Chapter 2.
Thirtieth day of Atekia,
Fire moon, 16 kilo-beats AST
Strahn sat back in his chair, sighing contentedly. His guest, a thin, pale male with flashing eyes the color of amber, long blue hair pulled into a tight braid, and a mouthful of very sharp teeth. Daigan Vasilieve was an Arynyk, a dragonish creature able to disguise itself as human.
“Please, have some more wine, my friend.” Strahn said, holding out a pitcher of dark red Faynya wine. Fermented from the juice of a bloody-red fruit, whose name literally meant ‘blood-fruit’ in the Ylrunen language, it contained enough alcohol to kill a human with one draught. Luckily, human was one thing Vasilieve and Strahn were not.
The Arynyk smiled, wiped his hands, and held out his goblet.
“Arredovle Codrien.”
“Daigan, were any of today’s experiments fruitful?”
“Dreit Codrien. Only one. Piro was extremely successful. The latest attempt was still alive when I last checked it.”
Codrien Strahn, a tall willowy Neko with hair graying at the temples grimaced. Piro was one of the experiments where the subjects died, often in spectacular fashion. Sometimes their blood literally boiled, they burst into flames, or they exploded.
“That knowledge warms my soul. Coincidentally, what was the subject’s body temperature?”
“About 10 degrees. They still have it in a cryo-tube.”
“Really? I would hope that they’d have had it out of the cryo-tube by now.”
“The Board wants you there when they take it out. Being a senior officer and all.”
“That can’t be the only reason. There has to be something else, like they’d thought that anyone else would torment the poor thing into revealing what the chemical infusion had done to it.”
“Maybe it is, or maybe they just don’t trust the rookie scientists to properly take care of things. They said you could pull it out at anytime.”
Strahn leaned back in his chair, and stood. Putting on his jacket, he smiled. “Wanna go do it now?”
Vasilieve returned the smile with his own shark-toothed grin. “Let’s.”
A few moments later, they were settled back into the plush seats of Strahn’s Zezle aircar. Glasses of wine in hand, another bottle chilling in an ice bucket for celebrating the subject’s survival, or for mourning its termination.
They both hoped to drink to the former, but they would drink in either case.
When the aircar settled on the roof of the Ekra-Tern Facility on the outskirts of Anyatropelis, Strahn was the first to exit the aircraft. He snapped a salute to an armed guard, who lowered the fearsome-looking weapon in his hands and returned the salute. He ran a hand through his hair, which was graying at an early age of thirty-five summers.
Vasilieve followed, but did not salute the guard. Instead, he laid a hand over his heart, and bowed stiffly, an Arynyk’s salute.
Walking quickly, they reached the bounce tube headed down to the R+D branch of the facility in about five-hundred pulses of Strahn’s watch. Entering a passcode and swiping their i.d. badges at a blast door let them into the chamber where the experiment was.
A tube dominated the center of the room, the Piro floating in a greenish substance that provided nourishment through the skin while diffusing heat.
The experiment was in a fetal position, head tucked between knees drawn up to its chest. Although it was naked, its gender was indiscernible. A respirator covered its face, a bulky black monolith compared to the small size of the subject’s face.
“It’s….unlike what I expected. I expected something larger, with the skin burned off in places, maybe liquefied.” Strahn said, awe in his deep voice.
“The technicians did a good job, as soon as the chem. infusing was finished, they had all needles out of it and it placed on ice. Ten heartbeats later it was in here.”
“Let’s awaken it, see if it will survive.”
Nodding to one another, Strahn and Vasilieve went to terminals on opposite ends of the room. Tapping commands, they both swiped their i.d. cards on the computer terminals.
A klaxon sounded, and a light on top of the tube started flashing as the greenish fluid began draining from the tube. The eyes of the subject snapped open at the noise, and its head lifted.
Eyes that appeared yellow through the sludge looked up and out of the tube, into first Vasilieve’s amber ones, then Strahn’s black ones. They both stepped back in shock.
“Gods! It’s a Neko!”
Strahn stared dumbstruck. He had no idea the Council would ever use a member of his race in an experiment in his facility.
The air supply to the breathing regulator was cut off, and the subject clawed at its face to remove the object. It managed to hook its fingers behind the seal, and pulled it off.
The subject took a gasp of air, as the sludge drained past its lips. It had the strong jaw line of a male, and tattoos on its cheeks.
