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Reunion: Chapter 11

"Hmm." The scientist with large, thick goggles rubbed his chin. He looked down at the charts on the monitor, a series of wavy lines plotted on a simple 'X' and 'Y' axis. "Even with the neural restraints, he's still resistant to conditioning." He frowned and turned to his colleague, a female who the more he looked at the more he wanted to see without that lab coat on, but he was in a professional setting. Another time.

Dr. Ramsey didn't look down at the graph, it was very much the same as before. Instead she looked through the one way mirror into the room where the specimen laid. The Canis, known as subject X-031a, was their prized possession. The Dog Catchers had dragged him in knocked out and given them their orders. They had to mentally recondition him to obey orders before the end of the month. So far it had been two weeks, but little progress had been made. The subject was a Class 5 Canis, capable of truly tremendous feats.

Tremendous, she thought. Most would think terrifying. To be able to lift people up, smash them against walls, read their minds, maybe even influence them. The woman chuckled and her colleague, Dr. Vox looked at her. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing." She dismissively waved at him and he shrugged, going back to his work, trying to figure out how he could get X-031a to accept the reconditioning. They had tried numerous tactics. First they let the guards and soldiers that were there to, not protect them, but keep the subject in, go at him. They both verbally and physically abused him, but to no effect. She believed that only made it more difficult, making him resent and therefore resist.

Next was the drugs, lots of them. A cocktail of anything that would hinder his ability to reason and slow down his brain. It had some positive effects, but the potential harm was too great. The Dominion wanted a soldier, not some crack-head that could barely hold himself up and maintain lucidity.

She tried to be kind, talking to him. Dr. Vox didn't like that, saying that she was wasting time trying to talk to an animal. He needed to be beaten into submission, tamed like the wild horses that used to roam the old human homeworld of Earth.

She ignored him. She had grown up in the slums and knew that they were just like any other person, capable of thought and free will. They made their decisions and she made hers. She had no regrets about what she was doing to him, she wanted to ensure the survival of humanity and if that meant twisting this dog around her fingers, then so be it. At least, she told herself, she would do it to a normal human being as well. There was no discrimination in her mind, only progress.

"Perhaps if we try a lighter cocktail along with some verbal cohesion." Dr. Vox was talking to himself. He rarely regarded the woman in his decisions, seeing her only as an aide and a potential sexual partner for the end of the day.

"Men." She said under her breath before speaking up. "I think a different approach entirely is in order." She walked flicked off the monitor and he looked at her as if there was about to be new readings at any moment.

"More of your puppy talks with him?" He sneered and pointed a finger up as if in a moment of 'Eureka.' "No, we must pick a method and go with it, no turning back." He turned around, already forgetting about his colleague. As far as he was concerned, his word was final. She may have been more experience with nearly over a decade more than him, but his connections were what got him his power. HIs brother worked in the Ministry of Science and got him this one, highly competitive position of working with one of the most dangerous creatures to have ever lived on Earth, now Mars and to break them down and show them who was boss. He would need to get his brother something nice the next time the family got together. Maybe a suit, he always liked to dress up.

Dr. Ramsey roller her eyes and gave one last look at the subject who was strapped onto a table in the room. He was unconscious. He was most of the time with all the things they did with him. While she held no harsh feelings towards him for what he was, she was afraid of what would happen if he was released.

She read the reports of what happened at the canning factory. So many died at his hands, hands that didn't even have to move as he threw soldiers, specialized soldiers that had been trained and augmented to be resistant and effective against psionic canines, around like toys. If he was released, escaped, god have mercy on the. She turned away and left.

---

"Rise and shine, Adrian. Rise and shine."

Adrian slowly came too. His head was still groggy after the last session he had with that maniac of a doctor. He couldn't even remember half of it, all he knew was that they poked him with more needles than he cared for. Not that he cared for the first one.

The air was cold, even when he was covered in the fur that had kept him warm during those cold Martian nights. He remembered those days, curled up with his tail wrapped around his body in his own home. His parents didn't have enough money to afford electrical heating and stoves were banned as a fire hazard. His fur kept him warm, or as warm as could be. This coldness he was experiencing was different, it was a mixture of the heat sapping air in this metal dungeon they had him in and the fact that he had been caught.

He remembered how they had come for him. He fought back, killed a lot of them, those bastards. He no longer felt remorse for all the people he had killed, crushed them with a thought, twisted them, pulled them, horrible things, but he did it to survive. Now they had caught him once he was too exhausted to fight back any more. They also attached a band around his head which made it impossible for him to use his psionic abilities. They essentially neutered him.

Like every other time that he woke up after one of the sessions, Adrian tested his restraints. His veins bulged as he pulled as hard as he could on the shackles on his legs and arms. They held firm, the metal strap not budging in the slightest. He held the hope that they would bend to his will, just a little. He needed something to tell him that this wasn't the end for him. He couldn't accept that.

