“Peenow?” the beast demanded, wrecking his sonata with a crude electronic squeak.

“No goddamn it!” Sam cried, shaking himself. “I don’t want to have to call someone to go walk you. Just shut up. I was thinking.”

The little beast scowled at him and laid its head back on his balls.

Sam tried desperately to return to his mental masterpiece, but, like safety glass hit by a crowbar, it was gone. Damn it. He was pretty sure that had been something brilliant, too… Reluctantly, he went back to his research.

The kreenit were a good base, if he could overcome the built-in sexual trimorphism triggers and the fact that all the test subjects had apparently been too stupid to withstand the transformation, curling into a ball and babbling to themselves in theoretical physics before their brains just necrotized and they died. Which, of course, wouldn’t be a problem for Sam, but he could see where his dog might have an issue. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be telepathic, though. His dog, sure, because he hated taking the time to replace batteries—even once every hundred years was boring, so why bother? Sam, however, didn’t need telepathy. He was pretty sure that if he had to put up with the thoughts of other people and listen to them talk, he’d gladly take a running dive into a wood chipper before the end of the first day.

But shapeshifting, immortality, and increased intellect? Fuck yes.

He hesitated, wondering why he’d decided shapeshifting was a good idea. On first glance, it seemed annoying to have to carry patterns around in case he got thrown out of a boat or got caught in a monsoon… Then he shrugged, sure that, if he’d decided somewhere along in the course of his research that shapeshifting would be useful, it was best to trust his brain when it was at its prime—he just needed to wait until his massive mental processes circled back around to reveal to him why.

Then Sam realized he was planning on dosing himself as a matter of course and hesitated, his eyes once again sliding back to the results of the Human science experiments.

Out of one thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine unwilling test subjects, all but one had ‘exploded from the inside’ and ‘dissolved into a runny gray mucous’ while ‘shrieking in agony’ and ‘vomiting blood’. The one that didn’t ‘explode’ had, by all accounts, been in the process of doing so before the screaming subject broke free of his restraints, grabbed a gun from one of his guards, and shot everyone in the room and before putting it to the roof of his mouth and ending the experiment prematurely.

Clearly they just got the calculations off, Sam thought, shrugging. He went back to analyzing which qualities he wanted his dog to have. Project Pinnacle was a gold mine. The scientists had analyzed every alien they could get their hands on, and while many of them refused to give up their secrets, there were plenty that had. He debated giving his dog chameleon qualities of the Jikaln, but decided the creature’s fur would render shifting skin pigmentation useless and he didn’t want to have to shave him regularly, so he ditched the idea. He considered figuring out how to him the invisibility of the Jreet, but decided that a dog with scales would be too conspicuous at the dog park, especially while the initial transformation was taking place. It was likely to be…gruesome.

So he decided to keep it to intelligence, long life, and telepathy. And a paralytic, Huouyt-depatterning saliva care of the Vanun, because that was cool.

Sam researched another twenty minutes, got bored reading the detailed reports of failed methodology, then closed his laptop, deciding to wing it. He tossed the dog off his lap and called the front desk to begin the construction of his lab and find him another ‘masseuse’.

#

Two days later, mid-coitus, Sam had the epiphany he’d been waiting for on how to incorporate the alien code without killing its subject. Immediately, he threw the expensive hooker off of him—making her yelp in surprise—and scrambled naked off the bed in his haste to get to his computer to test the theory.

After a few minutes of him frantically typing in code, the woman—he hadn’t bothered learning her name—sprawled on the bed asked in a husky-yet-bored, “You gonna finish, big guy?” trampling his orchestra with a shipload of bellowing aurochs.

“No,” Sam said distractedly, not turning. “Money’s on the nightstand. Stop talking and get out.” He kept entering code as quickly as he could make his fingers move. Minutes later, with a little ting of a successful algorithmic run, one of the keys to the Universe was staring him in the face. The formula worked! Sam did a little jiggle of glee and cackled, then grabbed and downed the rest of his martini in a huge gulp. Only then did he realize the woman was still in the room with him, slowly getting dressed as she squinted at him, trying to catch some look at the contents of his computer.

