Experiment 5532: Theta

Live a little! You didn't have a huge amount of time to understand these slime mixtures, so you needed to start with one of the more **** mixes. It's not as dangerous as 5551 might have been, as that was the kind of mix that might get away from you if you weren't careful, and you didn't want to lose a wild slime with your job on the line. But there was no universe in which you would take the coward's way out and start with such a diluted mix!

You logged things down in the notebook:

Experiment 5532 (codename Theta)

• Full personality, movement, willpower modification
• Full symbiote control over host
• Host is suspicious of their behaviors but doesn't understand cause
• Friendly independence

'Friendly independence' sounded right. In this project, you were essentially creating a friendly assistant who could independently help on collecting data, possibly take some self-observation, maybe they would make for a good conversation buddy. Hard to say. Either way, you were hoping that taking this approach meant you could accelerate future symbiote creation, as you had enough material in the vials to make maybe ten slimes if you average three droplets per vial. Ten slimes out of 625 possible combinations might not be huge, but with varied enough data points, you could extrapolate the other positions for both this intelligence enhancement and behavioral modification stuff.

You mixed up the combinations, noting that with so much slime droplets the mixture felt quite viscous, and you closed the lid on top of the cup you'd mixed everything in, sealing it tightly. Deciding to not leave the cup just lying around here, especially with the possibility of confounding variables that you should keep in mind, you put the container in your bag and headed back to your apartment.

Instead of doing any more reading, however, you wrote up your plan for tomorrow, including writing down the name designation and activation instructions so you could do that first thing in the morning, and then you logged onto a dating site and scanned through profiles, wondering if you could get a date by the weekend, before falling asleep.

When you stirred awake, you looked over at the table where you had left the slime cup.

The lid had been removed; the cup had tipped over.

Theta was gone.