Yul scowled. “It sounds like a shotgun approach to an impossible problem. What are you going to do, program every possible scenario?”
“Not necessarily,” responded Dez. “We provide the synthetic with comprehensive classes of reactions weighted with highest priority, according to the ‘personality’ under which it is operating. An aggressive personality would respond to a stimulus with violence, a feral one utter carnage, whereas a diplomatic one would pause to weigh and analyze its options and negotiate.”
Yul chose not to answer. It was interesting, but he didn’t like the idea of anything of flesh and blood being a complete cyborg. He didn’t trust synthetics like that brute Goss. But then he didn’t trust real men either—like Mathias, if he actually was human.
The pod under the glass seemed to make cracking noises to some stress Dez currently applied and Yul drew back.
Mathias squinted at him in amusement. “Are you that much afraid of it, Vrean?”
Yul muttered a curse under his breath.
“What’s that?”
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”
“From what Goss has told me,” Mathias said, “they’re just a bunch of charred plants. It was the Zikri’s horrors in the Mentera tanks that got the better of you.”
Let the man believe what he wanted, thought Yul. He owed Mathias nothing. The bastard would get his just desserts when the time came. Slapping nanobot particles in his blood was the line drawn in the sand. For now, he’d appease the tyrant, answer their questions, appear to comply. Then he’d strike when they least expected it. He peered anxiously at the pod, glad that he was suited when he had handled the things.
Dez continued to prod the pear-shaped shell with a metal fork, dangling his gloved hand through a flush, tight-sealed opening at the top of the case. The man grinned while he worked, making small whistling sounds with his mouth. The outer surface of the pod seemed to absorb the prods with stoic forbearance and change colour from green to yellow to deepening red.
Mathias turned to Yul. “If what you say is true about this ‘hatched’ creature both you and Goss describe colourfully as a dragonfly, we hope to capture and use its adaptive qualities to drive our next line of cyborgs. So far, I haven’t seen anything ‘dragonflyish’.”
Yul had not told Mathias about the remarkable adaptive power of the chameleon creature back in the Albatross. Let the sod find out for himself. If it morphed into something else—he did not want to be around.
Yul frowned, his muscles tensing as the pod grew visibly larger. His brows rose with curiosity and unease. Crimson barbs sprouted like spikes, a means to protect itself from the foreign invasion and now, menacing, mottled spots of vivid colour undulated over its surface. It seemed to quiver with a super-charged energy as if on high alert to ward off some new threat.
Dez mused aloud. “This is a second pod. The original seems to have split again in two. We’ve isolated the others in a separate container. Interesting and provocative, but not telling us much.”
“Why split in two?” demanded Mathias.
Dez shrugged. “Why not? Why change from green to yellow? A diversion, I believe. It increases its chance of survival. One pod may survive and the victim will go into fight-or-flight mode. A predator may go for one colour, leave the other alone. Let’s assume I’m the predator, one white-coated predator. The plant obfuscates its enemy. Clever. It’s a marvellous display of self preservation. Whatever the case, it’s absolutely compelling.”
“Knock off the maudlin adjectives,” Mathias snorted.
Yul gaped with impatience. “I still don’t see what fiddling around with alien plants has to do with building a new line of cyborgs?”
Mathias’s eyes flashed in irritation. “It’s beyond your understanding, Vrean. I don’t really have time to explain it. I just wanted to show you the apparatus you’re to be looking for. Some mock-up of Hresh’s black box, a Biogron.”
“Wait,” interjected Dez, “if he’s curious about the science and wants to know—” He pushed himself forward with importance, away from the protective screen of the case. “Our neural network is recording all the behaviours, successes and failures of the pod and creating a vast output matrix while firing neurons at will, the input being predicament, the output being solution. I must say, so far, the pod has been remarkably successful in evading minor attacks and absorbing stresses.”
Yul stared blankly. “It’s gobbledegook to me.”
Mathias’s patience was running thin. “What he’s saying, Vrean, is that we can create anything we want. Something you don’t understand. I have unlimited funds and resources. If an intrepid Cybernetics Corp explorer bot on, say, alien planet X is attacked, it goes into pod form, forms a protective dome, and when it is ingested say by some giant lizard, it morphs into an eagle-taloned dragon, ripping apart its attacker’s innards. I can program anything I want. Better yet, I can have the bot figure out what to do on its own. So, instead of a shape-changing alien species out in Timbuktu lying dormant, doing nothing, we can exploit and harness such a unique force for our own use in the lab and make a fortune.”
Yul sneered, “As much as I dislike Goss, he’s more human-like and effective than what you intend to do with your defensive, passive pod.”
“Goss has a complete human interface. He can
