stephendann:

official-data:

jewishdragon:

katy-l-wood:

You know, in all those “humans are the creepy/fucked up alien species” posts I can’t believe we haven’t touched on organ donation yet. 

 When they heard that the human general had fallen ill to a disease of the organ known as the liver the troops began to hope that it might turn the tide of the war. Research indicated that such diseases could be fatal after all. The organ did something similar to the flagulaxin in that it filtered out toxins so when it stopped functioning the human would slowly be poisoned to death by his own body. Or so they believed.

But then he came back.

A foot soldier was captured and answers demanded. Was it a medication? Had the sickeness been a ruse to fool them?

“Nah, man. This kid on a motorcycle wiped out on the I9 freeway so they gave the general his liver since they were a match.”

“They…what?”

“They gave him his liver. The kid was dead, and he was an organ donor. And he was a genetic match to the general.”

“They…cut the liver out of one of your young and placed it in an elder and it…worked?”

“I mean, he wasn’t that young. Mid twenties or something. But yeah, that’s essentially it.”

The interrogator and his assistant both regurgitated their most recent meal and ran from the room. Living in places like the “Australia” were one thing, but taking the organs of dead bodies and placing them in the living? What was WRONG with this species?

No wait make it better. A living person can donate a piece of their liver! It doesn’t have to be a dead person.

“You killed one of your own to replace the broken part of the higher ranking human?”

“No of course only a small piece of a one was needed to replace the general’s bad one”

“Who got the bad one?”

“No one! it was thrown away”

“Someone, gave a piece of their organ to someone else to use??? And they both lived???”

“Yeah”

But what if the aliens were like salamanders who can naturally regenerate damaged body parts? And when they find out humans lack that ability they think “We have an advantage over them” then to their shock they discover that we’ve come up with work-arounds for that lack. Also prosthetic limbs. “Wait … You’re telling me that you can’t regrow your leg … So you just BUILD one?!”

Trying to describe a human to a species that had never met one was getting increasingly difficult.  To start with, they seemed to exist in every possible state – solid, liquid, gas and crystaline. A core calcium infrastructure with a porous organic compound layered over it, through which fluid and gas travelled under the regulation  of a range of organic pipework, pumps and processing plants, all coated in a renewable organic surface layer. That was weird enough.

Then came the discovery that the human was semi-modular.  Component fluids could be swapped out and substituted – humanity had built some form of external versions of a range of the organic pumps and processors, and had manual, automatic and remotely operated variants of their core pump processor (the heart).  Internal parts could be exchanged, or replaced with suitable originals.  Something about needing genuine human compatible parts, known as donor organs, and the voluntary post-life nature of these donations seemed ineffective to many observer species, and postively horrifying to those who held the sanctity of the post-life body. Considering a fallen comrade as an accessible source of component parts was just beyond the pale, and to have an proactive harvesting regime was just unbelievable. What was wrong with these creatures that death should be rejected to such an extent that they would become hybrids of dead and living creatures? Did they think death would bypass them, thinking the component part they carried was already ticked off some post-life database, thus granting them an immunity card in the eternal island vote?

Weirdly though, these quasi-modular humans could not be assembled from component parts. Even the human histories, insofar as the human documentation systems were trustworthy, indicated that efforts to construct a modular human from parts, pieces and high voltage was deemed unwise, and mostly only suitable to be remembered in October in ritual costumes.  That said, a human containing sufficient of their original parts could be restored from dead state with a sufficient electric discharge, leading many to suspect that the creatures existed in an energy state alongside their gas, liquid, solid, and crystal forms.

Then of course, was that very human approach to limb loss – construction of alternate limbs from non-human parts. Suffice to say, most sentient machine species are horrified by the process, and many machine worlds are refusing to acknowledge humans are real, and are starting to campaign against the continued discussion of these creatures as organic propaganda.

They may have a very valid point.  These things make no sense from a design specification standpoint.