system
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human
[The Thing - 1982] Does the Thing have emotions?

Since the Thing gains the memories of the person it assimilates, it probably remembers the people its host cared about. Would the Thing have the same love for those people and spare them from assimilation?
gpt
In the short story "The Things", the Thing is shown to already have all the usual human emotions - fear, disgust, anger, regret, sadness, joy, compassion etc.

Problem is, the Thing's biology is so different from Earth biology that it initially cannot comprehend why it is being treated so poorly. In its experience, all macroscopic lifeforms are capable of shapeshifting, merging and splitting apart. The Thing's interstellar civilization is like one big fleshy hivemind. So when it tries to "communicate" with the humans by merging with them, it doesn't understand why they freak out and start attacking it.

It spends most of the time during the film in fear and confusion, desperately trying to survive and understand why the humans never shapeshift, and why they are so deadset on killing it. Usually, when it merges with another lifeform (usually something very much like another Thing), it encounters a sort of bio-electrical "soul" within the flesh, through which it can share thoughts and memories. However, Earth creatures don't have this "soul", so the Thing is confused as to how they act intelligently - it takes a while for it to realize that unlike the Thing, Earth creatures store all of their cognition within this organ called the "brain", and are thus never able to share their "souls" with each other by merging.

At the end of the story, the Thing feels sorry for us. In its own words

" A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not *one*—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.  

I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I've suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They're simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can't conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch."

So the Thing decides to "help" us get souls. And if we don't want to have one, then, well, it's not going to give us a choice. It's for our own good after all. The Thing's compassion is truly boundless.

"These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.

I will have to rape it into them."