Earth is inundated with asteroids 20 years from now: massive amounts of asteroids fall all over the planet, and there’s a concentration of them in Northern Canada and Russia. They bring with them some really unique semiconductors and materials that we aren't familiar with on Earth. So these mining corporations become these larger, 21st century versions of Google, where all the venture capital goes into extracting these incredibly precious metals.
In the asteroid, there’s this trap that’s been flying around for who-knows-how-many billions of years. I really liked the idea of a light wave transmitting gigabytes of data into a mind, and that’s what happened in the mining facility: when the miners crack open the rocks, this light bounces into their eyes, it sends them down this spiral. It basically teaches them how to make a biological substrate that it can live in. Essentially, it wants to make them a body. That’s where this monster comes from.
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Doug Williams, a two-dimensional illustrator, came up with a sequence of different looks and then took it into 3D. We ended up with this bipedal design. I went to him asked how many people it took, and it was actually more than I thought: he needed 46 people to make the creature that you see. That's how many limbs and eyes and stuff merged into that creature.