Yul flinched at this news, remembering the feral handiwork of the dragonfly. “How are you going to control such an entity?”
“We have inhibitors in place—in software and hardware. That’s the least of our concerns.”
“It’ll never work. The alien is too adaptable.”
Mathias smirked.
As much as he hated to admit it, Yul began to understand, yet he shuddered at the implications.
Mathias gestured. “Imagine a whole army of these things powering the next generation of cyborgs.” Mathias gazed with rapture upon the pod, his eyes travelling to faraway worlds.
Dez’s eyes gleamed no less intently. “We scanned and took bio samples of the pod, identified a liquid substance, various nucleotides and polymers inside, but unexpected ones too—sulphur-carbon and silicon-hydrogen, something vaguely resembling a foetus but as of yet of unknown make-up. As for fertilization—” He shook his head. “My guess is it seems to auto-fertilize upon stimulus from the environment. On its own, in a contained sphere, it lies dormant, so we have to subject it to stresses, like this one.” He zapped it with 50V of electricity and it bounced off the sand, rolling a few centimetres.
Yul shook his head, not seeing any parallel. Was Dez some sort of wacko? Mathias too? A billionaire psycho? A quack who used electro-shock therapy on exotic plants to make a name for himself like certain barbaric doctors out of Earth’s dim past?
“Because it looked like an egg, it gave me an idea,” Dez said excitedly. “We put the second pod in a vat with some ants and an anaconda. The ants, well, they crawled over it and the pod reacted, oozing some foul yellow secretion that sent the ants retreating. I doubt the plant had secreted that stuff already, so it must have created it on the fly—miraculous... which tells us much.”
“As for the snake, nothing has happened—yet. Betsy has just lain there, eyeing our subject without much interest. It’s typical behaviour. But wait... I am about to coat the pod with some bait, some chicken-egg yolk.” He reached in with his gloved hand through the protective screen and using a delicate brush-like tool, painted a yellow slime on the pod which rested on the sanded bottom immobile.
The coiled snake uncoiled, darting its forked tongue in and out and poking its yellow and brown wedge-shaped head up curiously. In a flash, its mouth stretched wide, absorbed the egg in a single gulp. A vague lump passed down the snake’s glistening middle.
Yul stared.
“Look,” Dez cried. “Our pod is consumed. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.” His eyes glinted with a sick fascination.
Mathias pointed. “Look, again.”
The snake’s middle suddenly swelled, its fanged mouth opening in a contorted ‘O’.
Yul drew back, horrified.
The reptile writhed, then thrashed. Its tail whipped against the glass as if it were having a seizure.
Dezmin gaped, breathing out a gasp of astonishment, sweat beading his flushed cheeks.
Mathias’s jaw dropped.
Dezmin’s young assistant hunched closer, pushing up his horn-rimmed glasses to better observe the phenomenon.
The lump enlarged, then a writhing pulse rippled down the snake’s body. It ripped in two and a blood-gored shape tore out of the snake’s tail to flap about the bloody sand, flicking bits of flesh off its wings. Yul and the others moved back reflexively. What looked like a lizard’s body with six prehensile legs squirmed and flailed, its four wings fluttering in synchrony, propelling it forward to smash against the glass.
Two quick successive strikes caused the glass to shatter and the assistant’s face blossomed with glass fragments. Caustic fluid dripped from his eyes and nose, which the moth-lizard spurted out of its proboscis. The faceless youth collapsed in a final scream of agony.
Yul jerked away. So much for a neural network. He bolted for the exit, hearing the harsh ringing of an alarm. But Goss activated the pain dispenser and he fell writhing to his knees.
Three security men secured him, hauled him to his feet, then dragged him out the exit.
More poured in the doorway. Technicians scattered in confusion. Goss lifted a hand, gripping his blaster. The moth, winging about the room, shot acid right in the synthetic’s face as if recognizing an immediate foe. Goss leaped back, his burnt visage pooling liquid.
Mathias stumbled for the exitway, cursing Goss and Dez. “Control your experiment! Lock the place down!”
Mother of God, thought Yul, as the guards hauled him into the fire escape. Whatever the moth-lizard was, it seemed to absorb the qualities of whatever it morphed into, as had that thing in Regers’ tank. The alien lifeform drew on what was around it, in its environment, adapting like an artist’s imagination to some new stimulus or predicament.
Mathias’s moth-plus-snake became a flying komodo dragon.
Yul’s brain registered the fact in a flash of lucidity. It made sense! The essence of the pod was a moth, indigenous to Xeses. But upon coming in contact with something else, like the snake, it became some new hybrid horror, in this case, a winged lizard.
The shrieks reached an apex as Mathias’s men died. Folly to have pushed the life form too far. Yul caught glimpses of the freak moth-lizard before he was pulled out of range of its sight. The thing spun out of control as stun fire caught it broadside and sent it thudding to the floor. It adapted. Jerking upright, like the sinister plants that had spawned it, it sent clicking sounds from its crazy, whirring wings. Those wings folded, then it fluttered uselessly on its black, prehensile legs, and scuttled across the tiles under men’s feet under the protection of an overturned table, dodging fire...
* * *
It was a distraught
