Metal: A story

Carbon, the structural scaffolding of life on Earth, thanks to the symmetric stability of its covalent bonds, has an ancestral and inextricable kinship with the elements of the transition zone of the periodic table; in fact, approximately one-third of the human proteome is composed of metalloproteins. The planet "Metallo" represented a thermodynamic and geochemical heresy: a remote world of seas of ammonia and oceans of water, where life had transcended the limits of organic chemistry to structure itself on complex nuclear bonds, and the very consciousness of the native species was not a biological epiphenomenon, but the result of a quantum phase transition, mediated by collective spin waves, propagating through the nervous system based on lanthanide elements. For these ancient organisms, time was a vector tied to the half-life of their nuclear fuel. Life arose from the catalytic activity of alkaline hydrothermal vents similar to those on Earth, with the same iron-sulfur catalytic centers, the origin of the first metabolic reactions on Earth. Beyond this, humans and Bio-meta had something else in common: the search for resources and a passion for science. It was precisely because of human research into the riches of "Metal" that the two civilizations first came into contact, through a physical anomaly that baffled Earth's scientists. The pulse of a human exploratory probe, sent to study the unusual thermonuclear signature of the planet "Metallo", was perceived by its inhabitants as a "distorting eddy current" in their spin networks and emitted a flux of neutrinos capable of disrupting binary telemetry reception on Earth. However, by recoding the probe at the atomic level, it became a biological extension of "Metallo", sending far more complex data. Cooperation between the two species led to an advancement for humans toward synthetic-organic technology, with the construction of the first long-range hybrid spaceship, allowing Earthlings to travel faster than the speed of light without experiencing time dilation and reach the mysterious planet.