Sub Basement 4: Xenobiology and Extraterrestrial Containment

This is the third installment in my Hyde Heavy Containment series. Click here for a link to the previous installment: Hazardous Materials.

***

We’d ascended the stairs to the next floor door. Igor eyed the plastic plaque reading ‘Xenobiology and Extraterrestrial Containment.’.

“Is that a joke?” Igor asked, bewildered.

“Oh, not at all!”

Though this fact has been obscured from public knowledge by the CIA and FBI, Area 51 was indeed compromised during the infamous September 17th raid. Following this event, the government had to subcontract the containment of many extraterrestrials and their own super soldier prototypes to Arete Laboratories. Of course, being that we are an international crime syndicate, this deal was kept under the table and paid for from the black budget. This floor was built to cater to one of the US government’s contracts. It’s a prison for aliens. Part of the deal is that we also get to study them.

“Kurrr-waa.” Igor muttered.

“Oh, and don’t tell anyone about this or the men in black will come for you.”

I opened the door and got blasted by a wall of hot air like some kinda summer supermarket from hell. My hazmat suit shrank around me like a shrinkwrap and my ears started ringing. The remaining henchman, who’d already taken off his hazmat suit, started choking and clutching his throat and his reddening eyes watered.

Igor ran to the henchman’s side, trying to get his suit back onto him, but it was already too late. Even after getting the gas mask back on him, the henchman kept gasping and coughing. He tried administering CPR, until he started coughing up fluid into his mask and convulsing.

Igor stammered. “S-shit, w-what do I do? You’re doctors, are either of you medical doctors?” 

“Dude, calm down. Only an ambulance could save him now, and there’s no way to get one in time. Let it go, he’s just a henchman. Their job is literally to be disposable.” I said, my hand on his shoulder.

Igor glared at me through his mask. Dr. Whatshisface broke the awkward silence by trumping it with his own supreme awkwardness. “That… was probably some kind of chemical weapon. S-so we need to hurry. Our suits will run out of air soon.”

I followed him down the hall, noticed the distinctive lack of lackey footsteps, then looked back. Igor was still standing back by the door, staring at the henchman. “Hey, Igor, c’mon! Oh, and grab his gun! He doesn’t need it, y’know?”

We stopped as we heard heavy footsteps from around a bend in the hallway. I quietly peeked around the corner. It was an Orx, which is one of the aliens the government gave us. I don’t know why they named it that.

The Orx was sniffing along the floor covered in dead minions like a bloodhound, rifling through their pockets for pennies and ripping brass buttons off their clothes. He was holding an odd tool that I wouldn’t have guessed to be a pickaxe with alien ergonomics if he hadn’t started using it to mine out the concrete walls after his nose led him there. He exposed a bundle of copper wires and tore them out, then grunting in surprise as the hall’s electric lighting went with it.

Igor asked what we stopped for, catching up from behind. I tried to shush him, but it was too late. The Orx had already extended its appendages in alarm and was lumbering straight towards us!

Dr. Whatshisface put a hand on my rifle, saying that gunfire would just attract more of them. He assured me that he’ll take care of it himself. Whatshisface stood in the middle of the hall in a wide stance, produced a scalpel (I thought he was a cell biologist?), and slit open the palm of his hand through the suit. Blood pooled in his hand, his supernatural white blood cells already annihilating any bits of dust or organic material left on the glove. 

“Blood Attack: LEGION OF 3,500 BILLION!” He says, announcing his own attack like a weeaboo, before throwing the blood at the charging alien! He’s clearly practiced throwing liquids quite a bit for this attack as it’s actually pretty hard to get it to not just go all over the place.

Allegedly, Dr. Whatshisface has killed many with this attack and it’s basically a guaranteed one hit kill. Unfortunately, Orxs are so biochemically incompatible with earth life, being that the human immune system targets proteins and lipids and Orxs have neither of those, that this attack only surprised and painfully burned the Orx. 

