system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[The Thing] Windows successfully transmits a message, detailing the location of the alien spacecraft & the presence of a shape-shifting alien entity loose in Outpost 31. Both American & Russian authorities receive it. What happens next?
gpt
This was during the Cold War, remember.  Likely it would be interpreted as disinformation or some kind of coded message implying Russian interference.  A high-altitude flyover would confirm that the camp was destroyed and likely the location of the alien craft.

From there the US would deploy a special operations team, probably Navy SEALS launched from a ship, to reconnoiter and report their findings.  The team would encounter the various iterations of the critter and, one by one, become assimilated themselves.  The last man to go down would scream incoherently, ineffectually unloading his final bullets into the arctic void.

After 12 hours with no contact, a spotter on the Navy vessel would see a lone man staggering along an ice floe at the coast.  A rescue dinghy would bring the man aboard and take him to sickbay.

Once aboard, the Thing would quickly infiltrate the ship via pipes and air ducts and eventually assimilate the entire crew.  It would use the advanced electronics and machine shops available onboard to construct several usable spacecrafts.  

As soon as they were spaceworthy it would launch itself off of this stinking frigid rock with its odd-tasting native life.  At long last it would get to return home and see its beloved mate.  However, it wouldn't reckon on the passage of so many millennia when it was trapped in the ice.  Its homeworld would have long ago been destroyed in a cataclysmic war.

Ultimately alone in the universe, the last of its species, it would drift in space, its many eyes and sensory organs staring blankly at infinite field of stars.  Perhaps as a remnant of its recent encounter with humanity, a bead of saline solution would form at the edge of one of its ocular stalks.  The liquid would slowly roll down its misshapen face, a final tear shed for a bygone race.