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I'm working on a bioweapon created by an extraterrestrial agent. The being is 2.5 m tall, humanoid, digitigrade, intelligent and mostly predatory. However, it does not require water, food or oxygen to survive (let's say it is sustained by "bullshynthesis"), though it can do so to get raw materials it uses for making offensive weapons(quills, claws, etc), and hunts solely to spend excess energy and for sport. the creature has a few cemented traits, including the ability to grow and undo specific structures (such as claws, plates for teeth, extra limbs, a tail, aquatic adaptations and others).

The main issue comes with three qualities: its lower jaw splits to reveal a spinneret organ, its limbs are capable of stretching to a certain degree and it can squeeze through spaces its body technically shouldn't.

The being is meant to have this many traits to be able to hunt no matter the environment (I'll admit it's quite the Frankenstein of various animal traits), but I'm mostly sure this three last qualities appear not to be in line with the majority. Is there a way to get them to function properly? How could they work, if at all?

Edit: I pretty much remade the question, after realizing I wasn't being specific enough and it sounded like just a xenomorph with some new parts stitched to it. The creature has an appearance that indicates heavy influence or theropod and avian traits in its biology.

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    $\begingroup$ Do you like nanotechnology answers? $\endgroup$
    – Muuski
    Mar 11, 2020 at 22:21
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    $\begingroup$ Can you narrow down your question please? As it is it seems that it will elicit very opinion based answers. $\endgroup$
    – kleer001
    Mar 11, 2020 at 22:26
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    $\begingroup$ What exactly is meant by "adaptive" traits for a creature which from the beginning "does not require water, food or oxygen to survive"? If the creature does not need water or food, how can it be "predatory"? $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Mar 11, 2020 at 22:27
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    $\begingroup$ Congratulation! You are the Yautja and you want to make the Xenomorph. Have fun hunting your ultimate prey bioweapon. $\endgroup$
    – Trish
    Mar 11, 2020 at 22:45
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    $\begingroup$ @AlexP If the creature does not need water or food, how can it be "predatory" They need the complex pattern of signals (neuro-, pheromons, etc) which the negative feelings generate in their prey; they need them the same way humans need vitamin C. You know that kind of feelings? Like feeling of anxiety, fear or just being extremely annoyed about something one doesn't understand but the one has this premonition that one's survival depends on that something ;p $\endgroup$
    – Adrian Colomitchi
    Mar 11, 2020 at 23:11

4 Answers 4

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Take a page from the human immune system: memory T cells.

Humans have large numbers of memory T cells. Each produces proteins useful for fighting a specific menace. If that menace shows up, the memory T cells kick in and reproduce, giving rise to a lot of progeny that make those needed proteins.

Your creature is like this except it has a lot of stem cells, each corresponding to traits in its biological repertoire. When needed, given stem cells ramp up and reproduce, their progeny moving out thru the organism to take places. Old unneeded phenotypic traits are recycled.

There may be many, many more stem cells than are currently used in this incarnation as badass hunter killer. Other possible phenotypes might include meat animal, party clown, sex companion, flying transportation and so on. A good way to fight this thing would be to hijack the master switch and compel the development of unneeded phenotypic traits.

Re energy: your critter has an onboard cold fusion reactor that regenerates ATP. Easy peasy,

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you very much for this, you actually got it right, as if all of them are manifested at once, I did plan for them to become an issue, hindering one another (you can't fly properly when you're full of long appendages that make you less aerodynamic, or run when your feet have claws meant for climbing, after all), though your stem cell works really well as to how it can create specialized cells. I'll also make sure to check on your energy suggestion. Once again, thanks a lot :) $\endgroup$
    – ProjectApex
    Mar 12, 2020 at 16:21
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Have fun with that Xenomorph.

enter image description here

What you are describing is essentially a Xenomorph from the Alien series, albeit with a few extra features.

Therefore, I suggest that you take the same route as the Yautja: get some nanoprobes and use them to genetically modify an existing creature. How about humans? Humanity is already pretty overpowered with our intelligence, strength, and dexterity. Plus, we already a predator of apex predators. All in all, humanity is a pretty good. choice. Plus, since you want it to be "2.5 meters, humanoid", you won't have to redesign the basic bodyshape all that much; you could just copy and paste the genetic code for whatever you want to give it. As an extra plus, most of our genetic code is unnecessary fluff anyway, so there's plenty of room for modifications.

So, to answer your question, You can have whatever want; just slightly modify a human.