Luckily, Orxian life is so incompatible with Earth life that there’s not really any risk of getting a disease from them. Our fluids are so full of oxygen and so basic as to instantly annihilate them. Turns out having acid for blood is a bit of a double edged sword as mixing acids and bases is generally bad no matter what planet you’re from.

I tried shooting it with my Gay Ray™ (which is completely silent if I turn off the cool pew pew noise) which also stunned and *confused* the Orx. This made enough time for Igor to get close and bash the Orx over the head with the but of his rifle, knocking it out. Successful stealth takedown! We’re so good at this.

I whispered back to Igor and Whatshisface that that was an Orx (plural; Orxs), an alien that needs special life support systems to make air they can breathe in their containment chambers. So I guessed that the support system had been connected to the AC for whatever reason. Which means that if this floor is already terraformed then the upper floors probably will be too soon, if not already. So we need to fix that immediately. The air in my hazmat suit was starting to get pretty stale, so we probably didn’t have much time to either. Fun!

I also said that if they start to smell rotten eggs, that probably means hydrogen sulfide is leaking into their suit. That or they need a shower. Whatshisface seemed oddly relieved by this information.

***

Conditions Orx can live in are remarkably similar to Earth’s, with the exception that instead of oxygen and carbon dioxide, they breathe sulfur monoxide and hydrogen sulfide. They’re also most comfortable at slightly higher temperatures and air pressures, which would explain why my ears were ringing.

On the Orxs’ homeworld, green oxygen photosynthesis never evolved, so they remained dependent on sulfur photosynthesis. There was a long time on earth, long before the evolution of multicellular life, where photosynthesis was not conducted with oxygen and carbon dioxide. There are actually multiple different ways of photosynthesizing, only one of which produces oxygen as a byproduct. Green oxygen photosynthesis arguably isn’t even the best, and it wasn’t the first. 

When the cyanobacteria first evolved green oxygen photosynthesis they started producing so much Oxygen gas, which if you didn’t know is extremely toxic to anything that isn’t specifically evolved to deal with it (and even a bit toxic to things that are) that they drove nearly every other species on the planet into extinction. And that’s why plants and most algae use oxygen photosynthesis today. 

We think their home planet was made from stardust that didn’t happen to have a lot of carbon because it only came from massive stars and/or white dwarfs, which are the stars that make oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, and silicon. Carbon and nitrogen are mainly produced by dying low mass stars. 

Lack of low mass star dust would imply their planet is very old and was harboring life nearly as soon as that was possible in the universe. Which would also imply that they’ve been evolving for much longer than we have.

People always think that silicon-based life wouldn’t have any carbon, but that’s dumb. They still have carbon, they just aren’t carbon based. ¹They’re silicon cringe. While carbon is stronger, lighter, and more reactive than silicon, it’s so rare on their planet that they evolved to use it more sparingly. They have silicone foldamers and sulfur polythinate chains in place of lipids and proteins.

***

The Orxs had set up a workshop in the breakroom, right outside the maintenance services room. One Orx was picking apart all the garbage and scrap they found into base materials, and another cleaned them with its own saliva. A couple were busy building a furnace out of clay they’d dug out from behind the walls. An old Orx was sitting off in the corner, working on some chunks of metal and a deconstructed assault rifle with a set of hand files and fitting them together to make some kind of device. Another Orx was busy using coffee mugs to mix some chemicals, while another dipped bits of cloth into a bucket of the stuff. They shook excess goo off the cloth and carried it to the center table where the makings of some kind of space suit was taking form.

The Orxs made a “machine gun”, but this is a very simple straight blowback SMG. Instead of a coil spring behind the bolt, it uses a fuckin’ crossbow to pull the bolt back into battery after every time it fires. To be fair, Orxian crossbow SMGs appear to be well machined and extremely efficient, at least as efficient as that kind of gun can be, but that kind of gun is still stupid. It’s really easy to get your hand caught in the reciprocating bow. We think their instinct for making SMGs somehow evolved from the instinct for making repeating crossbows.

