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Elaine’s lizard breathed fire once more, singing the bird’s wings and drawing its focus. It dove at the lizard, talons primed to lift the lizard straight off the ground despite its hulking size. Elaine extended her claws and lunged sideways to rake them through the thick legs of the eagle.

  It cawed, pulling back up and leaving the lizard to live another day.

  “How?” Marie asked.

  Lisa was stood with her hands up, trying to talk to the beast in an authoritative tone. “Get down,” she barked, and I knew that any other creature in the facility would have listened to her in a heartbeat. The eagle just tilted its head, obviously understanding, but not listening. It lunged toward Lisa once more, opening its beak to cry out.

  Everyone cringed as the sharp cry echoed through the metal lab.

  “We need to get it out of this room.” The lab was too important, I needed the lab for other things. I couldn’t keep it trapped in here until we figured out what to do with it.

  As if to prove my point, the eagle landed heavily on one of the control panels, digging its claws into the metal and dragging up the dashboard to reveal wires underneath.

  “Fuck,” I hissed. “We need to get it out of here and into another room we can keep it in before it destroys everything.”

  “And how do we do that?” Elaine asked, impatiently, as she held her lizard back from attacking again. For a moment they were in a standoff while the eagle surveyed the room, deciding what to do.

  It was still poised for attack, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before it tried again to kill the people in the room.

  “Come with me,” Lisa said, again giving a snappy order with all her usual authority. But she didn’t have the advantage of pheromonal consistencies with this enormous bird; she was used to animals with the wolf gene listening to her.

  Instead of convincing the eagle to do as it was told, that seemed to actively antagonize it, and it lunged forward once more, straight at Lisa with its talons primed. Lisa didn’t duck in time, but lifted her arm to take the blunt of the blow and received deep gashes in response. She cried out, and Elaine and Marie both sprang into action, diving at the eagle with their claws and gouging deep wounds in its chest. Blood seeped through the plumage.

  “Get out of there,” I instructed. “Lead it into a different room that you can lock it in. It doesn’t like being told what to do. Lisa you can use that.”

  They didn’t need to be told twice to flee from the laboratory and into the corridor. The problem was that the corridor was tight, and getting it to leave the more spacious lab for the tight corridor was tricky. They were in a standoff. Them on one side of the door, the eagle poking its head into the corridor and looking around, curious.

  “Find a room for it,” Lisa told the others. “Somewhere close by that it’ll fit in without being too cramped.”

  Marie and Elaine both hurried to do as they were told after a slight hesitation. When Lisa barked, “I’ll be fine, just hurry up,” they obeyed without thinking twice.

  That was what I’d wanted from the eagle, but this experiment had been a failure.

  “Maybe you should just put it down,” I said to Lisa, who was stood with a hunched back, ready to leap backward or forward depending on how the eagle acted. They were locked in a staring match. Lisa didn’t flinch despite the blood pouring from the deep wounds on her forearm.

  “I’m not going to do that,” she said, clenching and unclenching the hand on her injured side.

  “We’re not going to be able to tame it,” I said. “Look at it, it’s too independent.”

  “We can’t just kill it.”

  “You don’t have a problem with me just killing the rabbits, how is— oh,” I said, flicking cameras to find Marie and Elaine.

  They were searching nearby corridors for an appropriate room. “This is it,” Elaine said. “It’s big enough to house it, and the door is strong. We just need to get it here.”

  “I have an idea how,” I said, making Marie jump from my sudden appearance. “You need to go and get as many rabbits as you can carry.”

  Marie’s face fell. “Oh no. You’re not serious, are you?”

  “It’s a better idea than using yourself as bait,” I argued.

  “I really don’t want to watch that thing slaughter all those rabbits.”

  “Did you never watch Planet Earth?”

  “No!” Marie said indignantly. “I always want the prey to survive but the predators not to starve to death. It’s existential crisis material.”

  I laughed. “Really, though, this is how it has to happen. I can’t think of a better way.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  They set to work and I returned to Lisa, who was starting to waver in her stand off with the eagle. The blood loss was getting to her, and I fought my frustration as I watched.

  If I’d been in my body I could have taken over. If I’d not been selfish I would have made Lisa the small eagle she wanted, and my body would be gestating right now.

  Instead she was a hair’s breadth away from being ripped apart by my creation.

  Lisa swayed visibly, and had to rest her hand on the side of the corridor to support herself. This sign of weakness was the only thing the eagle needed, and it immediately pulled back, ready to attack.

  “Shit,” I hissed, and returned to the lab. There had to be something here that I could distract it with.

  I remembered the way it had lunged for Marie and instructed Ego to play noises that sounds like an eagle’s normal prey. It had super sensitive hearing, maybe it would respond to that, even if it couldn’t smell anything that corresponded with the noises it heard.

  It was at least enough to stop the eagle attacking. It turned its head, eyes returning to the lab to see if it could see the source of the sounds. I flashed lights on dashboard, hoping to entice it.

