*P*R*O*P*A*G*A*T*I*O*N*
The meteorite was over seventy kilometers wide and composed primarily of iron. It impacted with the force of over one hundred million megatons of TNT, creating a crater over two hundred fifty kilometers wide. The atmosphere choked with superheated dust and debris kicked up from the impact and its effects. Winds of eight hundred kilometers per hour scoured the sere landscape. Planetquakes shook the bedrock. Volcanoes erupted, spewing toxic gases into the air. Multiple tsunamis raced across acid oceans, crashed upon barren shores.
With nothing to oppose or even slow the impact, all this occurred in the space of but a few seconds.
This was a planet killer.
It might have been catastrophic for life on that lonely little world, had there been any native organisms aside from a handful of scattered microbes clinging to their decimated ecological niches. The oceans and rains were already acid; the atmosphere a miasma of sulfates, ozone, and carbon monoxide; the soil toxic with pollutants and heavy metal salts. The planet's very life force, its vital quintessence, the mystical stream of the purest, most fundamental and essential energy from which life sprang and ultimately returned, had been all but drained. Just a thin trace remained, almost stagnant, barely able hold the planet's brittle husk together.
The only life of any significance that remained in the wake of such environmental destruction was alien, so alien that it could survive even such a nightmarish event. So alien that it could create a cataclysm, could Call an appropriate meteor to impact the planet and trigger its Propagation.
In the time before Propagation, the alien organism had prepared. Drained the quintessence from the planet, consumed native biological mass to increase its own. Splintered its single Self into Many, sending out runners that broke away to quasi-independence but still remained connected with the One through aetheric communion—each portion seeking more food, more resources, more energy, more of the small life native to the planet. More to overtake and control, to alter and redefine and absorb, consuming what remained after its target sustenance was made compatible with the One Self's greater, truer kind of life.
Planets and their ecosystems were always fragile, finite resources, and, as always, sustainment ran out. It was the natural order of things. When resources failed, new resources—new hunting grounds—were required. It was time to move on.
Stony and metallic space detritus was common and several good-sized, iron-nickel meteoroids passed by the planet each year. A meteor strike was Called using vast stores of the alien's now overflowing wells of life energy, absorbed from the planet and its ecosystem, contained in complex subcellular structures and distributed among its many remote, satellite selves across the world.
Aggregation, required for Propagation, would now begin.
Once Many, the alien again became One Self. The primary mass sent out the chemical and aetheric Summons; from across the planet its satellites Answered and Returned. It collected all its individual parts into a single, mammoth organism, hundreds of times more massive than when it had first begun feeding.
Bliss.
Any Joining, any Aggregation, was always blissful, even if but the smallest pieces of the One Self found one another and joined. And a union of the All into One? Bliss beyond all description.
While still reveling in the joy, while still regaining the few last straggling fragments of itself, it migrated to the predicted impact site, chosen for its large deposits of iron and nickel ore to provide durability during the coming journey. The alien spread out into a thick, slimy mat covering several hundred thousand square kilometers of the dirt and rocks. This was a different kind of bliss: the bliss of the final preparations for Propagation.
Within the One Self's ever increasing mass, its genetic and structural information, gleaned from this world and hundreds of others, was preserved and protected in proteins, in complex biochemical memories encoded in giant nucleotide molecules duplicated and stored within multitudes of nuclei. The nuclei, organelles, and cytoplasm redistributed throughout its biofilm; membranes formed, creating trillions of individual cells, each capable of independence yet all desiring to be part of the Whole.
The last of its satellite Selves arrived and were absorbed. Aggregation was complete.
Each cell extruded microscopic pseudopods that wormed into the earth, dug into harder rocks. Deeper, deeper. Deeper still. The massive biological mat of cells shivered as it poured cytoplasm and essential macromolecules into the lengthening pseudopods, strengthening them, widening them—it sought and then found solid bedrock, broaching it as easily as if it were jelly. The pseudopods hollowed into tubules, and cells flowed through them and into the bedrock itself. Each cell cluster reabsorbed its pseudopods as it moved downward. The biological mat oozed into the bedrock through billions of microscopic pathways, leaving no trace of its existence on the surface.
At home in bedrock, secondary cellular membranes formed. On each cell's exterior, outside the primary cell membranes, the alien created and firmed up thick, resilient cell walls of proteins, fats, and fibrous structural elements. It embedded calcium and other minerals within them to protect its precious cells from adverse environment conditions. Excess moisture was excreted and biomass compressed. Metabolism slowed, reducing the need for sustenance and preserving the organism's massive stores of mystical and chemical energy, genetic knowledge, and reproductive potential. In this form, it could survive radiation, pressure, heat, cold, extremes of acidity and base, nutritive deprivation, even vacuum—it was all but indestructible.
And then, connecting all the cell clusters of the One Self with a network of fine filaments, imprinting and reinforcing communications, knowledge, power, instinct, and intelligence on all its parts, it waited for Propagation to commence.
It waited.
It waited.
It waited.
The monstrous meteorite blasted into the planet's surface, plowing hundreds of meters deep, throwing up uncountable tons of broken rock, dust, and debris. That portion of the organism's body at ground zero vaporized instantly. The outermost portions, farthest from the impact site, flew into the atmosphere with the rest of the impact detritus, not reaching escape velocity and coming down again, incandescent and flaming to destruction.
The intermediate parts, though...the ones close to ground zero but not annihilated, they survived. Encased in iron, nickel, and hard rock that shattered into hundreds of millions of pieces, they were flung beyond the planet's atmosphere. Most of these fell back into the planet's gravity well, also to be annihilated during reentry, but some...
A few million chunks of inoculated bedrock escaped the planet and hurled outward into the Void.
This was Propagation.
This was Ecstasy.
When meteoroids enter Earth's atmosphere (or that of another planet, like Mars) at high speed and burn up, the fireballs or "shooting stars" are called meteors. When a meteoroid survives a trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it's called a meteorite. —Meteors & Meteorites, https colon slash slash solarsystem dot nasa dot gov slash asteroids-comets-and-meteors slash meteors-and-meteorites slash overview