Strahn smiled, relieved. It was not a Neko after all; it was a tribal Kitsune; a savage.
Walking to the tube, he pulled recessed handles out, opening a hatch that swung out noiselessly on its hinges. Lifting the small male, he wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to a small examination room. He inserted a probe into a vein in the left arm, which measured heart rate and temperature. A circlet with cables coming off it went around the head to measure brain activity.
Turning, he snapped on several monitors that corresponded to the equipment attached to the boy’s body. A line crooked across it, and numbers flicked up. One was the temperature of the male’s body; the other was the heart rate.
“Temperature, 37 and warming, heart rate ratio 1:1.”
Vasilieve entered the room behind him, and commandeered the monitor. Strahn went a chair on the side of the room, opened a folder, and began reading. After a few seconds, he huffed, and reached in his pocket for his reading-glasses. Pushing them onto his nose, he returned to his perusal of the medical findings on the subject; blood type and such.
“Temperature and heart ratio please Daigan.”
“Temperature 57 and climbing about ten diags every other beat. Heart ratio 1.2:1.”
Strahn sighed, and started as the monitor began beeping loudly.
“Again?”
“A... A hundred and twenty diags, heart ratio 1.5:1.”
Strahn stood, the folder falling to the floor. “This is the way the last one went, and then it burst into flames…”
“Its temperature is stabilizing, its heart ratio returning to 1:1.”
“Amazing.”
Walking by, Strahn took a stethoscope off the cart of tools, and put the modified earpieces into his ears. It was a little uncomfortable, but he still took up the end up and reached out to touch it to the Piro’s back.
Vasilieve looked up, and his eyes widened. “Don’t touch it. Its body temp is over two hundred and fifty diags. The flesh of your hands will be cooked, and stripped off when you try to move.”
Strahn paused, and let the stethoscope drop from his hands. “You do it then, it needs must be done or the Council will have the facility shut down.”
Vasilieve shrugged, and started walking towards Strahn. As he did so, his body seemed to shimmer, and it appeared to be made of smoke as it undulated and changed. The face lengthened out into a snout, the skin turned red and changed to scales, and appendages like the whiskers of a catfish grew down from the juncture of his lower and upper jaws. He took the stethoscope, placed the earpieces into the shell of each sharply pricked back ear, and raised the stethoscope to the back of the Piro.
“Strahn.”
“Yes?”
“It’s breathing is undamaged. Its core temperatures are high enough that it should be dead, but the sound of its breathing is like listening to yours or mine. Albeit yours or mine whilst we are extremely afraid, but otherwise ordinary.”
“Are you serious? Daigan, do you know what this means? We have done it! We have successfully infused the chemical mixture into a living being!”
“Good thing too, this was the last of the batch that the person who knew the ratios of each chemical in the mixture made before he killed himself.”
Strahn paid him no heed, ranting to himself about the implications this rose.
“We will have funding for as long as the Council is the governing body! Which, is shaping up to be forever!”
“I don’t know Codrien. They weren’t very impressed with the Vulfishes.”
The Vulfishes had been a breakthrough greater that Piro, just in the department of Genetics. Successful hybridization of Mahari fish and foxes. There were three of them, all three fertile hermaphrodites and able to breed and reproduce. They were impossible to contain, however, as the hybridization unlocked the unused 85% of their minds. If one attempted to keep them in a cage, they would not hesitate to use telekinesis to unlock the latch, kill the guards, and escape. They were kept in tanks, and fed often enough that they would learn that they would be better off in the facility.
Strahn gained a thoughtful look, and he shut up. “That’s true. However, we also got the Vulfishes on the fourth try. Piro has taken….”
Vasilieve looked up from the experiment. “One thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight. One thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight dead children, killed by our hands in spectacular fashion. All in the name of science.”
Strahn rolled his eyes. “Let’s get lucky subject one thousand, four hundred fifty-nine squared away then, and then go celebrate. Remember we have the bottle of wine we can now drink with joy in our hearts.”
Vasilieve looked sideways at Strahn. “You’d have drank with a clear conscience and a light heart either way.”
He stood, and walked out of the room, jackboots clicking on the tile floors as he shifted back to his human form. Strahn followed, his lighter boots making not quite as much noise as they went to find a room for, and design a testing program for Piro-1459.