On impulse, Adrian tried to call on his abilities. He put an image of the table he was on, then he focused on the shackle on his right wrist. He imagined it bending, the metal shearing, he imagined it right down to the atom. He focused until his head hurt and he was clenching his jaw tight enough to hear his teeth straining in his head. Nothing, not a thing. The band that had all sorts of blinking lights and was tight on his head, and latched around to the base of his skull, it stopped him.

He could feel the potential in him. His abilities weren't there, but they were out of reach, just barely and every time he failed to grab a hold of it, it felt so disappointing.

"Weak."

"Who said that?" Adrian whipped his head around, looking for the source of the voice. There was no one there. He was alone in the metal room that was painted with white luminescent paint that eliminated all shadows. There could have been people mocking him from behind the one way mirror, but this voice, deep, dark and condescending was all surrounding, not just coming from the speaker in the corner.

"I did." Adrian strained his neck trying to find the source of the voice. "You're weak. You've allowed yourself to be caught by these fools. They don't understand what they've done." The voice chuckled deeply.

"Show yourself." Adrian strained more against his restraints, but that only tired him out and he nearly passed out again from the strain. The past two weeks had been a drain on him in every way imaginable. The first days were the worst when they just beat him whenever he refused to play their games. It was simply. move your ears to the rights, up, down, wag your tail. It was stupid, as if they were training him like a dog.

"You are a dog. Living beneath the master, under the table, waiting for scraps. All of you, I've seen it all."

"We're not dogs." Adrian hated the term. A dog was an animal, a pet, a four legged beast. To call a Canis a dog in such a manner to compare them to a feral, it was one of the worst insults in existence. Canis were already at the bottom of the social order. They were under the table, looking for scraps to scavenge off of the streets. Canis were worse than second class citizens, but they were citizens, not pets. "We people, we deserve better." Adrian screamed, not sure who he was screaming at.

"Then earn it." The voice dared Adrian. "How can you claim to deserve better if you're not even capable of better?"

Adrian was beginning to realize that the voice wasn't coming from some speaker, but inside his head.

"I'm going insane." He laid his head back down onto the hard mattress that had been his home for two weeks. He had a bed ban sitting under his bare ass and it was embarrassing whenever he went because he knew that there were always people watching him since a nurse or a soldier came every time to take his stool away and replace it with a fresh one. Once every other day, he was untied and taken to the showers where he could wash himself under supervision. He was fed twice a day since laying around and waiting didn't take enough calories to justify a third meal. It was all of this that led him believe that he was just losing his grip on reality.

"In my experience, everyone is their own special kind of crazy."

Adrian could just imagine this voice belonging to some human, so proud and full of himself to be able to talk like this. He wanted to hit him so much.

"Oh? You think of me as a human?" He cackled, giggled really and then there was a snarl that shook the inside of Adrian's skull. "I'm no human. You'll find me more animal than anything you've ever seen."

"You're just a figment of my imagination." Adrian turned his head to the side and stared at the blank, white wall across from him. He had spotted a small blemish in the paint a week ago, a small area where a small fleck of paint had chipped off. Maybe someone had leaned a chair against the wall there, a soldier's gun butted into it as he turned, who knew, but the blemish that revealed the gray steel underneath was something to focus on. He stared at it, thinking that it would help this voice go away, he would prefer silence and isolation than give into his imaginary voice.

"I'm more real than you know." There was a sudden urge to turn his head the other way. It felt like he wanted to turn his head, but he resisted it. His muscles fought against his brain. "Let go, let me take control and I'll show you how real I am." Adrian continued to resist. To anyone outside, it would have seemed like he was having a seizure as Adrian felt as if something had grabbed hold of every part of his body and was trying to bend his joints like and action figure. "Relax." The voice hissed. He could hear it in his ear and like with the people before, he resisted.

"Let go." He said through clenched teeth as this unknown force tried to take control of his body.

"All those years ago, when you were a scared little pup that got lost in the big bad city." Flashbacks of the exact moment came into Adrian's mind. "When the Dog Catchers, the boogeymen came for you, backed into the corner and beat down the only friendly face that tried to help."

Adrian couldn't fight back both the force on his body and the flashbacks at the same time. He could see himself holding onto his tail, backed up against the wall as the man in the fully armored suit and a gun approached him. He had been so scared. He thought that he was going to die that night.

"You didn't die though." The voice said. "Somehow you killed them, all of them. Woke up surrounded by their corpses. How did you think you escaped with your life? Magic? God? No, it was me." There was a loud groaning sound at the restraints began to fail.

Adrian had lost the battle over his body, this voice was in control and all he could do was watch as he saw the metal buckle, stretch and snap free from his arms.

"I saved us. I killed them in that moment because you had given up hope when I hadn't." The voice was now speaking out of Adrian's mouth. He heard his own voice talking to him, saw his hand go up and tear the band off and feel all his power surge back into him. "And I'm not giving up now either."

“What are you?" Adrian asked.

A smirk came to his face. “I've been called a lot of things over the years, but I prefer my first name, given to me by your ancestor. You can have the privilege of calling me Dog."