“It’s a Maltese,” the woman said, cooing at the beast. “She comes house trained. Very energetic. The breeder was highly recommended, and she’s been certified free of any medical conditions, as were both parents and both sets of grandparents. She knows how to sit, stay, come—”

“I don’t care about any of that!” Sam cried. “It barked at me! Why’d it bark at me?! It’s mine!”

“Yes sir. They’re known for their fearless bark.” She shoved the animal into Sam’s horrified arms and then backed from the room. “There’s a food and water dish in the bag, plus six cans of premium cuisine to get her through the next few days.”

The dog licked Sam’s face and made that ear-piercing, mind-shattering sound again, this time almost touching his ear. Sam cried out and held it at arm’s length. “No, you have to take it back and get me another one!”

“We can’t, sir. The dog has already been charged to your room. Four thousand dollars—top bloodlines!” She cooed and nuzzled it, obviously delighted by the obnoxious beast.

“I don’t care about bloodlines,” he said, shoving it at her. “It barked at me!”

“Yes sir. Enjoy your stay at the Naahj San Antonio.”

“No!” Sam cried, rushing towards the door even as it closed behind her, leaving him alone with the miniature canine.

Seconds passed. The dog looked up at him intensely, and for a moment, Sam thought it was trying an elementary form of telemental communication. Then it barked again, and Sam dropped it out of reflex.

The animal recovered from its fall and scrabbled across the room, barking in a brain-breaking cacophony as it tore circles around the furniture.

“No! Stop!” One hand on his ear, Sam unsuccessfully lumbered after the creature, trying to stomp on it, which only made it run faster and bark more.

“Fine!” he cried, gasping and lowering his hands to his knees in defeat, completely unused to physical exertion of any sort. “Fine. You fluffy little pest, I’ll just wait until you sleep, catch you in a blanket, and drop you in the waste recycler and tell them to get me another one.”

The ‘dog’ cocked its head at him, and again, Sam thought it was trying some eerie Jedi mind-trick to communicate. Sam squinted at it, intensely focusing on the animal’s intense focus. “You really do have half a lightbulb in there, don’t you?” Sam asked, bemused. “Bet you won’t look so smug when you’re sliding down the chute on your way to the incinerator…”

Then it barked again, and Sam cried out and hurled a lamp at it in reflex.

An hour later, his room tore to shit and the little monster somehow still alive, Sam collapsed on his bed to scowl at it. The beast, likewise, collapsed by the door. They glared at each other, the beast once again giving him that eerie stare like it was trying to send a message.

“You know,” Slade said, after a prolonged silence after their stalemate, “I could make you able to talk.”

Maybe if the animal was able to talk, it wouldn’t feel it necessary to bark, then Sam could grab it and throw it down the waste chute without it bursting his eardrums and shattering the membranes of every braincell he had in the process.

Yeah, that would do it. Sam went to his computer and, researching canine drugs and dosages, ordered a black market knockout drug and anesthetic, as well as a dart gun, syringes, razor, hair clippers, a voice box, programmable nannite blanks, bone saw, operating apparatus, electrodes, a micro supercomputer, and a tiny nuclear-powered battery, amongst other necessary supplies.

When the supplies arrived by courier, Sam quickly set up his makeshift operating room and prepped it, then loaded the gun. “Pain is weakness leaving the body, Barky,” he said, quoting his dad, and shot the dog.

At its startled yelp, Sam set the dart gun aside, went to collect his prize, and secured it to the table. Then he began his first truly interesting project in three years.

#

Twenty-four hours later, Sam had a self-repairing nannite stew layered over the creases in the animal’s brain, all collecting and diverting subtle fluctuations in the dog’s brainwaves to the nuclear-powered onboard supercomputer, along with a network of electrodes embedded in the dog’s language centers to receive and translate input so communication wasn’t just one-way.

“All right,” Slade said, administering the wakeup drug. “Let’s see what you have to say…”

“You cat fucker you shot me,” the little translator box said from the animal’s collar.

“Aha!” Sam screamed. “Success! I have conquered the barrier between man and—”

“You cat fucker you shot me. You cat fucker you shot me. You cat fucker you shot me. You cat fucker you shot me.” The dog was running in circles under the table, quivering.

Sam made a face, tapping the relay screen he had hooked up to the dog’s Bluetooth. “Surely you can say something else.”

But the tiny beast hunkered in a corner, saying the same thing, over and over and over…

“Okay!” Sam cried, slapping his hands over his ears. “I get it. I shot you. Say something else!”

