Bio-Meat: Nectar/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Americans in part 2 are armed with flamethrowers that shoot napalm. Shouldn't more of the building be, you know... on fire? At the very least, shouldn't all the fires that they do start be burning for a lot longer?
  • In part 2, it's pointed out fairly early on that simply killing all the witnesses to the USBM outbreak isn't an option this time, since there's too many high-profile celebrities and the like attending the press release. So why is it that, not long after, the American troops end up being ordered to do just that?
    • They decided to blame deaths on a fire within the building and the most influential people in the crowd were spared, because they were in the know.
    • That one is somewhat justified since the alternative is letting TWO planet-devouring abominations run rampant and most of the witnesses get eaten pretty quickly.
  • How exactly are B-M prepared for consumption? Chicken-nugget processed-slurry style? Or do they look like starfish-shaped prepared carcasses for a reason?
  • This troper is more concerned over why nobody in the story noticed that the B-Ms don't simply eat each other when hungry, and instead prefer to eat the concrete, as stated in the second outbreak. If some sort of method prevented that, shouldn't they figure out what THAT was so that the B-M don't eat the humans, thinking they're fellow B-M?
    • Good question. Obviously, the B-M must have been made so that it doesn't eat one another, otherwise you'd end with a highly inefficient method of producing food, so they have to something, be it by sound, pheromones, heck, maybe even taste (since they prefer organic matter, it seems likely they can taste food). But not all of these possibilities could be used against the B-M anyway... and sound, which seems like the best candidate, would be very hard to replicate.
    • Alternatively, they could have been "programmed" with the basic instinct to not eat each other. That's generally not good for a species' survival, not that they'd know any better, but in this case the scientists creating them have incentive to give them the "no cannibalism" instinct, as mentioned above.
  • Bio-Meat die almost immediately following immersion in salt water. So, if the government's so worried about the damn things getting out, why not give the waste treatment facility where they live a moat? Or, better yet, put it on an artificial island off the coast?