What would this combination lubricant/cleaning solution smell like and taste like?

Question

On an alien Dyson Sphere up in space, there is a blackish-blue slime that is everywhere on the sphere. It's slippery to the touch and is basically a combination of cleaning fluid, disinfectant, and lubricant.

Its purpose on the Dyson sphere is three-fold:

1. it keeps stuff clean and ensures stains don't occur, much like 409 cleaner,
2. it serves as a disinfectant, stopping the spread of nasty pathogens and parasites, and
3. it serves as a lubricant, reducing wear-and-tear on the mechanisms of the sphere.

My question is basically this: What would a combination of cleaning fluid, lubricant, and disinfectant taste and smell like? For the sake of simplicity, I'm talking about a stable mixture of equal parts chlorine bleach, lubricant oil, and ethyl alcohol.

Note that I'm not asking how this substance came to exist: I already have an (admittedly pretty hand-wavy) explanation for that. I'm just asking what it would smell and taste like.

In case you need to know, I want to know what it tastes like because one of the characters in my story gets a mouthful of the stuff.

Answer 1

It would smell like chlorine

Of the three substances, bleach is the one with the strongest and most distinctive smell, and it would easily overpower the relatively delicate smell of ethanol and the faint smell of oil.

It would taste salty and metallic

That's mostly your own blood, flooding your tastebuds as your delicate oral mucosa is badly burnt and damaged. Chloride ions taste salty too, but honestly, you're too busy bleeding from your orifice(s) to notice.

It would sound like AAAAAaaaaaAaargh

As above. Don't drink this stuff.

Incidentally, I'm not even sure the mixture you have in mind would be any use for what you want. Bleach works in large part by being very reactive; lubricant by being very inert. You can use ethanol as a solvent to force them to mix despite one being very polar and the other not at all, but I suspect you'd end up with a smelly, toxic, greasy mess that does neither job particularly well.

Answer 2

Raspberries

I mean, why not?

Aliens made it. Its actual composition probably has nothing to do with bleach, oil or alcohol, even though it has the same properties. It doesn't have to smell like any of those. It can have an artificial odor.

Just like we humans insist on giving our cleaning products funny odors like "cut grass", "clean laundry" or "hot chocolate", aliens may as well decide to make it smell like whatever they want, and they picked something that smells just like raspberries.

Answer 3

Unless you want to venture on the path of describing the taste like a sommelier would do with a wine, you can just go with something along the line of

it tasted and smelled like chlorine bleach, lubricant oil, and ethyl alcohol mixed together

Each of those has a smell which is pretty well defined and characteristic, so that would be enough for describing it.

Answer 4

Like being fifteen

And drinking Aunty's moonshine under the Spar with Ish and Zoos and Sputs. Zoos had an agreement with Aunty and she paid him with moonshine. Moonshine from batches that she couldn't sell because her distillation regimen had gone poorly, and there were too many hints of the moonshine's origins.

That is how the slime tastes now. Like tooth scum so tenacious you can't lick it off and so you have to drink it off. Like burning in the nose that made everything smell sweet, even Ish. Like a bitter soapy funk, and almost like the hot sauce Zoos used to add to cover up that funk. Like the end of childhood, drinking with your buds, talking shit under the Spar, watching the world below getting ready to swallow you up.

Answer 5

cleaning fluid

Fluids don't actually clean on their own. They help with cleaning by dissolving sticky stuff and washing away suspended particles.

That tells me the fluid is runny and constantly flowing. Not necessarily quickly, but constantly in a direction. From wherever it is generated to wherever it is disposed. It is probably reprocessed, dirt and waste is removed and handled by larger facilities.

disinfectant

A disinfectant is basically something that is toxic to microbes and parasites, but not excessively toxic to the larger lifeforms that use the disinfectant.

Mostly that difference in toxicity is due to the fact that the larger lifeforms don't bathe in it.

Since it's magic alien tech, this tells me it doesn't smell that much. Smells are gasses of whatever is in the thing that smells, which in this case is toxic; you don't want it in your nostrils.

Some smell would be good though, just enough to warn you that you shouldn't drink it.

Incidentally, adding ethanol to bleach in order to make it a "disinfectant" is a bit like adding rat poison to a dirty nuke to make it "poisonous".

lubricant

Pretty much any liquid works as a lubricant, as long as it coats the surfaces well. Since it already cycles around the station, all that is really needed is that anything that needs lubrication is designed to use the fluid.

Possibly it implies a high heat tolerance too.

WD-40

It's essentially just a very fluid oil with the infrastructure to cycle it everywhere. Nothing very high tech at all.

The cleaning part is mostly about how you use it, disinfectant just means it's toxic and lubricant is just about getting it where it is needed.

The one high tech aspect of it is that it needs to be stable enough that the atmosphere in a room covered in the stuff should remain breathable.