Exo-Psycho

The case of a psychopathic, chainsaw-wielding gas giant. It’s an exoplanet, but for how long?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Greetings Earthlings,

We don't know each other very well. You may know some of us who don’t have minds. As things stand now, we’re smart enough not to delude ourselves into thinking we’re plentiful. We are much rarer than ordinary life.

Introductions are in order. We are a collective of sentient gas giants. We call ourselves the Vuooooooooozp in our main language. For the sake of expediency, we’ll refer to ourselves as the Vu hereafter in this account. We don’t believe you are as accustomed to speaking in the languages of raging storms as we are.

Our languages are perhaps a good starting point for how we came to be.

Like other gas giants in your purview and like stars, we are made of mostly hydrogen and helium. We also contain notable organic molecules and biochemical precursors. These can include ammonium hydrosulfide, ammonia, methane, nitrogen, and water. Because we are mostly composed of gas, chemistries and temperatures can differ wildly across latitudes and depths in just one gas giant. This and wind speeds that are typically much stronger than the rocky planets in the systems we inhabit can make for some interesting scenarios.

Scenarios such as cyclones of chemistries and temperatures clashing together in massive vortexes that rage for centuries. These “storm spots” can be as big as many rocky planets put together.

Enormous wind energies slam precursors together in such crucibles.

In at least some of these storm spots in gas giants across the vast universe, complex organic systems came to be. From the soup of storms, living molecules arose and were broken down. Beginning small, this “lifeform” would soon extend for many kilometers, and go on extending until it had taken over the entirety of the storm spot. Any other cyclones became food for the larger living storm.

Our ancestors were those storms and storm spots. But, over the years, we have used our evolving intellect, as well as the factories of our planets, to become the gas giants themselves.

As living factories, we have harnessed winds 2,000 kilometers per hour and higher. This kinetic energy can be utilized to do many things. Because we also share much in common with the chemical composition of stars, such as high levels of hydrogen, we have been able to produce fusion to great effect.

But perhaps our greatest scientific achievements came with our ability to control and manipulate our own gravities.

Although we are less dense than rocky planets, making our surface gravities less than they otherwise would be, our gravities are still much greater than those of terrestrial planets.

What drove us to our gravity-related breakthroughs?

Loneliness.

You may be wondering by now how we were able to contact each other across the reaches of space, as rare as this lifeform of ours is.

It was gravity. Mostly.

Though separated by uncountable lightyears, a few of us developed wormhole technology independently. Moreover, methods for detecting exoplanets were developed that could pierce the veil of spacetime. Some of those involved gravity, some did not.

Our own gravity, it seemed, might help us cure our loneliness.

It wasn’t enough to only get in the same vicinity, however. We had to be sure our gravities wouldn’t cause us to kill each other once we drew close to one another. Isn’t it ironic how some cures can also kill? We too are familiar with irony.

Thankfully, research in gravity for our other projects had led down a path for completely negating our gravities by putting it off into other large objects.

Many of us had many moons, so we used these to take on our gravities. By smashing those moons and other orbiting bodies together and spinning them around rapidly and containing them, in a method the reverse of how one might create artificial gravity in space, we were able to then negate the gravity of ourselves as well as the protrusion. That’s what it was, a protrusion many kilometers long from the orbit of the gas giant, a protrusion made of spinning matter and energy.

I don’t believe there is a word for it in your language, so I’ll use the closest equivalent:

Chainsaw.

By means of those whirling blades of moon matter and energy, as well as chemicals and metals injected and molded in, our forebears were able to saw off their own gravities, at least temporarily, and transfer them to the chainsaws where they could be contained, contained like gravity wells with lids on top.

For the first time, sentient gas giants were able to visit each other without fear of annihilating one another, or without having to transmit messages from far away in the same system.

This led to mating and offspring between sentient gas giants.

For the first time, we had not only cured our loneliness but were able to create families of ourselves.

Thus was the collective of sentient gas giants, the Vu, born.

Over many years, our technologies for creating wormholes, cutting and manipulating gravity, and mating were all transferred to the chainsaw. It became a multipurpose tool.

That about brings us up to the current generation, my generation of the Vu. Not long ago, we sat around in our circle for an emergency Vu Hall meeting. As the Vu mayor of my galaxy, governing and representing my mini collective of sentient gas giants in that galaxy, which constitutes the closest thing for us to what you call a town or city, I was attending that Vu Hall meeting. We did not have anything like presidents or congresses or kings or councils because we usually had no need of them.

Fortunately, we are able to send our speech to each other with a swiftness that can bypass the speed of light limit. A side effect of our other technologies and evolutions.

Vwep Vwoof Thooooowowothp, the mayor of Vwippterzzz Galaxy said.

Which is to say, “We are fucked.”

“No,” replied another mayor. A kilometers-wide turquoise band in her atmosphere swirled and then sped up, the equivalent of a dramatic blink. “Now, they are fucked. Jonny Gas [here I will use a standard name in your language for the perpetrating gas giant] has switched his attention to other intelligent life.”

