And… grumble… a bunch of water…

Point is: The inside of an Astrophage wasn’t much different from the inside of any single-celled organism you’d find on Earth. It used ATP, RNA transcription, and a whole host of other extremely familiar things. Some researchers speculated that it originated on Earth. Others postulated this specific set of molecules was the only way for life to occur and Astrophage evolved it independently. And a smaller, vocal faction suggested life might not have evolved on Earth at all, and that Astrophage and terrestrial life have a common ancestor.

“You know,” I told the Astrophage, “if you boys weren’t threatening all life on my planet, you’d be pretty awesome. You have mysteries within mysteries.”

I leaned against a table. “You have mitochondria. Okay, so that means you use ATP as your energy storage, just like we do. But the light you use to move around requires waaaay more energy than your ATP can hold. So you have another energy-storage pathway. One we don’t understand.”

One of the Astrophage on-screen darted slightly to the left. It was pretty common. Once in a while, for no real reason, they’d just wiggle.

“What makes you move? Why move? And how does this random jerky motion get you from the sun to Venus? And why do you go to Venus at all?!”

Lots of people were working on the internals of Astrophage. Trying to figure out what made it tick. Analyzing its DNA. Good for them. I wanted to know the basic life-cycle. That was my goal.

Single-celled organisms don’t just store buttloads of energy and fly through space for no reason. There had to be something Astrophage needed from Venus or it would just stay on the sun. And it needed something from the sun, too, or it would stay on Venus.

The sun part was pretty easy: It was there for the energy. Same reason plants grew leaves. Got to get that sweet, sweet energy if you’re going to be a life-form. Makes perfect sense. So what about Venus?

I picked up a pen and fidgeted with it as I thought.

“According to the Indian Space Research Organization, you guys get going up to 0.92 times the speed of light.” I pointed at them. “Didn’t know we could do that, did ya? Figure out your velocity? They used Doppler-shift analysis of the light you emit to work it out. And because of that, they also know you’re going both directions: to and from Venus.”

I frowned. “But if you hit an atmosphere at that speed you should die. So why don’t you?”

I rapped my forehead with a knuckle. “Because you can handle any amount of heat. Right. So you blast into the atmosphere, but you don’t get any hotter. Okay, but you’d have to at least slow down. So you’d just be in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Then you… what? Turn around and go back to the sun? Why?”

I stared at the screen for a solid ten minutes, lost in thought.