Symbiosis: At World's End

Artificial Creation

Dr. Wendell stood in the medical bay, looking at the prone form of Medusa. It had been three days since she broke into Merrick's cell and he had beaten her to a pulp. She wasn't too surprised by the fact that Medusa had survived the encounter. In fact, she was shocked she hadn't killed Merrick within a few short moments. Still, if she had been a normal human and not a chemically enhanced Gorgon soldier, she would have died much earlier. That still begged one question though. How on earth was Merrick able to not only hold his own, but actually come out victorious in the resulting brawl?

He hadn't come out unscathed, that much was obvious. He had many bruises, a couple of cracked ribs, a black eye and he struggled to take deep breaths. Still, he had gotten off rather well in comparison to Medusa, whose face was very bruised and puffy, her nose was broken, both eyes were black and were almost swollen shut. She even had a couple of cracks on her lower jaw!

By all accounts, Merrick shouldn't have been able to do this. If the symbiote had been bonded to him, this would all be much more plausible, but he didn't. Not enough anyway.

When she examined his blood, she did discover that there were trace amounts of symbiote mass attached to a few of his red blood cells, but that still wasn't nearly enough to provide him with the strength and reflexes needed to do this sort of damage.

She wanted to run more tests once he was fully healed, but she was much more apprehensive about removing him from the cell, now that he'd made it apparent that he was much more dangerous than they had originally thought. Perhaps the council was right about wanting him executed.

No, not yet. She still had to determine just how he had been able to beat Medusa. It could give her some insight into side effects of bonding to a symbiote. That could be revolutionary! If they could introduce a small amount of symbiote mass that was completely disconnected from the mind of the original creature into the bloodstream and it bonded with the blood cells, it could render the whole Gorgon program completely moot!

Still, she had a more immediate project she needed to complete before she could move on to the next. Funnily enough, Medusa's condition might just have provided her with a unique opportunity. She needed to go through the usual nonsense first though. If she wanted to perform this test, she needed the council's approval as well as Medusa's. The chemicals used to transform her into a Gorgon soldier had given her an accelerated healing factor that was repairing the damage much faster than a human's. Her jaw had already completely healed, and the black eyes were fading nicely. Dr. Wendell suspected that the anesthetic would wear off in a couple hours. That gave her just enough time to go to the council and put her idea forward.

She had already presented her report on successfully creating an artificial symbiote and she had done some genetic tinkering so as to make it susceptible to human control, theoretically. She could only go off of what she managed to pull from Merrick's bloodwork. The council was indeed pleased and had requested that she create more, but gave her a much wider timeframe to work with.

She had already worked the data for two more, making them all slightly different so as to have as many 'prototypes' to test and determine which formula worked the best. She had yet to actually make them, but she imagined it would be soon. First though, she had to visit the council.

She walked to the council room and began her presentation of her findings on her two latest formulae as well as her idea for a test. The council had been made very aware of Medusa's condition and was more eager than ever to simply pop a bullet in Merrick's head and forget he even existed, but they refrained as they had been interested by the idea of a brand-new super soldier program and the fact that Merrick would be key in creating it outweighed their desire to just get rid of him.