If you love the John Carpenter version of The Thing and are dread the remaking coming to a theatre near you , or if you just love stories that successfully defend a truly exotic point of view , then you need to study Peter Watts ’ Hugo - propose narration “ The Things . ” It ’s the John Carpenter flick , but from the stop of scene of what humans call “ the matter ” — a creature who has a hive mind , and bed no boundaries between itself and everyone else . Watts is the author of the novel Blindsight and Starfish , and “ The Things ” is one of the best tale you ’ll ever take by the master of scifi mindfuckery .
Here ’s how it starts :
I am being Blair . I escape out the back as the existence come in through the front .
I am being Copper . I am rising from the stagnant .
I am being Childs . I am guard the main incoming .
The names do n’t matter . They are procurator , nothing more ; all biomass is standardized . What matters is that these are all that is leave of me . The world has burned everything else .
I see myself through the window , lope through the storm , wearing Blair . MacReady has say 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 doorway . I am being Childs , and I countenance myself in . I take brief sacramental manduction , tendrils writhe forth from my faces , lace : I am BlairChilds , commute word of the world .
The world has find me out . It has discovered my burrow beneath the instrument shed , the half - finished lifeboat cannibalize from the viscera of stagnant eggbeater . The world is busybodied destruct my agency of leakage . Then it will come back for me .
There is only one option will . I decompose . Being Blair , I go to deal the programme with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once call Clarke ; so many changes in so brusque a time have dangerously depleted my modesty . Being Childs , I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am refill 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 wreck . I was an explorer , an ambassador , a missionary . I spread across the cosmos , foregather countless macrocosm , took Holy Communion : the fit reshape the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwardly in jubilant , minute increments . I was a soldier , at war with entropy itself . I was the very bridge player by which cosmos perfects itself .
So much wisdom I had . So much experience . Now I can not remember all the things I acknowledge . I can only recollect that I once eff them .
I remember the clangour , though . It killed most of this offshoot in a flash , but a short crawl from the wreckage : a few trillion cells , a soul too weak to keep them in confirmation . Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most heroic attempts to hold myself together : panic - stricken little clots of kernel , instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fly across the combustion ice . By the time I ’d regained ascendence of what was left the flak had pall and the frigidity was closing back in . I barely managed to spring up enough antifreeze to keep my jail cell from bursting before the ice demand me .
I retrieve my reawakening , too : dull stirrings of sensation in real meter , the first embers of knowledge , the slow flower warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their farsighted sleep . I remember the biped branch besiege me , the foreign chittering sounds they made , the unmated uniformity of their soundbox program . How ill - altered they looked ! How ineffective their syllable structure ! Even disabled , I could see so many thing to fix . So I reached out . I took Holy Communion . I tasted the flesh of the world-
-and the world attacked me . It lash out me .
I left that position in downfall . It was on the other side of the mountains - the Norwegian camp , it is called here - and I could never have sweep that length in a bipedal skin . Fortunately there was another shape to choose from , smaller than the two-footed but well adapted to the local climate . I conceal within it while the eternal sleep of me press off the blast . I fled into the dark on four legs , and let the jump flames cover my escape .
I did not stop run until I go far here . I walked among these Modern offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped ; and because they had not see me take any other shape , they did not attack .
And when I assimilated them in turn - when my biomass change and flow into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes - I took that sacramental manduction in solitude , having see that the world does not like what it does n’t know .
register the rest of this mind - bending storyon Clarkesworld .
Need more Peter Watts ? It ’s a common job . Luckily , he make his novels available for free , under a CC permit , on his website .
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