Solid State Survivor by Nicky Martin
This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions Issue #2
XXXYYX slinks its body through the rubble that obscured its path. Molding its form into the shapes of the concrete crevices, it emerges from the cracks and continues its search. It must find the device; its movement will not stop until its task is complete.
Three solar rotations ago, this became XXXYYX’s routine: slip around the endless wasteland of a dead planet and search for parts. The needed mechanisms were small, so the search was tedious. A few solar oscillations ago, XXXYYX’s scent-based intuition told it the ancient machine was close. This would be the last one.
162 solar rotations ago, XXXYYX’s species landed on what was previously an uninhabitable planet. The Adapters (a rough approximation of what the hivemind slime calls itself), were the first habitable life forms on the planet in about 500 solar rotations. The slimes felt the planet’s scars of mass extinction. The Adapters coolant spleens worked in overdrive to compensate for the incredible temperatures trapped in the planet’s atmosphere. Their outer shielding membranes brightened in color, to reflect the gamma radiation bombardment.
XXXYYX slithers contently, absorbing the dead planet’s toxins. It feels its membrane molding them into sweet, sticky, brown delicious glob balls. XXXYYX backs up, absorbs the balls, and moves forward again.
To the Adapters, a dead planet is as livable as any other. Their plasmic bodies can easily mutate to conditions of most atmospheres; and as the slimes aren’t reliant on planetary sustenance, as a thylakoid membrane creates a nutrient resin, the slimes can travel intergalactically, colonizing worlds across the universe. All Adapters need to survive is hydrogen and even in the vacuum of space, hydrogen is bountiful.
The lonely slime was of one mind. It needed this part and this is why it existed. Once it found the small machine, it would happily cease to be. Sometimes, it imagined the airy infiniteness awaiting it upon the task’s completion.
XXXYYX is the pattern that emerges consistently enough within a constantly-changing Adapter slime to constitute an identity. Its most frequent form is a bulbous, insectoid goo that somewhat resembles a microscopic bug (although Adapters are multi-celled organisms). A beige, shell-gel protects a complex system of interlocking biomasses. The way its body connects and the color within its translucent goo resembles a Victorian wristwatch; the bronze and shining parts notch together gracefully, with a purposeful momentum. Moving tiny, rod legs in all axis’s of direction, the slime-bug makes slow but consistent forward movement. Adapters’ form is also contingent upon the planet of which it currently occupies. These slimes fluctuate. Even the creature’s mass changes. It can dense up, concentrate itself into new shapes and fit into impossibly tight spaces. One of the species most curious evolutionary developments is a gland that regulates the effects of gravity on the creature’s mass. On worlds with intense gravity, Adapters appear as shimmering rays of light.
XXXYYX separates its slime mass, seething into the spaces between the molecules of rock. To a molecular-typical creature, emerging through solid objects is impossible—but XXXYYX relaxes the magnetic conduction of its electrons to become a tenuous mirage of itself. This maneuver, however, does take a toll on the slime’s psyche.
XXXYYX reaches another obstacle. It morphs, becoming a bacillus and jellying itself through the water pipe’s hole, sliding around the rounded shape of metal. In this tight space, it remembers…
When the species discovered this errant planet, the Adapter Elders immediately understood the tragedy of the planet’s native species: the poor fools killed themselves through inalterable atmospheric tampering. XXXYYX could feel their life energies pulsing through the ground; a mega-death erupting in one fell swoop. The Explorers spent little time here; they quickly indexed the rock’s knowledge, plasmatized and sent to the Elder Guardians for absorption. The millennial-old slimes learned another potential destruction to be avoided. In the Elder’s Eternal Stasis, the planet served no further knowledge-synthesis purposes.
XXXYYX didn’t reject the Elder’s Divine Equilibrium, yet an inarticulable attraction pulled this slime and its oppositional counterpart to the lonely wasteland. The Elders allowed it because they sensed the coming monumental absorption.
As XXXYYX shambles across the planet, wandering forlornly without its companion, it wistfully remembers the warmth of the hivemind. No missions or journeys–just an ecstatic pleasure and wholeness of being. XXXYYX is trapped here, in this isolated landscape, with only the dust of a formerly prosperous society. It cannot stop feeling the planet’s traumatic jaggedness, as it scraped its gelatinous ground-flank against the rock. Yet, it too can feel the faint echoes of its counterpart, its life-energy emanating soft across the rocks.