“You can dress in the hall,” Sam said, spinning the laptop away from her and gesturing at the door. He poured himself another margarita, already returning his attention to the solution to his dog’s intellectual woes. As suspected, the Huouyt component balanced the kreenit component, hypothetically allowing the kreenit’s intelligence to activate without overwhelming the test subject and leaving him babbling on the floor in a gibbering mess like the rest of the—

“But I don’t even have my bra on,” the woman began, exploding his mental concerto with the cacophony of her voice. “Just wait a minute while I put on my blouse…”

“I need the space!” Sam cried, nearing panic that he wasn’t already back at work and putting his new epiphany to the test. He slammed the margarita and poured another to steady himself, gesturing wildly at the door. “Go! Now! I don’t have time. I have to test a theory.” He went back to entering code. He might have raised his voice a little, but it was nothing unreasonable, considering the situation.

“You know your eyes bulge out when you scream, right?” the woman muttered, hastily snagging her blouse and the five grand off the nightstand. “You’ve got some serious Jekyll and Hyde shit going on here man.”

“Go!” Sam shrieked, feeling his focus evaporating like a cheap perfume.

Then, his hotel room littered with pizza boxes and still smelling of sex, his latest hooker letting herself out, Sam picked up the dart gun again. The dog—who had been watching him from his bed in the corner—immediately lifted his head warily.

“You ready to become a badass?” Sam said, cocking it.

“Cats!” the dog cried, immediately bolting for the balcony. “Cat fu—”

Sam shot him, and the words died in a slur as the little beast collapsed on the floor. Giggling excitedly, Sam tossed the gun to the couch and went to collect his prize and return it to the lab, where this time, he removed the potentially-conflicting computer, electrodes, and nannite solution and instead injected the beast with a glowing purple serum of blood-brain-barrier-penetrating, load-bearing virus directly into the vein.

Only after he had depressed the syringe did Sam idly once again wonder if the virus might, given the proper conditions, replicate. He frowned, looking down at the quietly-breathing little beast, tongue lolled out, legs splayed out and tied down for surgery, skin glowing slightly purple where the veins were close to the surface. He scrunched his face, calculating the odds that the precise conditions would be met. The chances were slim, but not zero.

However, with the virus already deployed, he’d have to throw the dog in the waste incinerator to prevent any potential contamination, and if he had to start over now, he’d lose all the time he’d put into mass- and breed-specific calculations.

Oh well. He’d just have to remember to calibrate his serum to ensure it wasn’t potentially contagious. He set the syringe aside and checked the dog’s pupil. Already contracting. Good. He left it on the table and went to go find some Cheetos, taking the little vial of his serum with him so he could make the proper adjustments before his favorite TV show came on at nine-thirty.

Admittedly, he hurried a little bit in what came next, because it was his favorite show, but it was mostly right. Then, adjustments made, he snagged the vial off the magnetized calibrator, grabbed some popcorn and another margarita, then sat to wind down with some mindless brain rot while the luminescent vial rested on the couch beside him, casting a pale purple glow on the pillows that outshone the TV. One of the interesting things about the kreenit component was the glow, something that couldn’t apparently be defined or explained by Congressional scientists, but they shrugged and went with it anyway because the telepathy was the highest-value trait in their repertoire, should they ever get it to work.

Sam, who had also been intrigued by the glow, which, by the laws of physics and mass-energy preservation, shouldn’t have glowed, had looked into it long enough to realize it was going to take more than twenty minutes, then gave up, bored. As long as it worked, who gave a shit?

And it would work. He could feel it. He’d used the same base nannite-instructed virus as the dog’s, but had left out the telepathic coding—for aforementioned reasons—and the Vanun paralytic—because, while he did find girls to be annoying, he also liked sex, and the idea of them going even more cold-fish on him was less than appealing—but had added the shapeshifting sections of the Huouyt genetics, because that sounded fun.

At ten-thirty, four margaritas and a pirate space-caper later, Sam was well and truly drunk. He went to check the dog, then found the little beast hadn’t dissolved into a puddle of gray slime as had all of his predecessors, and—equally important—it was still breathing.

A win!

Sam went to find something else to watch on TV.

An hour later, the beast hadn’t woken up—but also wasn’t dead—despite the fact the drug should’ve worn off. Sam checked the time, shrugged, then poured another celebratory margarita and turned on a soap opera.