Now the dog began to bark and curse at him. “You cat fucker you shot me!” Bark bark bark. “You cat fucker you shot me!” It spun away from him and huddled under a nightstand, crouched behind a table leg, to scowl up at him. Then it looked him right in the eyes and did that little Jedi-mind-trick stare again for several moments before finishing, “Cat fucker.”

Sam narrowed his eyes and retrieved the dart gun from the nightstand.

“Cats!” the little beast barked, turning and running from him. “Cats, cats, cats!”

Sam shot it again. As soon as the little beast went limp, he returned it to the operating table. Time to make some adjustments…

Unfortunately, Sam discovered, the problem wasn’t technical. There were no crossed wires in the electrodes nor mixed messages in his programming. The tiny creature simply thought in approximately five sentences, and no amount of nannite stew was going to increase the base capabilities of the primitive beast. “Cat fucker” was one of the most common thoughts it had, he discovered, followed closely by ‘pee now’ and ‘need kibble’ and ‘wannapooponfloor.’

Which meant a peripheral application of electronics wasn’t going to be enough—he was going to have to get more hands-on, like a gene-altering virus. Those, of course, were tricky, with the potential for unintended consequences on a ecosystemic level if he wasn’t careful, but he could rent the adjoining room to hold the apparatus and use extra gloves…

“Pee now?” the little beast said, cocking its fluffy white head at him.

“No. Now shut up. I need to make you better before you give me an aneurysm.” Unwilling to put up with such rudimentary mental messaging in the time it took to carry the beast to the wastes chute so he could order a new, non-barking one, Sam opened up his laptop again and began researching ways to change the animal’s base code.

Irritatingly, Barky came to sit on his lap on the sofa as Sam surfed illicit government files looking for something he could use, forcing him to move the laptop to one side as the beast plopped its fuzzy body on his balls.

Not for the first time, Sam thought perhaps he should put on clothes after sex—the woman, of course, had been kicked out as soon as he’d gotten his rocks off so he could go back to thinking—then dismissed it. The dog didn’t seem to mind. Plus, the beast was warm, like his very own Conan loincloth, except alive.

Sam stopped his perusal of secret Congie programs when he reached Project Pinnacle.

It was a huge file, the research for which had been going on in secret for thousands of turns in secret government bases scattered across the galaxy for the purpose of creating a permanent soldier-augmentation using the most-desirable genetics of several different Congressional species.

Which, of course, presented major compatibility challenges, and so far had resulted in abject, gooey failure time and time again, but it was interesting nonetheless, and in the same general vein that Sam wanted to explore. He dug deeper.

He quickly found a series of genetic mapping and augmentation calculations he could use for his own project and had to refrain from doing a seated happy dance on the off-chance the dog might mistake it for an attack and then proceed to bark and crush his balls. Maintaining calm despite his enthusiasm, Sam read on.

Humans, the Congie scientists had hypothesized, were key. Upon first discovering them three and a half thousand years ago, those running the secret labs had gone into excited meltdowns about how easy it was to tinker with Humanity’s genetic code…and even add to it.

Alien genetics, of course, were vastly different than Human, often not even using amino acids and nucleotides to code information, usually having some impermeable, incalculable base structures that could not be combined or tinkered with, with only a few species that Congress had more or less been able to boil down to the basics, and Humans and the inhabitants of Earth, for better or worse, were some of the more simple species Congress had managed to blunder upon in its two and a half million year existence, considered by many Congressional scientists in the project to be a perfect ‘blank’ species for genetics experiments because of their lack of complexity.

Which had, of course, led to a lot of abductions in the last three and a half thousand years as secretive alien scientists filled their labs with guinea pigs prior to the official ‘discovery’ of Earth, thousands of years later. Unfortunately, as of yet, there had been no successful test subjects from the Congressional experiments, as they still hadn’t found that magic combination that allowed Human and alien genes to mesh without immediate disintegration, screaming, and blood.

But what was even more interesting was that the human government had somehow gotten hold of the Project Pinnacle files. Not just a couple of them, either, but all of them, and they were already using them in several scattered bases, absurdly trying to do what Congress could not.

Sam dug deeper, idly petting Barky as he read.

“Wannapooponfloor?” Barky said hopefully.

“Later,” Sam said, concentrating. “Busy.”

Barky squinted at him. “Cat fucker.” Then went back to sleep.

This was interesting. Only five turns after discovering Earth back in the sixteenth century BC, the Tribunal had classified the already-illicit genetics experiments on Human DNA as Tribunal-Only and destroyed all the secret bases—and made everyone who lived on them mysteriously disappear—except the covert lab on Koliinaat, which meant that humanity could only have gained the files if a Tribunal member himself had authorized it.

