Terrestrial Alien ✔

Chapter 44: Terrestrial Alien

It's about the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953. In it, the two scientists tried to simulate the conditions thought to be present in very early Earth—before even any living microorganisms existed—attempting to recreate the chemical origins of life that somehow happened in those conditions. The entire chapter is about all the ways life could have possibly been created on Earth where there previously was none.

"This part of the book caught my attention because... Well, I don't remember anything before landing on Earth. I don't think I was actually in the meteor. The stuff that made me was."

"What... What are you saying?" Joshua asks, looking to me with his brows drawn.

"The book talks about how organic molecules can be formed from inorganic molecules. How life on Earth may have started in the Hadean Eon—where the planet was chaotic and barely formed, without even an atmosphere—created from meteorites hitting the surface, bringing with them new chemicals that hadn't been on Earth before, mixing with the existing ones to create something... new."

"Life." Joshua whispers with wonder, as if the lesson is coming back to him.

I nod enthusiastically, "Yes. It talks about the gases that were brought to Earth from other planets: methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water vapor... Which combined with the conditions of the planet and helped make not only the atmosphere, but the first microscopic life!"

The more I talk, the more I'm on a roll. All this time on my own, reading these textbooks, pondering over these theories, and I finally get to share them with Joshua. The excitement is taking over.

Maybe my enthusiasm is infectious, because the more I explain, the more I can see tentative understanding spark in Joshua's eyes. I can see him turning it over in his mind, trying to understand.

"So..?" He prompts, urging me to continue. "If you didn't come here in the meteorite, how do you, well, exist?"

"I think everything I'm made of was in the meteorite. At least mostly everything. What wasn't there in the meteorite was here on Earth, and essentially, what I'm saying is, I think that—I think I was made when the meteorite hit the planet."

Joshua's eyes are wide as he stares at me, speechless.

"But... how? How could stuff in a meteorite mixing with stuff in the Windsor desert make you?" He asks, gesturing to all of me at once, struggling to wrap his mind around it.

I'm filled with so much energy, I just can't sit down any longer. Bounding to my feet, I pace the room as I speak, demonstrating my words in the air with my hands.

"I think—well, I think that meteorite has to have come from a planet similar to Earth when it was in the Hadean Eon, filled with rapidly evolving cells and molecules from elements that might not even exist on this planet. Frozen in space, only to be melted into gases once more upon entering Earth's atmosphere. Combined with the energy of entering the atmosphere and then the materials actually in the atmosphere and the desert it struck, well, it just might have been enough to create a living thing! It's just a theory, a crazy theory really, but it's the best one I have."

"But then why do you look like a human? Why do you turn into a monster and why do you have all those markings? It still leaves so many questions unanswered!" Joshua is watching me pace back and forth, and he's playing nervously with the pages of the textbook, letting them fall with a fwip, fwip sound.

I stop and grin at him. "Oh, I have an answer for that too."

I've had plenty of time to think about this, and plenty of desire to know the reason for my strange existence. Hoping for some sort of purpose... Though truthfully, I think I'm an just accident. An anomaly.