The Blue Stuff
People call it “the Blue Stuff” because the terms that could actually define it properly are flagged keywords for every intelligence-gathering agency from the NSA to the Boy Scouts. Physically, it looks like a blue liquid goop: it flows somewhat turgidly when poured, but it doesn’t clump or lump up, either. It can be used in a hypodermic needle, too.
And people do use it in hypodermic, because the Blue Stuff is an essentially magical way to preserve dying or even newly-dead flesh. A single hypo load is enough to halt further tissue damage — even post-mortem tissue damage; the Blue Stuff absolutely charges through human bloodstream under its own power — and stabilize the patient until somebody can get an IV full of the Blue Stuff set up. An IV bag’s worth of the Blue Stuff will keep the patient in a preserved state pretty much indefinitely. There’s at least one person who’s been preserved this way for two years, with no water, no food, no oxygen, and then revived later with seemingly no ill effects from the experience itself.
Note that the Blue Stuff does not actually heal damaged flesh, although it will stop both internal and external bleeding. Somehow. It also doesn’t seem to get in the way of mundane surgery, and is utterly unaffected by drugs or radiation. Most alarming of all, it’s easy to flush it out of the system intact; the human body sweats it out as part of the recovery process. The Blue Stuff can then be collected and reused.
Actually, that’s the most alarming part.
No, wait, the most alarming part is how if you put some Blue Stuff in a bucket with a bunch of different chemicals (the list is classified) it will slowly convert those chemicals into more Blue Stuff.
Before anybody asks; no, the people playing with the Blue Stuff aren’t idiots. They know perfectly well that they must be working with at the very least some incredibly powerful alien hyper-tech. They’ve spent twenty, thirty years gingerly trying to work out the parameters of the Blue Stuff, and the only real conclusion about whatever-it-is that they have here is that it seems absolutely benign, and completely uninterested in converting the world into blue goo. So various black ops groups use it. Gingerly. Very, very gingerly.
So what is the Blue Stuff? Well, it’s self-aware, for one thing. All Blue Stuff is Blue Stuff, and it’s kind of a singular entity and kind of a group mind and kind of a scoopable and detachable memory storage unit. When it enters a human bloodstream, the Blue Stuff samples the information found there — including memories and personality matrices — and then collates it with the rest of the data when it gets reconnected with the rest of the Blue Stuff. Every so often, that information is sent elsewhere. Where it’s sent is not the problem of the Blue Stuff, so it doesn’t worry about it.
Note, by the way, that while the motivations of whoever-it-is that’s spying on and/or studying humanity are up in the air, the Blue Stuff really is a benign entity. It doesn’t mind being injected into human bloodstreams and making holographic neural copies of people’s brains. It quite likes the job, in fact. There’s always someone interesting to read.