Dig into the details

You'd taken the binder and four vials from Chloe, storing them in your university office while you taught your afternoon classes. You tried your best to go throughout the day teaching as if nothing had changed, but you'd trailed off a few times as your mind remembered the vials in your office, beckoning you to study it further. You dismissed your classes without any assignments, because you didn't want to have to worry about grading anything over the next couple days while you worked through Dr. Walker's preliminary data. It may have been the first day you'd wanted to leave the lecture hall to do something else, rather than the other way around.

Finally, with your academic obligations complete, you hurried back to your office and opened up the binder, flipping through the pages on the 'Syn-Biote' smart gel instructions Chloe left for you.

Instructions: combine 1 to 5 droplets of each vial into a container with 100mL granulated sugar dissolved in 100mL deionized water. At least one drop is necessary from each vial for the smart gel to properly activate, and over five drops will result in shedding excess gel material with no added effect. Leave overnight for combination. After 12 hours, the Syn-Biote gel is ready for absorption into a body. Use the provided auditory commands to assign the gel a name, activate for absorption, absorb into a host, extract from a host, and disassemble into its individual components. Gel will not absorb into a host before the activation command is given.

It seemed Chloe's done a lot to try and relieve your slightly sci-fi-related concerns about an experiment going wild and out of control, requiring you to become an action hero and defeat it with a flamethrower. Still, there were plenty of other concerns that only grew in your mind as you read further, as the writings continued to sound more like science fiction all on their own.

While the vials each have their own effects on memory and problem-solving, they affect a host's behavior and suggestibility. Because the Syn-Biote is an independent living creature, its own intelligence will transfer to the body and mind of the test subject to some degree. These behaviors are controllable to a degree by the amount of material used from each vial. A correlation between the intelligence and behavior modification has yet to be established for the combination of vials. The side effects of the vials and their strengths in droplets:

Vial 1: Behavior Modification

1. Host willpower only
2. Personality and willpower
3. Partial motor function
4. Complete motor function
5. Full personality and movement modification

Vial 2: Symbiote Control Strength

1. Passive suggestibility
2. Weak influence, interpreted by host's mind
3. Shared, shifting control between host and gel
4. Symbiote drives the body with host as filter
5. Symbiote in full control

Vial 3: Host Awareness

1. Normal awareness of their modified behaviors
2. Aware but indifferent to modified behaviors
3. Suspicious of modifications without understanding cause
4. Mostly unaware, tries to justify their new behaviors
5. Fully unaware of their new behaviors

Vial 4: Symbiote Attachment to Creator (You)

1. Fully independent in actions except for programmed command
2. Partially independent, friendly but will dissent for their own interests
3. Agreeable to the creator's suggestions
4. Mostly imprinted to creator, low independence
5. Fully imprinted, only acts on creator input

The resulting behavior modification can be denoted as a four-digit number in project notes. Test subjects and which mixtures you use are at your discretion, but please note down the test subject's behaviors as well as how their intelligence has changed, and take enough data points to draw a conclusion on the most effective combinations of vials for intelligence versus side effects.

Side note: the gel contains a powerful pheromone that will make a potential test subject interested in absorption if near the gel, and will find the absorption and expulsion to be pleasant sensations.

It's kind of funny... the writing is almost entirely focused on these 'side effects' rather than any mention of increased intelligence. If you didn't trust that Chloe was a complete professional, you would think that perhaps these behavior modifications were the actual focus, instead of the intelligence boosts! Still, you just assumed that's later in the binder's data. It did sound like these side effects really could change a person at their core, so it made sense that a person might be comfortable with only a particular trade-off.

...Still, there's something tempting about some of these potential combinations... you didn't want to dwell too much, but these combinations could be interesting in their own right. Maybe you could try combinations on their own, and the research about 'intelligence' was just icing on the cake? After all, you've got some upcoming dates, some other professors, and some students that maybe could use a bit of a change. ...What was that? Ethics? Well, maybe if you just try some of the lower-powered combinations it would be too bad, right? ...Or if you bumped up the awareness suppression?

You wondered what combination you should try, and who would make a good first test subject among your immediate circle of acquaintances. Or you could set up a more rigorous scientific experiment. Or... send it all back to Chloe and try to forge tall about all this.