Three solar rotations ago, XXXYYX felt itself in the presence of 242424252524. The sad slime was unable to unify with its counterpart. They were figuratively invisible to each other (Adapters can’t comprehend sight). Without a pheromonic broadcast aura, all hope of existing to one another was lost. The bombasts of life energy emanating from each Adapter blistered their counterpart. They understood their proximity, but were unable to fulfil their purpose. It was a hopeless inaccessibility that forever since scarred the hopeless slimes.
Yet, this experience awakened XXXYYX’s purpose. It gave it a macro-view of the resources on the dead planet, showing the slime what it needed to do to broadcast its melding soundwave frequencies.
XXXYYX could obsess over this instant no longer; it must move on. Not able to let the hot sun pass and freeze the rocky ground, the slime plummets itself deep through the crackled stone, the lingering scent blend of chromium and chloride is in its proximity. It can feel it.
The slime arrives into a collapsed structure that probably stood proudly centuries ago, but had become a messy pile of broken rock types. XXXYYX feels the textures of these sediments: the smooth, rounded curves of marble; the sticky, thick shards of concrete; the warm, hollow clank
of bricks. From the life energy that emanates off these substances, XXXYYX knows that it is in a former hallowed hall of knowledge.
It is so close.
An intuitive buzz inside its biomass echoes a strange resonance. XXXYYX follows the echo of this strange, internal sound. The machine was calling it. Here, the last one discovered.
XXXYYX possessed five other machines, found strewn all over the planet—two others buried underground, one submerged in a metal, ocean tomb, another atop a mountain stronghold base, the last in the fossilized body of a beast’s skeleton. The final drive is upon it.
The Adapter began to radiate nervous energy waves. What if the fragile was destroyed beyond the Adapter’s repair? Or unable to connect to its five brothers? Perhaps the feeling XXXYYX felt was all wrong, maybe a sixth no longer even exists in the dust of this world?
The slime let the irrational fears course through its goo like electric jolts. Consciously, it welcomed the anxious emotional-energy. The creature rationally knew that all these problems were within its solving capacity. But the slime did need this excess emotional-energy, the power source needed for the coming conductivity test.
XXXYYX smells the vibrations. The device was nearly in its sticky grasp. It slathered itself over the boxes scattered all over the floor. So many boxes: some flimsy, made of cardboard, others firm, made of metal. XXXYYX just needed the one special box. The slime stretched its shape into something like a many-armed starfish. With a mass of tentacles, it slapped the room carefully, careful not to damage the device. The hundreds of suction arms moved and disturbed the rooms forgotten remains.
It felt the click. XXXYYX stopped moving. XXXYYX lowered its goo-tendril onto it. This is it! The final mechanism!
It brought the tendril back to its central goo mass. It splatted the tiny thing into its body for cleaning. It was a tiny polymer-vinyl box shielded in a smooth, grey case. Inside the device was a metal casing protecting an ancient computer drive. The device was decimated by dust—yet XXXYYX’s porous body absorbs the dust and turns it into more food resin. It uses two tentacles and scrubs the box deep inside its body. The box is clean, inside and out, like a wet rag removing a dusty film from a flat surface.
The slime’s journey was complete; now, its true work was ahead. XXXYYX places the small drive in its internal protection sac. The fragile part stays safe in here, though it limited the creature’s molding mobility. XXXYYX would need to find a path out that was not smaller than the computer box.
Slower than before, XXXYYX began its journey up toward the ground.
#
XXXYYX returned to its makeshift lair many days later. Never stopping, its movement not encumbered by eating, sleeping or a need for shelter. Finally, it opened the rusting door to its small, bombed-out, metal-frame lair. It placed the final part next to its brothers.
With the complete collection, XXXYYX began building the instrument.
From the mass, a precision slime arm emerges and arranges three drives in two rows. The arm then splits into a series of cables, similar to wet spaghetti. These wires extend into each drive, with XXXYYX as the machine’s conduit.
Millions of years ago, Adapters realized their potential to communicate with machines. Adapters themselves conducted electricity through feeling. When taken by intense emotions—happiness, despair, anxiety, anger—they generate an electric pulse. This energy can be stored within the Adapter’s biomass.
