The Third XCOM Saga, part 15, RP Interlude 26

As written by Spirit Kay…

Memo re: Alien sentience

I must make a quick note here. The blues have human-equivalent brains — they could probably pick up one of our guns and figure out how to use it; they certainly did with a water pistol. What they don’t have is any trace of learning, a culture. While their metabolism is extremely fast, and they literally die of old age in a month at best, their perception of time isn’t — they have no time to learn anything.

The other creatures appear to be too simple to be sentient, even the other humanoids.

I note that the only similarity between this group of invaders and the one we’re familiar with is, if anything, the brainsuckers — while their genetic code is wholly different, they look and act like mini-chrysalids. Their intention is to sneeze out part of their nervous system into a victim’s mouth or nose. However, the resulting zombification or similar process would not cause another chryssalid, or even a brainsucker, to spawn — in addition, much like a bee, the brainsucker has one shot at this. The rest of the brainsucker organism cannot continue independent existence without the kentrogon it tries to inject, much like the crab parasite Sacculina. I reiterate that these are morphological similtudes only; brainsuckers are not genetically related to Chryssalids, or for that matter, Earth crab parasites.

We will have to study the entire alien life cycle to make heads or tails of this. I realize there isn’t much money to spend on this, but we can work with the existing facilities for now, and no new lab equipment needs purchasing — the more live specimens we have, the faster we will get a complete picture. Have the Etherals completely changed strategy?