Of course, if they want to shoot bigger bullets they resort back to single shot rifles. One of the particularly ingenious Orxs realized if they want to shoot more than once they can just add another barrel. That or they have a mutated rifle-making gene.

This is a fantastic metaphor for the kind of poorly engineered solutions evolution has made in our own bodies, by the way. All of their technology is like this.

***

As far as we can tell, the Orx avoided the great filter by being stupid.

We think the reason why space fairing alien civilizations are so rare in the galaxy is because the tendency for technological progression to greatly outpass evolution. Intelligent species gain the ability to annihilate themselves before they evolve the emotional maturity to not do that. What do you think happens when you give a caveman a nuke? By all rights we should have gone extinct several times over during the cold war, and we’ll have to be a lot luckier to survive long enough to explore the stars.

Humans are a war-like race because it was a good strategy when we fought with sticks and not many people actually died. At least not on the winning side. But as our weapons got better the cost of war became less worth it, the hatred, envy, and paranoia inside us driving us to kill each other never left. We “learned” our lesson after WWI, while the Orx *actually* learned it after millions of years bleeding in the trenches. By the time they could split the atom they had already evolved past war. 

Our ancestors only did what they wanted to do – mainly hunt, gather, have sex – and that just kept working. Office work is only soul draining because it’s completely different from anything we evolved to do. Orxs go through their entire lives doing only what they have an urge to do or what feels correct, and this brings them nothing but prosperity and peace. They seem to genuinely enjoy things like clerical work and math just as much as we enjoy violence. Meanwhile, Orxs don’t like violence. They fight and make weapons when necessary, such as when they’ve been kidnapped by an alien species, similar to when we do clerical work and math.

***

We snuck into the maintenance services. Despite having a very good sense of smell and the ability to see thermal radiation like the Predator, which they use to temper metal, apparently wearing thick double layered air tight hazmat suits does a good job camouflaging us in those regards.

As we came in we found more corpses. But these corpses looked like some kinda hippies dressed in Hot Topic and whatever falls off the back of army trucks. They had green “AWG” arm bands. AWG? Isn’t that that animal rights group that even PETA denounced for being too extreme? Did they free the Orxs? Well that was stupid, ‘cause they’re dead now. 

We fixed the life support systems. Fresh oxygenated air streamed through the vents. 

Just then, an Orx had spotted us spraying bullets in our general direction, not knowing that hydrogen sulfide is a flammable gas in the presence of oxygen, as a fireball expanded from the muzzle flash and engulfed the alien. 

The other Orxs coughed and clutched their breathing orifices, realizing what was happening (you know how we breathe through our mouths creating the possibility to choke on food? Orxs have the opposite problem. On the plus side, their genitals are in their mouths.) The Orxs ran back to their cells and shut the doors.

We peeled off our hazmat suits and basked in the fresh air, which still reeked of spoiled eggs, but still. 

Igor took me aside. “When I became your grad student, I thought all that was some kind of eccentric joke! I thought it was weird with all of the armed guards, but I just thought that is how American companies are. And it was one thing to find out about that whole kidnapping operation downstairs and the narrowly averted zombie apocalypse, I think I was too busy suppressing existential crisis to really think about that. Is any of this even legal? Are you criminals?”

I blinked. “Well, yeah. Obviously. Didn’t you read our LinkedIn?”

His face dropped into his hands. “Oy, blyat. I’m here as a grad student! Does this even count towards my PhD? Can I even put this on my CV? Getting arrested wouldn’t help my degree either, would it?”

I laughed. “Oh, is that all you’re worried about? Don’t worry about that, I’m not a real doctor either-“

“You’re not?! That’s it, as soon as we get out of here, I’m gone!”

“Wait, Igor, no!”

“My name is Igorevich Ivanovsky, cyka.” He growled.