PJ’s Blog

The Aliens are a writer’s nightmare, just as they are a nightmare for the Media of 27th century Earth. They are a race that inhabits red dwarf systems, where the energy given off my the star is a lot fainter then the Sun’s, but those worlds are three times as old as the Sun. They live at different scales than our own. Their race was an advanced, space-faring civilization before the sun existed. In fact, their homeworld was a rogue red dwarf that was caught into the orbit of the Milky Way some 8 billion years ago. It took them hundreds of millions of years to slowly colonize the whole Galaxy. They inhabit the underground tunnels and caves of highly geologically active worlds.

Their biochemical make-up is based on carbon and silicon polymers, and their chemistry includes a lot more metals in various enzymatic processes. Their genetic information is stored in silicon-metal complexes, and their cells have sulfonate-carbon walls. Their high metal content interacts with the strong magnetic fields of the worlds that they inhabit and allows them to produce large ammounts of bioelectricity, their basic energy source. They have a specialized organ for centralized electricity production, and have a nervous system made of conductive metal “wires”. They have no central nervous system, but their body is lined with single-cell electricity generator that act as an “all -body” brain. This gives them prodigious “calculation” power, a little in the same spirit as massively parallel supercomputer. They feel electromagnetic fields, and are also highly touch sensitive. They have no sense of taste or smell (so no chemical receptors accompanying air intake), and eat mostly other plant-like organisms that they grow specifically for food.

To humans they appear as tall, hulking and lumbering giants. Their bodies have two symmetry axes: a two-sided top-down symmetry, as well as a three-sided around symmetry: Their bodies are spheroid in shape, and they have three lower and three upper appendages that are identical. Those appendages are arm-like, with three main joints: one at the body, one at mid-length, and one near the end, where they have prehensile organs, like a claw or a hand, with retractable high-precision tentacle-like protrusions.

When in movement, they use only one set of “legs” for moving in open spaces, keeping the other set folded against their bodies if not carrying anything. When in tunnels or in their ships, or if climbing, they can use all six legs expertly, and carry heavy loads with only one of those appendages. They have no eyes or sense of vision in a earth sense, but have directional EMF detectors that are sensitive, among other things, to what we consider visible light, although with nowhere near our level of specialization. They have “mouths” both on top and below their bodies, and they ingest food, keep it in a stomach pocket until fully digested, and release the waste through the same opening. The time required for the digestion means that they use both of their mouths in alternance. They have no pre-set “up” or “down”, and are stricly top-bottom symmetrical.

More on the Aliens another day…