  I cringed when it worked, and the eagle flew toward the dashboard and dug its claws into the control panel just as it had before. It went further this time, digging out wires with its talons and ripping them. It jumped when it got an electric shock and careened backward, bashing into the wall. Hissing, its assault on the dashboard got stronger, and it was shocked once more.

  The shock wasn’t enough to render it unconscious, but it obviously hurt because the eagle gave up its attack on the control panel completely and returned to the corridor.

  Instead of finding Lisa there, it found a fat, fluffy rabbit instead.

  The rabbit hopped toward the eagle, and the eagle lunged.

  It tore the rabbit limb from limb, and I was glad the girls had decided to get out of there rather than watch it. Marie would have been horrified. I’d have to get the bots to clean the blood from the floor before they returned.

  The trail of rabbits worked exactly as intended. As soon as the eagle was in the room Elaine and Marie had picked for its holding cell, I slammed the electric door shut and sealed it.

  The girls were in a nearby room, tending to Lisa’s arm injury. They wrapped her in bandages while she looked away, jaw set.

  “It worked,” I informed them, hoping to keep them away from the laboratory and the trail of blood that led to it. “It’s trapped in the room for now.”

  Lisa sighed. “And now what?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to figure out what to do with it.”

  “We either have to put it down or let it go free,” Elaine said. “It’s too dangerous to just keep it here locked up. How are we going to feed it?”

  “We can let the robots do that,” Lisa replied, tense. “We’re not just throwing it out into the world. It’s too dangerous.”

  “What, but keeping it locked up here is a better scenario?” Elaine argued.

  “It’s not going to escape a sealed room, is it? The doors are half a meter of thick steel. We can’t just put it down either.”

  “We shouldn’t kill it,” Marie said softly. “It’s alive. That wouldn’t be right.”

  “You’re all too soft,” Elaine said, leav
ing Lisa’s bandaging to Marie and going to sprawl herself out on the couch. She ran a hand down the scaly neck of her lizard while she calmed down.

  “It’s powerful,” I said, intervening. My voice seemed to soothe some of the tension in the room, but the girls were arguing more and more nowadays. I needed to stop focusing on my body and come up with a coherent strategy that I could unite them behind. “We should wait and see if we can use that some way before we just reclaim it.”

  Reclaim sounded less emotive than put down. It didn’t make Marie twitch uncomfortably when I said it.

  “I just don’t know how you think you’re going to tame it. It obviously won’t listen to any of us,” Elaine said, though her tone was less combative. “I’m just worried it’s more dangerous than useful.”

  “It’s safe behind the door for now,” I said. “We can decide what to do with it later. It’s not an immediate concern.”

  “And we haven’t tried seeing if it will listen to Sol yet,” Marie pointed out. “You know he’s the top dog around here. Maybe it’ll respect that.”

  The tension calmed, Marie put the finishing touches to Lisa’s bandage. “That feeling better?” she asked.

  “Not better, but at least it’s not bleeding all over me anymore.”

  The nanobots in all the creatures created in the facility—including the girls—meant that they healed faster from injuries than ordinary animals. It wasn’t an instant process, though, and they still scarred. The cuts on this forearm would match the scars already shining white against her white fur on the other arm from a skirmish she’d fought when helping Cara and the villagers.

  “You should get some rest,” I said. “It’s late, and you’ll be wanting to go back out again tomorrow, won’t you?”

  “True,” Lisa said. She stretched, and her own exhaustion showed all over her face.

  A pang of guilt struck me right where it hurt. Lisa had just wanted a pet, and I’d made an abomination that had given her scars. This was all my fault.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” I told her, voice soft.

  She gave me a toothy smile, bearing her deadly canines. “I will. Thanks Sol.”

  Lisa headed to her bed, and Elaine and Marie headed to the one they’d started to share. I was left alone. Ego was absent unless I called on him, and that was what I did.

  “Ego, I need to make another eagle.”

  “Because the first one went so well?”

  “You really need to stop with the sarcasm,” I said. “Find something from the 1920s to watch where everyone is polite all the time. Well, as long as you’re a white male, I guess. Anyway, I want you to make an eagle. A small one. Smaller than a real eagle. More like, budgie size. F-tier. A pet rather than a fighter.”

  “I can do that. The chances of mutations are minimal.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You can turn the obedience right up, right? And fiddle with the affection. Make it super affectionate. And loyal.”

  “I can do that,” he repeated.

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s considerable damage to the laboratory.”

  “I know. How long do you think it’ll take the robots to fix it?” I asked. “I can’t make my body until it’s fixed.”

  “A couple of days. It depends how many other tasks they have to do.”

  “That’s not so bad. I’ll have to take a look at their schedule.”

  Ego disappeared, presumably to start creation of the eagle I’d instructed. It wouldn’t take long at all to gestate thanks to its size and low power. Hopefully it would be there when Lisa woke up.

  Chapter Ten

  Lisa was thrilled by my gift when she woke up.

  She came into the lab in the morning—I’d had the bots scrub away the rabbit remains from the floor during the night—and was greeted by the tiny eagle. Its claws had been blunted and its beak wasn’t as sharp as the original blueprint. It was snowy white, with thick plumage. The moment Lisa walked it in hopped onto her shoulder and peered into her face, then rubbed its head against her cheek.

