The Things [short fiction]

"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."

A clever and beautiful response to Campbell's classic SF/horror novelette.

A little confusing to me... "I" was used, but it seemed to me that "we" would have been a better fit, maybe.

As the title promises, this is a replay of the standard "The Thing" scenario - a group of scientists working at a Polar base, find something long buried, which then awakens and goes on the rampage and must be stopped to save the world. The twist here is the nature of the "thing", hinted at in the title. A brilliantly inventive re-imagining of a tired cliche.

Extremely jarring and unnecessary final sentence but otherwise very interesting.

Fanfiction done right. No one gets non-human sentience like Peter Watts.

interesting short story about a biomass that is slowly invading earth. it may have helped if I had seen the movie to have a little reference for the story

interesting short story about a biomass that is slowly invading earth. it may have helped if I had seen the movie to have a little reference for the story

p cool short story, I won't ruin it.