Three hours after the drug should have worn off, the dog still hadn’t made a peep in the other room. Sam calculated that, by that point, he definitely should have begun feeling the effects of the gene-modifications and would have at least been howling or whining a little. They wouldn’t be complete for a full twenty-eight hours—he’d sped up the regimen as much as he had been able—but still, he should’ve heard something…

He went into the makeshift lab, pushed his way through the plastic sheeting, and stood there scowling down at his test subject. He prodded it with a alcohol-numbed finger to ascertain that it wasn’t a gelatinous puddle of goo inside a bag of skin. It wasn’t. Frowning, he started to pour himself another margarita, then, realizing the margarita mix bottle was already half empty, just said fukkit and added the Grand Mariner and Cincoro Tequila directly to the mix. Shaking it, he took a big chug and frowned down at his lab experiment.

“Why the fuck aren’t you waking up?”

It continued to lay there, not dead, but not drugged, either. Narrowing his eyes, Sam poked it in the ribs. “Hey. Say something.”

The dog’s eyes—bloodshot and red, now—flashed open and, like a sledgehammer to Sam’s mind, it said directly into his mind, “You cat fucker—”

Immediately, Sam started to deflate. Well, that was a couple hours of wasted time. Now he had to incinerate it. He turned, chugging his margarita with a depressed sigh. Back to the drawing board…

“—you let me up right now or I’m going piss on your computer on the off-chance you ever take a shower, you slovenly bag of cat shit.”

Sam gasped and let out a little giggle of delight, spinning back to his test subject. “Success!” He poked the thing again. “Say something else.”

Common sense isn’t a primary language for you, is it?

“Amazing!” Sam cried, with a happy dance and a squeal. “Say something else!”

The dog narrowed its unnatural eyes at him and went silent.

Sam stopped smiling and frowned. “Say something else.”

No.

“I own you!” Sam snapped. “Do it!”

Technically, you threw away my registration without filling it out, so you don’t. You didn’t even get me chipped. You own nothing.

“I paid money!” Sam gasped.

Prove it. You can rest assured the hotel didn’t keep records of an illicit dog sale in the middle of the night, just like they don’t record your hookers or drug use. They just wrote it off under ‘amenities’.

Sam’s mouth fell open.

Go check, asshole. I’ll wait.

Sam quickly went to check. It was true. There was no ‘dog’ or ‘canine companion’ or ‘Maltese’ listed anywhere on his itemized list of concierge purchases. Just thousands upon thousands of dollars for ‘amenities’.

Realizing his brilliant discovery could thus be claimed by any drooling idiot on the street, Sam gasped and went scrabbling over to the trash receptacle, hoping it hadn’t already—

The maid had already dumped the contents in the incinerator. Dammit.

Sullenly, Sam returned to the operating table to glare down at the spread-eagled pest. “You’re gonna stay there until they send me a replacement registration.”

You keep me tied to this table any longer and I’m going to start shrieking Cher’s Believe at the top of my mental lungs, cat fucker. With some encores by shitty boybands.

Sam frowned, his buzz rapidly fading. He chugged more margarita from the bottle, watching the experiment with increasing trepidation. Finally, he said, “How do you know about boybands?”

My previous—better—owner had teenage girls. Now let me up or I’ll just castrate you with my mind.

Sam swallowed the rest of the margarita in a spasm. He set the bottle down and wiped his lips with an arm, nervously eying the little beast on the table. “You can’t do that.” He didn’t like the way it almost sounded like a question.

Guess we’ll find out, won’t we? It continued to stare at him with its creepy, blood-filled eyes, and Sam was the first to break contact, nervously scratching the back of his neck. “The, uh, serum shouldn’t have messed with your eyes. Can you still see?”

I’m all but blind, goat fucker. Like seeing through a tidal wave of blood. Thanks to you, you mental clown.

Sam grimaced and considered whether or not he wanted to get the dart gun again. Experiments did, after all, often fail, and he wasn’t sure he felt comfortable releasing a potentially-contagious eye-bleeding virus loose upon the population—

If you don’t untie me, the dog—Sam couldn’t remember if it was male or female—warned, I am going to lobotomize you.

Sam cocked his head, a new wash of possibilities zinging through his mind. He’d expected a Send/Receive function, but what if something about mental processes allowed a Tinker function? “You can do that?”

Absolutely. Here. Allow me to demonstrate.

And, with that, Sam felt himself needing to urinate so bad he walked over and pissed on his couch, then, because he’d been too preoccupied to take his morning dump and sex always jogged things loose, he went into his bedroom, climbed onto the bed, squatted over his pillow, and took the biggest dump of his life. Because he really needed to go and no one would let him outside, so that was the best alternative…

Sam was already untying his good friend from the table when he hesitated, mid-knot, the unmistakable smell of shit wafting to him from somewhere in the house. He frowned, not thinking he had been so busy again that he had shat in the garbage can by his computer rather than waste his time jogging to the bathroom…

Then he remembered the semi-erection he got from the pleasure of shitting on his own pillow and gasped, recoiling from the table in shock. “That’s impossible,” he gasped.

