Nichtozhestvo

The story of Peter watts ' "Nothingness" (orig. "The Things", other variants of translation: "Nichtozhestvo", "Creatures") was released in 2010 in a series of "Loose continuation of the story of John Campbell's "Who goes there?".

Described in the story of the confrontation between American explorers and the mysterious alien creature is able to take the form of any living creature, familiar to many as the story of John Campbell's "Who goes there?", and from the movie John carpenter's "the thing". In the story of Peter watts, the story is on behalf of the alien.

The main part of the story is the monologue of an alien creature trying to understand people and the logic of their behavior.

Unlike film, in which aliens were just some of the explorers in the story being assimilated all people and was surprised that the blood of some of them not respond to touch hot wires. This effect it is explained by the fact that full assimilation takes time. In addition, in the story there is the answer to the riddle of the open end of the film: "did the creature?"

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»

The plot of the story follows the plot of the movie John carpenter's "the thing".

The narrative begins with a description of a crashed space ship with an alien creature, arrived on Earth. The ship is wrecked in the ice, and the stranger, having developed a special antifreeze that had enveloped his flesh into hibernation. He awakens among two-legged beings are not adapted to cold conditions. The creature begins to absorb them, and people trying to figure and kill the alien. Part alien takes the form of a dog more adapted to the cold, and runs away in search of other life forms to absorb.

Once in a new camp and the newly unopposed, the creature finds that his space ship is destroyed and cannot be repaired, and to save him no one is coming. The stranger decides to once again go into hibernation to wait until the place is hostile to it people will come a new form of life.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»

Crashed spaceship which came alien, the story practically is not described:

But it was not a ship. Not even a wreck. A fossil embedded in a huge ice hole.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»

Alien creature is a set of cells constituting a single body with one soul and knowledge. It absorbs living beings, which are referred to as "biomass" or "sprouts", absorbing stored information: the structure of the body and its cellular structure as well as knowledge and experience. Feeling of the outside world from the shell of a man the stranger compares with the spotlight which you cannot manage and which grabs only part of the surrounding information.

The process of absorption being "biomass" is described as follows:

We can fast-track communion: antennae wiggle in front of my entities are woven. I'm Blair childs, I exchanged the news of the world.

[...]

... in the mindless biomass of this world was not to hold on: only communication to transmit signals and the original data. And I took communion, even though I didn't reciprocate; shell struggled, but obeyed; my superfine fiber infiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems. I looked eyes, which yet was not my ordered motor nerves to move limbs of a foreign protein. I wore these shells as well as countless others; I seized power and allowed the assimilation of individual cells to flow as usual.

An alien trying to be like the people around him to survive:

Desperate mimicry was an improvised, last hope to survive in a world which attacked anything he is not familiar.

The alien sees humans are imperfect creatures that are not adapted to the world, and believes that the takeover will only improve them, as stored in their bodies information connected with located in it data about the life forms of other planets. Alien creature thinks is available to him a way of adapting to the environment through the absorption and processing of other organisms and storing information about them in its own memory is the best way of survival.

The story mostly consists of a monologue of the stranger, in which he wonders that the people engaged in them "empty" (it does not detect the soul, or, as he calls it, the "host shell"), and why this world has forgotten how to change. The creature also indicates that each lost cell takes the part of his intellect.

In his monologue, the stranger says he is not a conqueror, and an Explorer, Ambassador and missionary. It spread all around the world and visited countless worlds.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»