Researchers creating life made entirely of metal

[Luna]

http://dvice.com/archives/2011/09/researchers-dev.php

[Triple Zero]

Death Metal, Life Metal ...

is good thing. when we accidentally make evil sentient robots, we can go all biological warfare on them now!

[Don Coyote]

Wow.


i can see this going very very wrong.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yay!

[Don Coyote]

Is it weird that I wondering how we could use this to make cybernetics? Or as a basis for Transformer fiction?

[Luna]

Wow.


i can see this going very very wrong.

ROBOT ZOMBIES!  This is gonna be epic.

[Don Coyote]

Wow.


i can see this going very very wrong.

ROBOT ZOMBIES!  This is gonna be epic.

An infectious plague that turns people into computer eating monsters?

[Luna]

Wow.


i can see this going very very wrong.

ROBOT ZOMBIES!  This is gonna be epic.

An infectious plague that turns people into computer eating monsters?

Living nanobots, infecting humans, and using them as transport systems to spread themselves...

[Don Coyote]

Wow.


i can see this going very very wrong.

ROBOT ZOMBIES!  This is gonna be epic.

An infectious plague that turns people into computer eating monsters?

Living nanobots, infecting humans, and using them as transport systems to spread themselves...

YOU HACKED MY EYES!!!! YOU BASTARDS!!!!!!!
                      /

[Luna]

It all started off so innocently.  Pure science, for the sake of science.  Could life evolve without carbon?  Is it possible for life to exist made purely out of metal?  They started the research at the University of Glasgow.  Tungsten, oxygen, phosporus, microchips, assembled with the capacity to reproduce themselves, organize themselves.

It was Dok Hamish Howl at the University of Tuscon that came up with the innovation.  Some say it was a stroke genius...  Others vow he was off his nut on cactus at the time.  Nobody knows for sure, and Dok isn't talking, not after the escape.

They're devilishly hard to detect, we all know that.  They get into the bloodstream.  Once they reach the brain, there's no way to remove them without killing the host.  And they spread...  Any body fluid will do it.  Spitting in someone's eye is now a whole new level of terror-inducing. 

They communicate on some level that we... that humans haven't figured out, yet.  They can sense each other, work together.  They can't access what's in the brains they occupy, but they're learning.  They're learning, so fast, they're getting harder and harder to detect.  Motor skills are improving, they hardly shamble any more, once they've threaded through an entire system, and they remind each other to eat, drink, to keep the bodies working.

We're losing, gentlemen, and there's nothing to do about it.

[Don Coyote]

Tuesday morning

They got Fred last night. We will never know how, and we don't know for how long she's been one, but it's obvious that she is one of them now. We caught her hacking into the water supply. Had to boil the entire lake. We aren't even sure if that works anymore.

[Luna]

Run with it. 

[Doktor Howl]

http://dvice.com/archives/2011/09/researchers-dev.php

Life made

entirely

out of metal, you

say?

[Don Coyote]

Friday afternoon

Out on patrol. We shot a deer. It was to a deer what semi is to a pickup. It had a strange metallic sheen on it antlers and hooves. Took 10 rounds from Twid's old elephant gun to knock it down.

Don't know why we were surprised. Seems obvious really. More stable locomotion and less higher functions to override. The things I saw during the autopsy were not meant to be seen by human eyes.

[Triple Zero]

The things I saw during the autopsy were not meant to be seen by human eyes.

[constructive criticism] sorry but this is a cop-out. How can a deer infected with metal bacteria contain stuff not meant to be seen by human eyes? Mercury blood? Circuit board organs? "Not meant to be seen by human eyes" gives me association with the eldritch, the paranormal, transdimensional, Lovecraft-style horrors, etc. But not cybernetic deer.