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Ummm... the reconfiguration of the body, shedding structures and creating others in a short span of time (creating them from air and/or incorporating elements in the immediate env). To realize something like this, one will need:

  1. the application of large amount of energy - to dislodge the atoms needed for the process from their place in the substances around; and

  2. capability of transporting atoms/substances from their place of "absorption" to the place of "assembly". This transport needs to happen fast and precise; and

  3. capability of very precise application of the energy to coerce the substances/elements in molecular and/or composite structures appropriate to the "offensive weapon" intended

All the above sound very much like "cheating entropy at great scales" - it's simply incompatible with the biochemistry

(To handwave something like this, you may use something like a bulk core of nanobots that uses anything available to build themselves "attachments" and "frames")

The problem arises when you consider where that energy can come from? Clearly not from chemical processes, you can't fight chemistry with chemistry and expect to win (at best, you get a draw).

I simply don't feel that you can have a diffuse/reconfigurable source of high energies which, in addition, are so stable and so controllable one can speak of "energy flow on demand without side effects". If we handwave some sort of a "mini-fusion reactor" or "hyperspace-based energy relay", it is very likely that volume and shape of that device will be strictly fixed.

That "energy source device" imposes limits on shape reconfigurations - there will be a certain macroscopic limit of crevices or super-tensile-mesh density which will stop the creature.

So yo may want to drop or nuance the ability of

it can squeeze through spaces its body technically shouldn't

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, though I wanted that one to work out somehow, I kinda felt like I'd have to ditch the squeezing ability, especially since it would likely require a skeleton to be as agile as I want it to be. The extra structures would simply grow from pre-designated regions, using natural composites already present in the body as material reserves (basically like a weaponized, reversible version of the tadpole metamorphosis or like a water flea's adaptations to its environment) $\endgroup$
    – ProjectApex
    Mar 12, 2020 at 0:31
  • $\begingroup$ @ProjectApex the way I see it, you still can, but you'll want to impose some decent limits. Clearly, the creature can't squeeze between the interatomic space (so hiding in a welded-all-around panic room will provide some shelter against this ability); my answer suggests the size of a reasonable downwards limit for it may be still macroscopic enough. $\endgroup$
    – Adrian Colomitchi
    Mar 12, 2020 at 0:37
  • $\begingroup$ I see. Well I planned for it to abide to the octopus rule and only be able to squeeze through spaces larger than it's plated Jaws,though I'm unsure if it would work, since I'd value flight over compressibility and so far, ribcages which sustain Strong pectoral which allow for flight aren't that compressible, and tend to be larger than the skull. You have any ideas on how to bypass that issue or would you just ditch the compressibility? $\endgroup$
    – ProjectApex
    Mar 12, 2020 at 0:42
  • $\begingroup$ @ProjectApex I wanted to come with an answer to your other question, yes. Problem is: a possible anatomical solution (mixture of muscles, hydraulic tubes made of tendons and a soft hydraulic pump combination that may be possible/plausible) is very far from trivial and I didn't have time for an answer of the quality I'm feeling compelled to provide (meh, the tendency to perfectionism as a compulsion is rarely an advantage, most of the time more like a liability) $\endgroup$
    – Adrian Colomitchi
    Mar 12, 2020 at 0:54
  • $\begingroup$ It's ok, I had already realized that the system required for it to work would be too much trouble, even for a bioengineered organism, might as well fill that space with extra muscle and add traits that enable it to enlarge said crevices and holes, after all, even if energy is not a problem it's not good to rely on such energy-expending mechanics when other more important traits are already energy-consuming. But thank you for enlightening me nonetheless $\endgroup$
    – ProjectApex
    Mar 12, 2020 at 1:10
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This seems somewhat like the creature from the Alien franchise, although perhaps closer to what the conception of the creature seemed to be in the first movie. There it was described as being made largely of silicon and having a powerful acid for blood.

This would seem to imply this is not a biological organism at all, or at least not in the way we think of it, but rather some sort of mechanical construct using the acid blood as an electrolyte - an organic robot if you will.

Obviously this is far beyond our ability to design and build (much less create the complex "life cycle" of the movie), but the alien engineers are obviously skilled enough to use the equivalents of genetic engineering to create this artificial being. The advantage to them is the creature can carry out difficult and dangerous tasks for the creators, and the beings are (initially) self limiting, since they will eventually run out of "battery" power. Obviously, if the engineers are using real genetic engineering and allowing the creatures to undergo the equivalent of evolution, then at some point they will evolve past the limits imposed by the engineers.

So treating this as some sort of biological "robot" may answer most of the stated abilities, although with our current state of knowledge, the idea of it evolving past its initial design specs cannot be ruled out.

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