Thirtieth day of Atekia,
Fire moon, 16 kilo-beats AST
Strahn sat back in his chair, sighing contentedly. His guest, a thin, pale male with flashing eyes the color of amber, long blue hair pulled into a tight braid, and a mouthful of very sharp teeth. Daigan Vasilieve was an Arynyk, a dragonish creature able to disguise itself as human.
“Please, have some more wine, my friend.” Strahn said, holding out a pitcher of dark red Faynya wine. Fermented from the juice of a bloody-red fruit, whose name literally meant ‘blood-fruit’ in the Ylrunen language, it contained enough alcohol to kill a human with one draught. Luckily, human was one thing Vasilieve and Strahn were not.
The Arynyk smiled, wiped his hands, and held out his goblet.
“Arredovle Codrien.”
“Daigan, were any of today’s experiments fruitful?”
“Dreit Codrien. Only one. Piro was extremely successful. The latest attempt was still alive when I last checked it.”
Codrien Strahn, a tall willowy Neko with hair graying at the temples grimaced. Piro was one of the experiments where the subjects died, often in spectacular fashion. Sometimes their blood literally boiled, they burst into flames, or they exploded.
“That knowledge warms my soul. Coincidentally, what was the subject’s body temperature?”
“About 10 degrees. They still have it in a cryo-tube.”
“Really? I would hope that they’d have had it out of the cryo-tube by now.”
“The Board wants you there when they take it out. Being a senior officer and all.”
“That can’t be the only reason. There has to be something else, like they’d thought that anyone else would torment the poor thing into revealing what the chemical infusion had done to it.”
“Maybe it is, or maybe they just don’t trust the rookie scientists to properly take care of things. They said you could pull it out at anytime.”
Strahn leaned back in his chair, and stood. Putting on his jacket, he smiled. “Wanna go do it now?”
Vasilieve returned the smile with his own shark-toothed grin. “Let’s.”
A few moments later, they were settled back into the plush seats of Strahn’s Zezle aircar. Glasses of wine in hand, another bottle chilling in an ice bucket for celebrating the subject’s survival, or for mourning its termination.
They both hoped to drink to the former, but they would drink in either case.
When the aircar settled on the roof of the Ekra-Tern Facility on the outskirts of Anyatropelis, Strahn was the first to exit the aircraft. He snapped a salute to an armed guard, who lowered the fearsome-looking weapon in his hands and returned the salute. He ran a hand through his hair, which was graying at an early age of thirty-five summers.
Vasilieve followed, but did not salute the guard. Instead, he laid a hand over his heart, and bowed stiffly, an Arynyk’s salute.
Walking quickly, they reached the bounce tube headed down to the R+D branch of the facility in about five-hundred pulses of Strahn’s watch. Entering a passcode and swiping their i.d. badges at a blast door let them into the chamber where the experiment was.
A tube dominated the center of the room, the Piro floating in a greenish substance that provided nourishment through the skin while diffusing heat.
The experiment was in a fetal position, head tucked between knees drawn up to its chest. Although it was naked, its gender was indiscernible. A respirator covered its face, a bulky black monolith compared to the small size of the subject’s face.
“It’s….unlike what I expected. I expected something larger, with the skin burned off in places, maybe liquefied.” Strahn said, awe in his deep voice.
“The technicians did a good job, as soon as the chem. infusing was finished, they had all needles out of it and it placed on ice. Ten heartbeats later it was in here.”
“Let’s awaken it, see if it will survive.”
Nodding to one another, Strahn and Vasilieve went to terminals on opposite ends of the room. Tapping commands, they both swiped their i.d. cards on the computer terminals.
A klaxon sounded, and a light on top of the tube started flashing as the greenish fluid began draining from the tube. The eyes of the subject snapped open at the noise, and its head lifted.
Eyes that appeared yellow through the sludge looked up and out of the tube, into first Vasilieve’s amber ones, then Strahn’s black ones. They both stepped back in shock.
“Gods! It’s a Neko!”
Strahn stared dumbstruck. He had no idea the Council would ever use a member of his race in an experiment in his facility.
The air supply to the breathing regulator was cut off, and the subject clawed at its face to remove the object. It managed to hook its fingers behind the seal, and pulled it off.
The subject took a gasp of air, as the sludge drained past its lips. It had the strong jaw line of a male, and tattoos on its cheeks.
