“This specimen it quite promising, Doctor, you might want to have a look. We picked him up on the edge of the desert on Demaria. Took a bit of doing to bring him around, but ...”
Doctor Kyner looked down from the observation room and into the surgery chamber below, a sigh escaping him as Golin's words returned to him from almost two years earlier. The felinoid on the operating table was currently unconscious, but that would change soon enough. If this continued, the beast would have to be put down. The experiment had been successful many times before, but this time …
Cloning the creature would have been an easy task, and not without its usefulness. An excellent example of what was already a physically impressive race, its DNA could have had plenty of applications, but no clone would have the full potential of the original.
When the Demarian had first been brought to the research facility, he had been indignant, defiant, and belligerent. Belligerent did not even begin to describe what was unlocked as conditioning began.
The first episode had been a month into the program. The felinoid had broken loose from its restraints and killed two of his best lab techs, not to mention three of the guards sent in to subdue it. It had taken a day and a half to clean up the mess. The rib cage of one of the lab techs had been opened up like a liquor cabinet.
The more strenuous the effort to break what passed for a mind in the Demarian, the more violent the reaction would be. Last time the thing broke loose, it had started eating … that's right eating the woman delivering the medication.
The cybernetics had been ready for installation months ago, the genetic resequencing protocol had been shelved time and time again for almost a year. Neither could be implemented until the subject was controllable. It was becoming painfully clear that might never happen.
This time, they had been lucky, they had managed to sedate the creature quickly enough to prevent damage. With even more luck, the animal would have returned to its normal level of sapience, such as it was, before awakening.
Even as Doctor Kyner considered the situation, the big cat's eyes began to flicker. The scientist sighed, shaking his head as he looked over at the set of enhanced claws that had been intended for installation in the paws of the Demarian. If the animal could not be controlled within the next few days, it would have to be put down. DNA had been harvested, and a clone would have to do as an asset. That Tiller had taken such a liking to the beast was not his problem.