Apparently not, ape.

Sam, thoroughly unnerved, grabbed the whole table and wheeled it out to the balcony, rigidly avoiding any further urges to do anything except untie the little beast as he started levering it over the edge of the railing.

What are you doing? the lab experiment demanded, sounding nervous.

“Retiring a failed experiment,” Sam said, grunting as he shoved.

The dog licked him on the back of the hand.

“Ha!” Sam cried, “that fake love routine isn’t gonna work this ti—”

Sam felt his entire body lock up, every muscle going tense, then he plunged sideways, both him and the table crashing back to the balcony floor. The dog, meanwhile, used the sudden displacement of mass to chew through his bonds and hit the floor running, climbing onto his bed to dial 9-1-1 on the phone with a tiny paw, then, leaving it off the hook, took his lighter—Sam was lazy and preferred the push-button kind—and, after only a couple minutes of careful maneuvering with a paw, set the pile of doobies on fire. Then added Sam’s sweatpants to that. Then his notes.

My notes! Sam thought, horrified. He couldn’t, however, move, the paralytic keeping him well and truly fucked as the dog went about the room destroying everything he’d worked on for the last three days, coming back every few minutes or so to lick his face again.

The dog continued fucking with his stuff, including climbing onto the table and pissing on his computer, which immediately fried with a depressing electric sizzle and a puff of smoke.

“Where did you put that serum you were gonna use on yourself?” the dog demanded, as the haze of burning cotton marijuana smoke began to hang heavy in the air. “I’m gonna go use it on a chihuahua friend.”

Don’t you dare, Sam thought, in a panic.

The gremlin snorted and went back to rooting through his stuff. His frustration, Sam noted, quickly grew. “They’re gonna be here any minute! Did you already dose yourself with it, dickcheese? Where is it?!”

A few moments later, while the beast was still rummaging through his lab, the fire alarm went off, followed by, a few moments later, a knock on the door. Instantly, his nemesis ducked into the closet nearest the door and waited like a quiet, blood-eyed demon.

“Um, Mister Rothchild?” the woman in the hallway called. “The local police department said you called 9-1-1?” She hesitated. “Asked us to check on you, sir.”

Sam, unable to respond, scowled at the dog, who scowled back from its hiding place in the shadows by the door.

Another knock, this time an authoritative male voice. “Mr. Rothchild? Is that smoke coming from your room, sir?” The pounding came again, louder this time. “Sir, we need to open the door. We’re coming in.” After another knock, during which Sam couldn’t say or do anything, he heard the sound of a keycard being slid through the lock. The dog crouched in preparation.

The monster is going to escape with my serum, Sam thought, horrified. He struggled to work his mouth, but found himself mute. No, don’t let him get out the—

The moment the hoteliers opened the door, the dog sped past them, a blur of white making a beeline for the elevator.

“Oh no! Mr. Rothchild’s dog just—” the man in security uniform turned to charge after him, then paused, straightening suddenly, and said, “Never mind. I’m sure it’s fine. Just a cute little dog.”

“Yeah, totally harmless. I’m sure he’ll be fine. Just a cute little dog,” the woman with him intoned, with the dull, glazed look that Sam imagined he himself had had, when taking a nice, big dump on his own pillow. Then those glassy blue eyes were finding the pile of doobies and debris smoldering beside his bed and the mind-slave complacency was immediately replaced with panic. She rushed forward and stomped it out, then gingerly examined the charred remnants cluttered on the singed carpet underneath. She still hadn’t noticed Sam out the huge open sliding window, where he lay sprawled on the balcony, watching the scene in despair. “Mr. Rothchild?” she called towards the bathroom. “Did you intentionally start a fire in your bedroom?”

“With weed?” the security guard demanded, wrinkling his face.

Sam, who still couldn’t move, could only lay there in misery.

It was then that the woman with the keycard and the hotel uniform saw him on the balcony. “Oh Jesus, I think he had some sort of seizure! Call 9-1-1.”

The security guard immediately pulled out his phone and started babbling commands into it to whatever dispatcher was on the other side.

No, Sam moaned inwardly. My serum…