Strahn smiled, relieved. It was not a Neko after all; it was a tribal Kitsune; a savage.
Walking to the tube, he pulled recessed handles out, opening a hatch that swung out noiselessly on its hinges. Lifting the small male, he wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to a small examination room. He inserted a probe into a vein in the left arm, which measured heart rate and temperature. A circlet with cables coming off it went around the head to measure brain activity.
Turning, he snapped on several monitors that corresponded to the equipment attached to the boy’s body. A line crooked across it, and numbers flicked up. One was the temperature of the male’s body; the other was the heart rate.
“Temperature, 37 and warming, heart rate ratio 1:1.”
Vasilieve entered the room behind him, and commandeered the monitor. Strahn went a chair on the side of the room, opened a folder, and began reading. After a few seconds, he huffed, and reached in his pocket for his reading-glasses. Pushing them onto his nose, he returned to his perusal of the medical findings on the subject; blood type and such.
“Temperature and heart ratio please Daigan.”
“Temperature 57 and climbing about ten diags every other beat. Heart ratio 1.2:1.”
Strahn sighed, and started as the monitor began beeping loudly.
“Again?”
“A... A hundred and twenty diags, heart ratio 1.5:1.”
Strahn stood, the folder falling to the floor. “This is the way the last one went, and then it burst into flames…”
“Its temperature is stabilizing, its heart ratio returning to 1:1.”
“Amazing.”
Walking by, Strahn took a stethoscope off the cart of tools, and put the modified earpieces into his ears. It was a little uncomfortable, but he still took up the end up and reached out to touch it to the Piro’s back.
Vasilieve looked up, and his eyes widened. “Don’t touch it. Its body temp is over two hundred and fifty diags. The flesh of your hands will be cooked, and stripped off when you try to move.”
Strahn paused, and let the stethoscope drop from his hands. “You do it then, it needs must be done or the Council will have the facility shut down.”
Vasilieve shrugged, and started walking towards Strahn. As he did so, his body seemed to shimmer, and it appeared to be made of smoke as it undulated and changed. The face lengthened out into a snout, the skin turned red and changed to scales, and appendages like the whiskers of a catfish grew down from the juncture of his lower and upper jaws. He took the stethoscope, placed the earpieces into the shell of each sharply pricked back ear, and raised the stethoscope to the back of the Piro.
“Strahn.”
“Yes?”
“It’s breathing is undamaged. Its core temperatures are high enough that it should be dead, but the sound of its breathing is like listening to yours or mine. Albeit yours or mine whilst we are extremely afraid, but otherwise ordinary.”
“Are you serious? Daigan, do you know what this means? We have done it! We have successfully infused the chemical mixture into a living being!”
“Good thing too, this was the last of the batch that the person who knew the ratios of each chemical in the mixture made before he killed himself.”
Strahn paid him no heed, ranting to himself about the implications this rose.
“We will have funding for as long as the Council is the governing body! Which, is shaping up to be forever!”
“I don’t know Codrien. They weren’t very impressed with the Vulfishes.”
The Vulfishes had been a breakthrough greater that Piro, just in the department of Genetics. Successful hybridization of Mahari fish and foxes. There were three of them, all three fertile hermaphrodites and able to breed and reproduce. They were impossible to contain, however, as the hybridization unlocked the unused 85% of their minds. If one attempted to keep them in a cage, they would not hesitate to use telekinesis to unlock the latch, kill the guards, and escape. They were kept in tanks, and fed often enough that they would learn that they would be better off in the facility.
Strahn gained a thoughtful look, and he shut up. “That’s true. However, we also got the Vulfishes on the fourth try. Piro has taken….”
Vasilieve looked up from the experiment. “One thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight. One thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight dead children, killed by our hands in spectacular fashion. All in the name of science.”
Strahn rolled his eyes. “Let’s get lucky subject one thousand, four hundred fifty-nine squared away then, and then go celebrate. Remember we have the bottle of wine we can now drink with joy in our hearts.”
Vasilieve looked sideways at Strahn. “You’d have drank with a clear conscience and a light heart either way.”
He stood, and walked out of the room, jackboots clicking on the tile floors as he shifted back to his human form. Strahn followed, his lighter boots making not quite as much noise as they went to find a room for, and design a testing program for Piro-1459.