  She beamed, running her finger over its head. “Oh my God,” she said, and I worried for a moment that her voice would crack. “It’s perfect. Thank you so much.”

  Consumed with her new bird, Lisa hadn’t been bothered about leaving the facility to track the tribe. Instead we all had a day off for a change.

  Ego, with his thousands of media files, offered them a list of movies and they settled in to marathon the original Star Wars trilogy after much debate. Lisa wasn’t happy with it, but she was too jubilant to really care. She spent the whole time with the bird curled on her knee, snoozing.

  For a change, I actually sat in my camera and watched all the movies with them instead of drifting back to my body’s creation screen, or flicking through the cameras searching for something to occupy myself with. I didn’t sit watching the desert from my limited position being jealous of any animal I saw, able to roam free.

  The only frustration was watching Elaine lay her head on Marie’s lap, having her long mane of red hair be played with.

  I would have killed to lie there instead.

  But it was so long since I’d been that relaxed that it wasn’t enough to really bug me. We just chilled together, ignoring any of the stress that had plagued us for weeks now. There wasn’t a single snippy comment exchanged between the girls.

  And while the movies played, my mind had an epiphany.

  “Ego,” I said when the credits of Return of the Jedi started playing, keeping the conversation internally rather than broadcasting it through the speakers to the girls. “I want you to start gestating my body.”

  “What?” Ego asked.

  “I want you to start gestating it. I think it’s ready, and I can just make it and see how it goes, to see what it looks like in real life, before I decide to attach my brain to it. I can remove and edit parts before I add my brain to it without harming myself. It’s not the most efficient use of gel, but I think it’s the best idea for now.”

  There was a long pause. “Okay,” Ego said. His voice was smooth, but the hesitation was strange. “I’ll start working on that.”

  “Is there something wrong, Ego?”

  “With the facility? Everything is going great,” he chirped. I figured he knew what I meant, but I thought it was probably best to leave it.

  While Ego did that, I sent two bots to the rabbit room to fetch one of the younger rabbits. They brought the struggling creature to the lab on sub-level four that wasn’t still recovering from the eagle’s attack.

  Ego surprised me by speaking first. Normally he waited until he was summoned. “What are you doing with the rabbit?”

  “I want to see if we can alter already existing creatures,” I said.

  Elaine thought that her lizard had gone through that process, but in reality I’d made a new lizard from the blueprint she’d given me and upped the obedience level. It had just been easier at the time. There’d been no need to put things back into stasis so they could be altered because I could just reclaim and make more things with alterations.

  Now, though, with my own body I wanted the ability to constantly modify and upgrade my body. The more our army grew, the more people I could send out, and the further afield they’d be able to go. When I was safely in my body we’d be able to go on overnight excursions, and the number of blueprints we’d acquire would go up and up.

  There would always be something new to add to my body to make me more powerful.

  I needed to know I could actually change it before I committed to what I currently had in mind.

  Ego said, “I know that we can.”

  “Oh. Well, I still want to try it, just to make sure it actually works.”

  “What do you want me to change?” he asked.

  “Uh. I don’t know, give it some wings or something,” I said noncommittally. “We’ll have it reclaimed straight away anyway. I picked a big fat one nearly at the right weight for reclamation. I just want to
make sure it’s… okay before I do it.”

  “I’m on it,” Ego said.

  “Do something that won’t take long,” I said. “Something as small as changing its fur color or something if you want. Just as a test run.”

  I’d play around with adding more and more complex things if this one worked out, but I wanted the immediately confirmation that it worked before I wasted nutrigel on something bigger and more complicated.

  Unlike with creating a creature from nothing, this was a live being, and I had to instruct the bots to put it to sleep with a sedative to get it onto the table and still enough that the nanobots could get to work.

  The DNA code was altered. The gestation time was short enough that I could sit and watch the change happen before my eyes. Fur turned from a snowy white to a mottled brown. When the gestation period finished after only ten minutes, I had the bots inject the rabbit with something that counteracted the sedative. It was still dozy, but hopped around and didn’t protest. It was as though nothing had happened. It didn’t seem to notice the change in fur.

  “Neat,” I breathed. “Well, it’s time to try something bigger then.”

  Instead of fetching a new rabbit, I put the same one back into gestation with another shot of the sedative. Hopefully the sudden overload of drugs into the small rabbit’s system wouldn’t cause any adverse effects that I thought were because of the DNA modification.

  Probably I should have gone and fetched another rabbit, but I trusted Ego to give it the right dosage to not hurt it. He could do the maths required for something like that in less than a second.

  This time I told the AI to give it the wings I’d first suggested. This would take longer, so I abandoned the camera in the lab and returned to the girls.

  They were still sprawled on the couch, watching the credits run.

  Their bodies hadn’t been changed at all since I’d first created them, and I hadn’t made any more girls yet either. I still had brains in storage waiting to be put in bodies.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I didn’t realize you’d disappeared,” Lisa said, stretching as slowly as possible so as not to disturb the snoozing bird on her lap.