Reproduction

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Where does it keep its knowledge of forms, then, if not in DNA? Its hiding place answers this also. Rather than clumsily try to pack its genome library into each of its cells, it subsumes all of the bodily principles of its victims (including their mind) within itself as a principle. When it wants a new form, then, these forms arise spontaneously, reincarnated in spiritual and physical bondage at its pleasure. When the Thing splits, these principles must also split, like a hologram, so that each creature retains a full set of the ideas.

A problem arising here is the question of how a soul can be in two forms at once. The answer is quite simply that it cannot, and that is why the Thing will never be able to produce two identical perfect imitations of the same victim. The victim’s soul, once employed by one Thing, could not be employed by the other. Bodily forms, genetic codes, and the like, would not be subject to this problem, for they are composed of an infinitude of principles, from which the Thing can simply grab a handful like building blocks from a bag, whenever it wants to construct an ad hoc bricolage. Given enough Things, one could imagine them running out of imitation material in this way, which nicely explains the ironic dovetail between their physiology and their compulsion to assimilate all life. Even as they gain new forms, they are losing the potential to use those forms through reproduction!

In cases of unexpected tissue loss, how does the Thing, as a mental singularity, "know" to grant that bit of tissue its memory-library? As we saw with Palmer, the Thing isn’t able to prevent it from happening, so it must be an intrinsic effect. To understand this, remember that the assimilation process touches every cell, and so absorbs the spirit of every cell. Every biotic soul in that body is replicated and subsumed by the Thing-principle, and therefore when recreated, is recreated /out of/ that Thing-principle. Thus, although the Thing hides the mental evidence of itself from its victims by generating amnesia using the regions associated with cognition, the Thing itself persists as a whole in the whole body. When split, it’s again like splitting a hologram, except that since each offsprung Thing is a uniquely composed entity, the principle applies equally to both. Only the use of souls themselves are limited, as mentioned above.

A form’s potential intelligence and power, depends on its size. The smaller the form, the less capable it is of recognizing the curve, and acting. When a Thing bleeds, its blood does not recognize a problem, having no mind. While sitting in a petri dish, the blood is unaware of its predicament, just like Norris after his heart attack. It can neither plan, nor stop itself from reacting. Thus, it will sit in the dish, responding to the threat of desiccation by forming a simple neural network. This network can’t think in terms of either space or time, only in terms of good/noxious stimuli. Because of this, it can’t go anywhere, because it has nowhere to go – every place it knows of contains perfectly identical threat, so it can’t decide what to do. When a hot needle is introduced, it suddenly has a specific threat to respond to, and respond it does.

This places a natural, non-arbitrary lower limit on the efficient size of organism a Thing can assimilate. It unquestionably can imitate cells, and therefore must have imitated the dust mites and microbes inhabiting the men it attacked, for these organisms are in a certain sense a part of that man’s body. We need certain symbiotic bacteria living in our eyelashes, intestines, and such to facilitate certain bodily processes. So the Thing must have imitated these creatures as well. What makes them non-infectious, is that there is no genetic component to the Thing at all, that it is (ironically!) a creature of principle. Dust mites and microbes are incapable of the nervous awareness needed to generate characteristically Thing-like responses, other than merely moving away from noxious stimuli. In other words, a phase-shift occurs, beyond which there is no way to distinguish between Thing and non-Thing life.

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