WRITING ADVICE: Creating Alien Aliens, Part 27: I Made A REALLY Weird Sapient Alien…What Do YOU Think?

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota. Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction. After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...

I’ll be expanding on Creating Alien Aliens Part 15 – you can read it here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2022/05/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html

I’m going to assume that if you want to follow along with my process, you’ll read that first – I did before I tried this. I also at least SKIMMED the links I found, too. The most important point in this exercise is this: “The biggest difference between Humans and Sapient Jellyfish is that one Jellyfish is an entire world. The parts of the Jellyfish ARE NEVER ALONE! They are always together; always experiencing each other. Would they even understand the IDEA of the alien? I think Humans get it because anyone outside of us is an alien. You don’t know what I’m thinking; I don’t know what you’re thinking. And even with my very dearest friend, my wife…I truly have no idea what she is thinking.”

“An Intelligent Jellyfish would never be alone because it would be aware of all of its parts…”

So…The boat pulls alongside the spiral, careful not to keep the motor going. I’m trying to make first contact with something that I’ve never even seriously considered being sapient and chopping it into little bits wouldn’t be a particularly effective opening contact. I look down into the water, then in a suit, I slip in. No tech to start with, no wetsuit, just a mask, snorkel, and flippers, I recall an observation from the article: “This gelatinous, stringy siphonophore is composed of millions of tiny cloned organisms called zooids. Many of the smaller components are equipped with lethal stinging cells that stun and kill the bizarre animal's intended prey. Those specialized organisms connect into a coiled string that cooperate together as a team.” And then, “Witnessed in a saucer-shaped feeding position, the fragile organism floats in the fathomless depths searching for food like some otherworldly phantom. It’s made of millions of interconnected clones. There are about a dozen different jobs a clone can do in the colony, & each clone is specialized to a particular task. THIS animal is massive. AND not just massive, the colony is exhibiting a stunning behavior: it’s hunting.”

According to research and a dab of speculation, we know that the Siphonophoroid would have zooids that are either polyps (stick to things) or medusae (move around like tiny jellyfish – or as a groups, they would amplify what an individual would do; nectophores assist in the propulsion and movement in water and can coordinate the swimming of colonies or work in conjunction with reproductive structures in order to provide propulsion during colony detachment. Others zooids like bracts protect the colony and maintain neutral buoyancy; gastrozooids are polyps that assist in feeding; palpons regulate the circulation of gastrovascular fluids; pneumatophores are gas-filled floats that help the colonies maintain their orientation in water and assist with flotation and in some, function to sense pressure changes and regulate chemotaxis in a direction corresponding to a gradient of increasing or decreasing concentration of a particular substance.

Lemme abbreviate that: they can stick to stuff or move; coordinate movement of different parts of the organism; detach parts of the colony; protect the colony; eat; circulate what was eaten; stay in a particular orientation; sense pressure changes and concentrations of chemicals in the water.

Once in the water, the Siphonophoroid…ugh! Let’s call them Sipho – because the sapient isn’t a creature like us. It’s a colony. If it does something, maybe it has to agree to do something. I sort-of understand that – I only have a limited number of parts of me that can act independently. I’m sure you can think of some, but I’m going with my heart – not doing anything exciting, it beats nice and steady. When I see a Blue or Bull or Hammerhead or Great White, but heart uncontrollably begins to beat faster! Theoretically, Sipho can ALL act independently.

So why doesn’t it? Why does this alien creature choose to stick together when any single part of it can take a vacation and no one would care? One advantage: so OTHER predators won’t eat it. Together, they make a rather intimidating creature – it certainly weirds me out, there swimming inside a huge coil of literally trillions of organisms!

I think I have enough to begin to “think like an alien”. This is first contact, so what does the sapient Sipho think?

There is unexpected movement near Us. Not the smooth movement of the usual creatures of our world – the sleek rush of a shark, not interested in anything like us; though the electrical activity of its neuron clusters are minor and mostly organized along simple response to environmental stimulation. The longer tendrils that might mean longer thoughts are not present.”

Even the larger Swimmers, while their electrical activity is long, it feels…slow. Content. Stay too long in their breeding waters, and We fall asleep! When we drift down where the pressure flattens us and there is no sense whatever of the shortened stimulation of the electromagnetic spectrum that amuses us. But we only look at the Deeps to see its differences. We bathe in the glory of the closeness of the light above the water.

The Unexpected startles the parts of us nearest and a highly coordinated pulse of EM races from one end of us to the other. The impulses of the Unexpected are long indeed – though not because it is long as we are. It is COILED impulse, as if the fizzing we speak with from one end to the other instead spins frantically in a very small space. It contemplates as we do, yet its thoughts are frantic; as if fearful.

The colony mostly decides to investigate. As we close the colony around the Unexpected, we form a tube, not touching it, but around it. We can now taste it – many tastes are the same, but some? Some are both unknown and startling. It is more solid than we are as well; we subject ourselves to the worldwide currents, drifting sometimes even into the near-freezing waters where the EM waves grow long; lazy; and the fluids must concentrate in us to avoid freezing solid. But the Unexpected is…entirely alien; like nothing…

Pause, some of the colony are clustering. Shortly we know that the Unexpected isn’t Unknown! Some have felt and tasted something like this. The Unexpected moves like we do, but…it is not like us. One part of it remains above the world, in the Above where we go to die; but it plunges into the water, and it’s as if the water around it lights up!

The part now in the water fizzes like the water in the highest storm or the deadliest struggle between the largest of the water’s inhabitants. It is stunning in the intensity of the fizzing. It nearly matches ours when we coil tightly to explore new parts of the world…

THAT is what we are reminded of! Our body, when we draw so close together, one of the sleek swimmers finds it worth their effort to hunt us. Then we must waste the fizzing on protection rather than experiencing. So little time passes and the Unexpected vanishes. There was no warning. It didn’t not swim quickly like the sleek ones. It is gone, as if only a dream. We decide to sacrifice a group of chemical tasters and move the memories of the Unexpected to one place.

Perhaps we will taste them again; feel their fizzing clusters again? Is it truly a “they” as we are? Might they be somehow less than Us? THAT is an strange thought…we begin to compose the memory.

What kind of Human-Sipho story could I create with this? What kind of conflict? Sipho would be familiar with being prey; Humans are academically familiar with being prey – probably what keeps more people from wilderness camping or swimming with sharks or hunting lions. We’d just as soon not find ourselves on the menu.

I will say it was a…strange experience trying to…feel alien…Later…

My alien: https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/blog-post-embedded--tablet/public/2020/04/creature.jpg
Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae (basic background on the lifeforms and their characteristics); https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/deep-sea-predator-millions-clones (article is more informative on the Siphonophore discovered a bit over a year ago off the coast of Australia), the larger YouTube on the bottom is a more general survey of the creatures (colony????), the Tweet is just a 30 second clip from the larger video…); https://theconversation.com/it-feels-instantaneous-but-how-long-does-it-really-take-to-think-a-thought-42392 (how fast does a nerve impulse travel?)
Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg