#you're no longer a normal human and your existence tapdances all over the known laws of nature lets have some fun with that

[geejaysmith]

So. A very fun and kind of mean idea I had: Alien duplicate zombie!Maxwell.

also look I'm listening thru again and I'm up to episode 41 (will probably be thru season 3 by this afternoon) so I will probably need to tweak this for the exact mechanics at play here but,

So this idea is brazenly stolen from a fanfic that had the other dead crew members get reconstituted after the Hephaestus fell into Wolf 359. And I like that! I like when fiction alters the rules a little and posits death as a change of state rather than a strict ending. Thing is: all the duplicates we've seen, they were created by scanning people who were very much alive (or Isabel, who got too close to the star, and because physics she'd be very dead long before making contact with anything like its surface, but whatever, there's wiggle room there, let's just roll with it). So if they're not scanning a living person, but a dead body... Or bits of one, in Hilbert's case... what then?

And all this is assuming that Maxwell's cadaver was kept in cold storage or otherwise preserved, even if by "preserved" we mean "chucked out the airlock by a crew member under Pryce's mind control" (angst fic writers, that one's free). So let's say that by this point the Dear Listeners have poked around with humans enough to start taking educated guesses at how they're *supposed* to work, and to take some stabs at putting one back together after they stop moving around and making noise. Let's say there's enough structure left intact to guesstimate how the electrical activity in Maxwell's brain would've worked in life. Let's say they can look at their other archived examples and go "okay, so this bit of the hind brain goes here, and this bit of the brain stem goes here, and- hey, humans already have holes in their skulls for like, their sensory input and stuff, do we *really* need to patch the new ones...? Ok, cool. Cool, she's moving around again! ...oh dear, that is not where that electrical charge is supposed to go."

What I'm saying is I'm picturing three different levels of outer zombie-ish-ness ranked on a sliding scale of "OH GOD WHY". I'm partial to the first and second, because (1) I Am An Edgelord, and (2) certain Past Experiences With Fiction make me really picky about preserving the notion that actions in fiction should have consequences, particularly where death is concerned (you know what you did, Andrew).

I'm sorry Renee, but it's way more fun to not let you forget about the Very Rude Thing that you did. I love you, and when I love a fictional character, sometimes I make them suffer for their own good.

The first level leaves it really obvious that this is a corpse that got back up and started walking and talking again. Maybe all Maxwell's organs are functioning as per usual again - maybe not, maybe it's just her brain, and "because aliens" just kind of... patches over the rest for now, because Maxwell 2.0 is still very much a work in progress. The important thing is that the really grizzly gunshot wounds to the head are still there, and Maxwell is just kinda... doing her best to ignore them! It's not a problem as long as everything stays in there where it's supposed to. It's fine! It's fine. This is fine. It's fine.

The second level is "ok, either a dead body, or maybe just somebody who really ought to get out in the sun more often." The most vital systems are basically functioning (albeit with some long-distance extraterrestrial assistance?), but everything else was a lower priority and is taking awhile to figure out how to get going again. You know what a dead body looks like after two weeks in cold storage? Yeah, that. Except, again, she's up and walking around as though it was a lot less than immediately fatal. Will still haunt Minkowski and Jacobi's nightmares, but isn't quite as over-the-top as "oh, pardon my exposed gray matter".

The third level is probably where the Reanimators From Mars' progress will plateau for awhile. Maxwell looks fine, feels fine (maybe a little scatterbrained, maybe like she had a bad concussion, but fine), but look at her too long and you'll get the notion that something's a little off here. Maybe her eyes stay a little clouded, maybe there's a glowing light in the back of them that never totally goes out. Maybe she glows in the dark! That'd be fun.

So yeah. Zombies Kepler, Rachel and Cutter have the advantage of being fresher, with less risk of damage from decomposition, and who even *knows* what's going to happen with Hilbert ("We're still trying to put him back together." Lovelace voice: Keep him.) but by golly this podcast gave me Weird "Clarke's Third Law" Borderline-Supernatural Bullshit and messing with that kind of thing is like catnip to me.

Or, you know, you could just leave the body as is and duplicate it to use as an empty shell to converse with the humans.

But that would just be horribly upsetting.

Wouldn't it? (;