XXXYYX used its reservoir of emotional-energy to power on the small drives. The insect-slime creature began to glow. A pleasant humming exuded from the vibrating goo. The drives came to life, their small moving hinge rotating at a controlled speed.
By adjusting the electric pulse’s intensity, XXXYYX controls the rate of the drive’s movement. The drives pulsate, the small motor controlling the tone’s frequency. Metal rakes across the device at a finely calculated speed, the tiny sensors moving back and forth, searching for data that does not exist.
XXXYYX moves each motor in concert, producing a variety of tones. A clanking, mechanical symphony emits, balanced by the slime’s lulling, bass hum. As XXXYYX gets the hang of adjusting the small motors, a song emerges.
The tonalities of the Adapter’s song are foreign to human ears. A monotone with hard-to-hear variations, this music produces a vibration that entices the slime. Without ears, slimes process sound differently—the unadulterated motion of the air molecules causes Adapters to move in a rhythmic fashion. Traditional human instruments do little to entice a slime; where mechanical clanking carries a timbre much more alluring to the goo. The sound’s envelope is quick and erratic, a fast-motion that pleasures the bodies of slimes.
Its mission nearly complete, XXXYYX celebrated. It split itself into two bodies. The first body continuing to power the strange, tone song. The second body moving, jiggling, dancing with unmistakable delight. XXXYYX bounces off the ground, into the air, tucking its second body into new and complex shapes. Its gel self is less complex than that of a mammal; however, the sheer delirium it feels is no less potent.
Later, XXXYYX joins its other half and readies itself for life’s end. The goo absorbs the whole device back into its protective sac. As the slime’s shape was bound to the six devices, this leg of the journey will be slowest of all. Protecting the instrument is now its most important task.
The slime moves and meditates, feeling the life-energy emitted by its species counterpart. The vibrations tickled the sensory hairs that lined the bottom of the Adapter’s form. It realizes the general direction of its companion.
XXXYYX heads northwest.
#
The determined slime crawls over rocks and rubble, destroyed and discarded objects of centuries past. It moves through the dark (soot blackened the planet’s atmosphere) and feels the scars of destruction—not only the depressed landscape, but the spectral, lingering life energies of creatures wiped out in immediate mass extinction.
XXXYYX imagined them: getting vaporized in an explosion, melted in a volcano, pulverized in a storm. Plenty simply starved to death. All carbon-based lifeforms perished over the course of three solar cycles. Even plants and single-cell organisms died. The stifling heat, of intense solar-radiation heating the black, absorbing atmosphere, exterminated all life. XXXYYX didn’t sense the heat (the slime-bug’s internal temperature regulation mechanism was a coolant cream that lathered the exterior of the goo, giving the biomass a pleasant tingling) but it couldn’t stop feeling the sadness.
The slime embraced its despair, knowing the energy would be necessary for the final song. Yet, the feelings made movement go even slower. Already, the obtuse shapes of the computer drives made XXXYYX’s journey more difficult. It couldn’t go through most things, instead forced to slosh over them. The despair only compounded its difficulty. Feeling so empathetically in-touch with the megadeath made XXXYYX want to slather and sulk into a dense foam.
Yet, the sad slime maintains its northern course.
With a slow and resounding emanation, 242424252524 life-energy begins to occupy XXXYYX’s sensitivity-field. The two slimes sense each other. This is it, the unification begins.
The memories of the forlorn planet become easier to ignore, as XXXYYX plods toward its true purpose. Two feelings fill the slime with crackling jolts: a coexistence of sad, desolate finalization and hopeful, upcoming purpose increase the slime’s electric energy through synergistic amplitudes.
XXXYYX practically reaches 242424252524. It explores the degenerative remains of the forgotten rock city with its sticky body. It knows exactly where to go. Finding the structure that houses its counterpart, XXXYYX slinks inside.
The room is a vast hall, curving out in a massive dome. It swirls into a point at the top. The floor beneath caved in, a craggily hole holds splintering wood, inert metal, dirty, red fabric. Resting, far back near the bottom-end of this massive chamber, is 242424252524.
