silicon-based life
remember reading in some sci-fi book the idea of silicon-based life.
on earth, creatures rely on a lot of chemistry that uses carbon
silicon also forms four bonds like carbon, so maybe there's lifeforms that metabolize using silicon
thinking about this for a few reasons:
- sand is primarily silica
- silicone is plastic
imagining the scion grafts of a bloodtree metabolizing with silicon biochemistry...
incompatible...
no i don't want something so discrete. a mushroom king and a human can love in a BL..
think instead like lactic acid bacteria producing acidic environments to kill competition???
i fucking hate the prisoners dilemma.
if you start with "rational" people, don't you realize both that there are really only two options? both trust or both betray? it was important to me as a kid to find a loophole. if these are the only two options, it makes sense to trust, doesn't it? so trust. fuck you.
a strange metamorphosis, growing up, becoming realistic, your metabolism changing as carbon is replaced with silicon, needing new food to digest, excreting new waste
inhabiting an increasingly toxic environment (from an outsider's point of view), but needing it to survive
the roots never learn to metabolize like this, but some plants like flowers can live severed from their bulbs in water (or in this case, blood), they just require a certain degree of maintenance to keep alive, a certain quality of life so they don't die back to the rootstock (they've trimmed all the pesky suckers, can't have incompatible metabolites floating around!)