Re: The Dividing Line - Medical Bay
Caitlin holds her hands up as if to slow Draven down. "Hold up now, you've got some good ideas, but you've got some bad assumptions in there too. First off, I can think of three examples on Earth alone where a Symbiotic creature takes some control of it's host, one of which completely. Both symbiotes and parasites can sometimes do that, which is why you can't base your decision on that alone. The DNA is merged, and death is not the final condition for the host, that makes it a symbiote. Second, the entire electricity thing, I believe you're right, which is why I think that it's melon-sized to begin with. There's nothing in the Human genome that would allow us to store or use electricity like that, I think the original creature might have that as either a defensive mechanism or as a means to disable a host, perhaps both."
She stops for a minute here, thinking through the conversation before continuing. "Next, the lack of telomeres. I might have been hasty to say that it is adding onto our genes, though that's certainly what it looks like. I always thought telomeres seemed a little redundant, being such massive structures for what is essentially a period on a sentence. There is some alien genes on the end of every human chromosome, so it may be that it is constantly adding to the genome, or it may be that it uses a more efficient way to end itself than what our gene structure uses. As for the telepathy, in my mind that indicates some sort of intelligence, and while this thing certainly seems capable of it, I'd like to think that if it was intelligent, it would have called for a pickup a fair time ago, but that's entirely conjecture."
"Now, what does that leave?" Sha thinks out loud, counting the points on her fingers. "Right, the possibility of someone having actually created these in a lab. I can't tell myself, at least not at just this first look, but I sincerely hope that it was, because I want to meet whoever it was that did it, they're a genius! It took me four years to hodgepodge the genetic material for my ship together from existing creatures, and I'm still improving on it. To make something like this using all-new base pairs, have it mesh so well with the genetic material already inherent in this galaxy, and possibly to have it able to improve upon itself, must have taken decades to do, and would be an amazing scientific breakthrough. Do you realize what can be done with this much more genetic diversity? Any species with these WXYZ genes has effectively cubed their gene pool!"