“Why is Jonny Gas doing this with his chainsaw?” I asked. “It’s meant for good.” It was a naïve question, probably, but as the youngest Vu mayor I felt it had to be asked and if I was the naïve one, so be it. “If we can only understand why,” I went on, “maybe we can stop him without resorting to annihilation.”

“Because Jonny Gas,” said another Vu mayor, “is a fucking psychopath.”

“But—” I said.

Then someone cut me off with, “There’s nothing beyond the ammonia laden upper layer of Jonny Gas’s atmosphere worth understanding. Nothing to reason with besides a malignant curiosity.” It was Dr. Eeeroooovwp, who I hadn’t realized was sitting in on the meeting. Maybe she had just gotten there. She floated out from behind an asteroid belt. Her chainsaw was silently whirling, negating her own gravity, as were the rest of ours.

“Jonny Gas,” she said, “must be put out of commission.”

Truthfully, I’d had the hots for Dr. E for a while, hots down to the barely differentiated metallic sea nearest my heart. I’d been hoping I’d find a way to court her and possibly make some baby gas giants with minds of their own. But here, on the Vu Hall spacetime floor, I was not liking what she was saying. We were all supposed to be pacificists. Our ancestors had been lonely for so many years that the mass slaying of other life by a psychopathic gas giant was inconceivable to me. I wanted to conceive it, and I wanted to help Jonny Gas heal even as we were trying to help his victims’ friends and families heal.

Now that he had set his sights on smaller, more plentiful lifeforms, I thought it was essential we understand more before simply snuffing him out like a bad star. What if another Jonny Gas arose ex nihilo?

When I shared these thoughts with the rest of the Vu Hall, Dr. E’s clouds across her equator visibly changed directions. I couldn’t tell if she was irate with me, or if maybe I’d impressed her by disagreeing.

“The longer we try to understand,” Dr. E said, “the more lives are lost. These other intelligent creatures, they don’t have the same lifespans as us.”

“And why can’t we just bring him in?” I said. “Study him? We could keep him in timeout.”

As advanced as we were, we hadn’t yet developed a word for prison. The closest thing we had was timeout for our gas giant youngsters when they misbehaved. We hadn’t needed prisons.

“Timeout?” one mayor snorted. The snort was essentially a thousand meter per second stratospheric jet wind. “Never mind the cost on our resources, Jonny Gas must be punished for his crimes. The punishment must be adequate for the crimes.”

I did agree about punishment, even though we had yet to really develop our own version of contrapasso. I also agreed that we were running out of time.

There were many who fell on my side and many who fell on other sides. Time continued its orbit as we sat bloated in space, spinning and arguing.

And then there was a transmission. We’ve developed such technologies to help bridge the gap of loneliness.

That transmission came straight from Jonny Gas, straight from his “eyes,” as it were.

We saw what the killer was seeing, and it was clear he wanted us to bear witness.

He approached a blue and green orb, a rocky planet teeming with life.

Jonny Gas’s chainsaw whirred silently in the dead silence of space, spinning as it negated his own gravity. We got a zoomed image of the teeth of his chainsaw. They took out artificial specks in orbit of that planet, what I would come to learn were satellites and a space station.

Jonny Gas gave us a series of zooms on another speck: little soft things in a spacecraft. Beneath their visors, those little soft things had two orbs and holes near the tops of their bodies. The largest of those holes opened. I would later understand that they were screaming.

Jonny Gas smash-sawed them to smithereens. Then he waited. He waited without either that planet or himself driving into the other, because he’d negated his own gravity through the chainsaw. He waited while they sent wave after wave of their best technology against him. This was “war technology” as well as “space technology.” We hadn’t yet conceived of “war technology.” We had always been so far apart that we just wanted to be together or else coexist peacefully.

Except for Jonny Gas. Jonny Gas waited. He waited and laughed without gravity in their orbit, while those little soft things in the barriers of their suits and craft died against his chainsaw or fell into the extreme temperatures and pressures of his atmosphere, fell dead until they were torn apart. Atom by atom.

When they had spent all their shafts, Jonny Gas waited some more to really let it sink in for the intelligent beings on that planet.

All that time he was broadcasting these horrors to us. Why? We weren’t sure.

After enough time had passed, Jonny Gas put his chainsaw down on the planet. And drove it through.

It sawed and got caught on matter and sawed again, sawed until the planet was riven down the middle.

The impact of his saw would’ve killed anything worse than an asteroid could’ve done. Better that, probably, than floating on one half of a planet as it was slowly stripped of its means of supporting life.

Jonny Gas had no doubt murdered billions of that planet’s most intelligent creatures, as well as untold other species on that planet.

The broadcast ended.

But, though our Vu Hall arguing intensified, it only continued.

It continued until someone got the idea to reach out to Jonny Gas’s likely next victims.

In the coming Earth days, you will receive further transmissions from us with more detailed evidence of Jonny Gas’s crimes. Because we don’t have a judicial branch ourselves, having never needed one, and because we have reason to believe you might be his next target, we are reaching out to you.

We are hoping your people will function as judge and jury in the case of Jonny Gas.

Warmest Regards,

Aloovhoovroon (“Alvin”), Mayor of Oooooooliooo (“Olio”)