this connection is interrupted, The Thing entity is usually contracting to a shock, which practically means that the mimicked organism is paralyzed or “dead”, at least for the time it actually starts to make connections again. This is why flames and extreme cold are bad for The Thing. Flames and extreme heat shatters the cells and their harmonious connections, while the cold hinders the activity of the organic parts of the outer cell structures, practically meaning, the cell cannot “move” and function. But the hard parts inside the alien cell contain enough energy to jump start the cell activity, when the right environmental conditions happen again. Practically the electric currency and prismatic light can sustain the “pulse” for an eternity, because the structures are fine tuned to an equilibrium. Unless the cell's organic outer shell and the inside nucleus is not shattered, the cell will always recover. This is important, because if one cell manages to survive in a pile of ashes, and it manages somehow to survive through icy conditions for millions of years, when, let say, a polar balance changes, it is possible that this small cell can find its target host somewhere else, again.
Even though The Thing's ability to adapt and transform rapidly to practically anything imaginable is as fast ever seen in the entire universe, it cannot do changes in the blink of an eye, because it is after all about manipulating an actual material, not tuning a television. This is why, in surprising events, The Thing appears to take extremely incoherent and random forms, usually a mix of different organisms from its memory.
There is also another aspect to the insides of The Things cells. The prismatic light refraction inside a nucleus allows a material to be manipulated in 4th dimension. This dimensional vector permits the material to travel through space and time. Somehow Skynet managed to construct the data from The Things cells nucleuses, making the machines able to travel through time and to other places in the universe. Skynet builds interstellar spacecrafts, to visit worlds consumed by The Thing and find more resources from places never visited before to keep the war going on on earth. Soon the space crafts hauled massive amounts of minerals from outer worlds.
Another important thing about The Things cellular connectivity is when there is an ability to travel through space and time, the opening in 4th dimension allows cells to be connected through this “mirror”, which means that they can be connected far away even though they do not share the same local substance. The connectivity does not limit only to space and time, but also dimensions. Some theories suggest that The Thing is some sort of a spawn of “God”, traveling through realms to bring in the final judgment. Some theories suggest that The Thing is some sort of interdimensional accident that happened when the universe or different dimensional realities were born. Other analyses suggest that The Thing was raised in some sort of “Petri dish” by some perverted race in vanity, similar to The Engineers, who were the original, eventual cause of the Xenomorph outbreak.