Before they had been disbanded, however, in their last days, the scientists had successfully isolated the base code of hyperintelligent, telepathic beasts called kreenit and now those Human scientists who had been just…given…the information were attempting to use that information to make an army of hyperintelligent, telepathic super-soldiers with the ultimate goal of Earth fighting its way to freedom.

Which, of course, would forever be unsuccessful, because whoever had given the humans all the files of Project Pinnacle had also made some very small but important alterations to the code, ensuring that the experiments would never live past embryo stage in the lab.

The whole thing screamed patsy to him, so Sam decided to update the Human servers with the correct codes and erase the base’s locations and records from the Tribunal forces monitoring them, then reassigned all the monitors to a new top-secret project with a requisite full brain-wipe upon entry, something about mold. Then he went back to reading about kreenit, sipping his martini.

Kreenit, he discovered, were a sexually trimorphic species that had evolved on the same planet as the Dhasha and grew to approximately the size of a 747, with wings to match.

Now this was interesting…

The species had three sexes—not surprising for an alien—but while the ultra-rare, less-than-two-percent hyperintelligent males and females of the species were both winged and smarter than Huouyt, they were perpetually quarantined on tightly controlled breeder planets, secretly classified as non-sent as per the top secret section of the Dhasha’s Species Concessions. The sexless ninety-eight percent that made up the rest of the kreenit species—the ones Congress dropped on planets they didn’t like—were basically mindless drones that the Dhasha used as proof the creatures were stupid so no species conservationists ever dug any deeper…

Useless information Sam would probably never have to use anywhere else in his life, but cool nonetheless. From the documentation on sexed kreenit, Sam found that Congress was secretly even more afraid of them than they were of Dhasha, and installed ekhtas on all planets that actively bred them, just in case one of the males or females escaped its collar and used the drones to take over and turned the Congies into slaves. Some serious Alien: Resurrection sort of shit. Except, in this case, the bad guys were the ones keeping the poor, hyperintelligent aliens without opposable thumbs trapped on a planet for a million and a half years with no hope of showing the universe they were sentient, mining them for drones they could use as war machines.

“Well, that’s not very fair, is it?” Sam said, taking a moment to set up a pairing between the smartest and most telepathic parents he could find, then intentionally corrupting the classification, isolation, and quarantine procedure of their upcoming hatch to make their progeny’s debut as interesting as possible in the hopes that the next handful of males and females would be labeled ‘drones’ and shipped off to some misbehaving planet where the beasts would hopefully have a chance to prove their intellect to the world before they could be secretly locked away again. Sam got all warm and fuzzy inside, thinking of how he was doing a Karmic Good Deed, fighting for the trodden-on Little Guy, sticking it to the Man. He sipped his margarita, beaming at his own humanitarianism. He couldn’t wait to see it on the news.

Sam closed the manifests for the kreenit breeding planet and went back to figuring out how to make his dog less stupid. Unfortunately, the high intellect of the sexed kreenit had not yet been transferrable even in theory, totally flummoxing the scientists working on the project. Sam, of course, suspected it required a secondary genetic to stabilize it, as it appeared to be hormonally triggered in the host species, but he wouldn’t be sure until he tested his theory. He jotted a few notes and went back to figuring out how to make his little housemate smarter, because he certainly wasn’t going to make a telepathic dog who could only speak five sentences, incessantly.

Which brought him to the Huouyt section of the Da Vinci Project. This one had focused on the more desirable qualities of the goat-fuckers of Congress, namely shapeshifting, but with minor focuses on lifespan and intelligence. It was the latter two that Sam cared about. Maltese only had an average life of twelve to fifteen years, much too short to be the perfect companion animal. He’d leave off the shapeshifting, of course, but by his calculations, if he infused the creature with the genetics of a Huouyt, it should activate the kreenit component—another ridiculously long-lived alien—and he could add at least fifty years and two hundred IQ points. It wasn’t great, but considering the creature started with single-digits, it was an improvement.

Hell, it might even work on him… Sam downed his martini and got a refill, idly wondering what it would be like to be even smarter, surpassing even god-mode and entering into something beyond deity, a living legend that would be whispered about from mother to daughter, a pinnacle of Human capacity, a myth…

That would make those idiot girls adore him more than his brother.

The shapeshifting would be useless, of course. He’d probably leave it off. He really didn’t want to have to waste his time carrying genetic patterns on the off-chance he accidentally fell into a puddle.

Then he thought about getting those same doe-eyed girls into a bedroom with him and show them the benefits of a very localized shift…

Sam zoned out, fully immersed in their awe as he showed them his inhuman ‘prowess.’ There would be six of them, not hookers, because he was just that notorious for his prodigious brain, all redheads, all staring at him as he—