Unlike its counterpart, 242424252524 looks nothing like a microscopic bug. This Adapter is essentially a collection of blue pinwheels—spinning, circular discs that fluctuate in a way that suggest designs of vague togetherness. The pinwheels bop and spin, a collection of moving, floppy tendrils—like yellow dandelion petals blowing in the breeze. The leg-petals are blue, purple, pink, turquoise—they’re connected by long, boundary shaping petals. These shapes float together in the identity pattern that manifests itself as 242424252524.
Like last time, they are in exact proximity. But this time, with XXXYYX’s functional pheromonic device, the joining does commence. XXXYYX lets the drivers slip from its storage sac, slopping wet out from the goo-mass. XXXYYX sops up the protective gel’s moisture. It relaxes and shapes itself back into wire-spaghetti. Inserting itself into the six devices, the tones begin.
The motors move; tones project through the remains of the bombed-out theater. XXXYYX’s hum resonances a harmonic hum from 242424252524–a sloshing percussive mushing adds to the weird cacophony.
The two now share emotional-energization.
242424252524’s life-energy seeps into the porous, slime body of XXXYYX; it trembles the molecules in the massive bug-slime-shape, evaporating XXXYYX into a mist. It feels amazing and inevitable. The motors still powered by XXXYYX’s gaseous jelly, the drive’s tiny hinges move quickly, sound emanates throughout the huge hall from not just the machine but the air molecules clouding the two Adapters. XXXYYX is cloud now, it wafts over the cavernous hole below.
242424252524 becomes tumescent, its metabolic goo pumping through its internal biomasses. The pinwheels of 242424252524 shook to the tones emanating throughout the room, amplified by the slime condensation. 242424252524 floated into the middle of the room, and curved its pinwheels into amplifying funnels. The tones swirled within the sliding cones.
The solid slime’s goos become more porous, absorbing its cloud counterpart. Both lose their loose visages and meld into new goo. The shape is like a spherical globe. The neon colored slimes mix into a stony, woolen grey. The emotional-energy violently vibrates the creature, internal pressure counterbalancing itself, stabilizes the unified goo. Heat courses through the gloppy, internal mush. The trembling motion of the internal biomasses rupture with new life flesh, old organs become bigger, better ones. Quadruple the hydrogen is alchemized into satiating nutrient resin.
The new organism feels a calming sensation of unity. Its feelings now powered by synthesis. The one-mind whole of the giant slime-ball radiated throughout its throbbing biomass. Fulfilled, it now will do two things: exist and grow.
The master slime possesses an acidic composition, melting the rocky remains of the dead planet like a drop of water dripped on a hot skillet. The rock’s moist essence dissolves into the quaking, grey creature—growing and growing and growing. In just hours, the slime is the size of a continent.
The enlargement begins. The grey gook expands and contracts to the sound of the air emanating around it. With each pseudo-breath, it increases in mass. The sloppy, grey mess overflows the chamber’s massive hole, bubbling through the broken rubble around it.
On ground where water once sat, the eroded rock crumbles quickly under the weight of the pulsating biomass. Every molecule contributes to the growing total density of the grey slime’s shape. The mass seeps deep into the cracks of the planet’s hardest rock, encompassing the planet’s molten core. Exothermic heat from the lava encases in the sediment shards, and further energizes the slime giant. The slime becomes a gelatinous mass of liquid metal hydrogen.
Everything that was on the planet is turned to grey slime. The former celestial body ceased to exist. It is slime now.
The unified Adapter contains the planet’s fleeting memory. As the organic slime-mass hurls through the vacuum of space, a massive collection of expanding slime, it slowly forgets everything that once was. The old world is gone now.
With nothing left to absorb from the planet, the big slime is complete–it splits off into smaller slimes—some as big as a moon, others as small as a molecule. These slime-sheds disperse throughout the universe; the new, little slimes would catalog and process more knowledge to be synthesized by the Elder Guardians.
The wholeness of XXXYYX and 242424252524 floats toward those same ancient God slimes. Now, XXXYYX242424252524, the mega-slime is more so slime synthesized from the molecules of melted planets. Once the messy mass meets its Elder specimen, it will bubble and burst like a rupturing boil, ejecting itself into the mass of the ancient slimes and becoming old again. The popping sound that erupts from the gush won’t be heard in the vacuum of space, but it will vibrate within the Elder slimes at the same frequency as XXXYYX drive tones.