Christian Bk / The Extremophile

the extremophile

1.
Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives
in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no
energy from the Sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a seam of gold on Level 104 of the Mponeng
Mine in Johannesburg. It lives in alkaline lakelets full of
arsenic. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in
a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It
breathes rust. It needs no oxygen to live. It can survive for
a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of
323 k, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for 100
millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It
does not die in the hellish infernos at the Stadtbibliothek
during the firebombing of Dresden. It does not burn when
exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via the
use of dna. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hairspray.

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3.

It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It inhabits caustic geysers of steam near the Grand Prismatic
Spring in Yellowstone National Park. It thrives in the acidic

It feeds on nylon byproducts. It feeds on stainless steel. It

inhabits an extinct volcano in the xeric waste of the Atacama
Desert, where the rain falls only once per century. It dwells in
a tide pool of battery acid. It blooms in a barren salina, ten
times saltier than the sea. It breathes hydrogen. It resides inside micropores of superdense granite, crushed down 3000
metres below the bedrock of the Earth. It can withstand
temperatures of 343 k, hotter than the flash point of aerosolized kerosene. It is ideally adapted to devour the rubber
tubing in the engines of the f-22 Raptor. It does not die in the
explosion that disintegrates the Space Shuttle Columbia
during orbital reentry. It does not die among the tornados
of hellfire, raging, unchecked, in the oil fields of Kuwait
during the Persian Gulf War. It gorges on plumes of petroleum, venting from the wellhead of the Deepwater Horizon.

runoff from heavy-metal mines, depleted of their zinc. It

abides in the shallows of the Dead Sea. It breathes methane.
It can withstand temperatures of 333 k, hot enough to melt
phosphorus. It resides in a fumarole of scalding seawater,
deep in the bathyal fathoms of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It
can endure pressures equivalent to 45 tons of force per
square inch, six times greater than the pressure at the nadir
of the ocean, one sixteenth of the pressure required to crush
graphite into diamond. It lives in the muck at the bottom of
the Mariana Trench. It is ideally adapted to devour the wreck
of the Titanic. It does not die during its own immolation in
the Nazi bonfires at the Opernplatz in Berlin. It eats jet fuel.

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4.

5.

It eats arsenic. It eats uranium. It resides inside the core of

Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It thrives in the topsoil of battlefields contaminated with toxic doses of lead. It thrives in
hydrochloric acid. It can withstand temperatures of 373 k,
hot enough to boil the water in its own cells. It is ideally
adapted to dwell inside the steel drums of radioactive waste,
now entombed at the Yucca Mountain Repository. It lives in
the stratosphere. It can survive exposure to the vacuum of
outer space. It can survive the effects of g-forces more than
2000 times greater than the surface gravity of the Earth. It
is the only known organism capable of exceeding speeds
of Mach 1. It does not die in the furnaces reserved for The
Satanic Verses after the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah of
Iran. It can, in fact, repair damage to its own genome so fast
that its dna never mutates. It never changes. It never evolves.

It devours plutonium. It can endure longterm exposure to

acids that eat away at human flesh. It can withstand temperatures of 383 k, hotter than the polar zones on the planet
Mercury. It can hibernate for 500 millennia in the core of a
snowflake, deep beneath the permafrost of Siberia. It awaits
discovery in the abyssal fathoms of Lake Vostok, 4000
metres below the ice of Antarctica. It survives direct immersion in liquid nitrogen. It survives 1000 times the dosage of
gamma radiation that can instantly kill a human being. It is
ideally adapted to eat hot graphite in the ruins of Unit 2 at
Three Mile Island. It resides on the surface of a heat shield in
the clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It does not
die in the conflagration during the collapse of the World
Trade Center. It does not die in the crucibles of Treblinka.

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7.

It resides in a soda lake, whose pH level equals the alkalinity

of lye. It can survive superheated blasts of steam for ten
hours inside autoclaves used to disinfect surgical scalpels.

It survives. It persists. It resides inside the robot scoop of

the Viking 1 Lander during tests for perchlorates on Mars. It
can live through exposure to supercoolant temperatures at
the brink of absolute zero. It can hibernate for 250 million
years, living as a spore, encased in a halite nodule found in
the Caverns of Carlsbad. It can withstand temperatures of
423 k, hotter than the nose cone of the Concorde in super-

It can withstand temperatures of 393 k, hot enough to melt

sulphur. It can lie dormant for 40 million years, hibernating
inside the gut of a honeybee, shrouded in a jewel of amber.
It evades its predators by hiding in the firmware of the Intel
Pentium 3 microchip. It propagates itself through the use
of networked computers. It can survive direct blasts of cosmic rays from solar flares. It is, in fact, the only known organism to survive being shot, point-blank, by the proton
beam in a u-70 Synchrotron. It does not die in the incineration of Hiroshima. It does not die in the planetary firestorm
after the impact of the Chicxulub meteor. It does not die.

sonic flight. It can endure multiple, meteor impacts. It can

endure multiple, atomic attacks. It lives nowhere on Earth,
except in one petri dish of agar agar, locked in a fridge at a
Level-4 biocontainment facility. It is totally inhuman. It does
not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know
that you exist. It is invincible. It is unkillable. It has lived
through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism
to have ever lived on the Moon. It awaits your experiments.

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