Aurelian arrived fifteen minutes earlier than he was told and began working with Entro on his project.
Finish mundane work during the day, slave over the test tube at night. That was their routine.
Days passed, and weeks, seemed to fold into one another. Time blurred endlessly and experiments and calculations consumed every waking moment.
The two barely noticed the shifts. Work had taken on an almost obsessive rhythm; a constant loop of theory and action.
Over and over, he ran the simulations and did the test.
But it wasn't enough.
The small breakthroughs he'd hoped for, never amounted to anything, and it wearing on him.
"Another one failed," Entro sighed before kicking his cabinet.
They had been at this for weeks, and run into the same problem every time; the bare minimum energy output overwhelmed the neurons and physical form, causing it to collapse on itself.
"Without a proper catalyst of some sort to efficiently regulate and hold the energy, it'll never survive," Entro said while leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
Aurelian was lounged in his chair, looking exhausted.
While Entro restlessly toiled over calculations and experimentation, Aurelian trained the consciousness, from scratch.
Entro could let it be, allowing instincts and neurological development to take its course, canines were not unintelligent by any means.
However, he would just be like everyone else, and if he was going to undertake a project, it would blow every conceivable notion out of the water.
So here he was, having Aurelian train the wolves to the peak of human intelligence, an efficient method since it seemed the boy was a genius himself.
Aurelian's speed of improvement, and in turn, improvement of the neural connections in the wolf, unfortunately only put more and more strain on the embryo.
"What are we going to do," Aurelian half questioned with his eyes closed.
Entro took his eyes off of the screen, "I don't know."
To make forward strides, they had to back up, all the way.
They were running into the same wall like a housefly next to the open window.
It was time to consult the basics once more.
Rising from his chair, Entro started rummaging through his old desk drawers and cabinets.
"Get up, start looking for something to help."
The reason why Entro could easily put together hundreds of androids that couldn't be distinguished from a human to your untrained eye was simple.
They didn't need to live.
They didn't eat, nor did they breathe.
So when he developed a consciousness to simulate a human mind, he uploaded human data, mapped behavior patterns, and set those minds loose within rigid digital frameworks. They grew, but only as far as he let them.
He gave the man a fish.
Now, he wasn't creating a new creature, but remapping what it meant to be one. The androids followed a complicated list of instructions; the wolves needed to improvise.
Entro wanted to teach the man to fish.
Barely ten minutes into their search, the lab was a mess. Objects cluttered the counters, drawers were left open, and their contents spilled out onto the floor.
It was then, while rubbing his hand under his desk, did Entro found a slight indent on the bottom side.
It was imperceptibly slight, but when you're in his line of work, at this level, you're attuned to noticing these things.
Feeling around the dent, Entro began pushing, feeling a hum begin from the desk.
Slightly intrigued, he pushed harder, and longer.
To his surprise, after precisely 6.15 seconds, the drawer chimed
Before Entro could ponder the odd sound, he felt a prick at his finger and jerked his hand back.
Checking his finger, he found it slightly bleeding. The desk started humming louder, the sound of gears coming to life after a long slumber.
'This can't be...'
Quickly, Entro went to the side of his desk and scanned the wood, finding nothing.
Unsatisfied, he took a knife and started furiously scratching at the surface of the wood, watching each flake fall.
After clearing a huge square of flakes from the desk, he found words carved into the wood, clear as day.
Entropy's Enclave
It was his hand-built retro-futuristic desk.
One of his first creations. A desk he used to his most important blueprints, but cleared out and burned the contents when his company went under.
Entro wasn't sure what he thought happened to this desk, but here it was, working.
'6.15 seconds... Hope's birthday'
The gears were in full operation now. As the seconds passed, the desk slowly transformed, new compartments appearing left and right.
It was technological magic with the sheer amount of space hidden in one desk.
Although the desk was magical, just as he remembered, each compartment was cleared, but the memories were in full bloom.
Entro reminisced, as his fingers glided along the interior of the desk, the humming soothing his heart. He remembered the days storing blueprints he knew others would and had tried to steal. Some of his first scientific breakthroughs happened on top of this very desk.
Aurelian, sat upright in his chair, appearing dumbfounded.
"This is one of my first inventions. I never knew it was in here," Entro softly chuckled, though there was a tinge of sadness in his voice.
"Can I touch it?" Aurelian shifted side to side awkwardly as if embarrassed by his own question.
Entro nodded and took a step back to allow Aurelian to explore the desk.
Over the past weeks, the kid started to grow on Entro. He was far from confident and anxious, clearly struggling with something at home, but the kid was smart and possessed a level head.
"I cleared everything that was in it before I went under, it used to be stocked with schematics."
His mind wandered to all the potential inventions he could've introduced to the world, perhaps in another world.
Entro chuckled. This was his life's work now, even though it was failing miserably.
"Then what is this," Aurelian asked, eyebrows furrowed.
He dug into his side of the desk, Entro's view obscured by the unfolded flaps. Moments after, Aurelian pulled out a small vial filled with a green substance.
Entro's eyes widened, he recognized that vial.
"That was in there?" Entro exclaimed while rushing over, snatching the vial from Aurelian.
There was nothing particularly important about the vial save for it's mysterious origins.
Entro uncovered a crater impact site years ago and personally appeared to study it once it was discovered to be about 2.5 billion years old.
This not only predates all of life on Earth, but is smack dead in the middle of one of the most cataclysmic periods in the planet's history.
Massive asteroid impacts bombarded the surface, as if the heavens were pounding the Earth.
Super volcanoes blackened the sky, and tectonic shifted the continents we're familiar with today with violent fury.
In one of the larger craters originating from that incident, this green ooze was molded around by obsidian, suggesting it was encased by molten rock and cooled.
The fact anything survived that period was baffling at the very least, but this particular substance is a different case for one simple reason.
It was alive.
Not just simple lifeforms bunched together, the only thing found in any of Entro's studies were cells that showed individualism, but work seamlessly together towards a goal.
They didn't compete over resources, nor did they break down under pressure, they worked in perfect harmony; the signs of something originating from something much more complex than a single-celled organism.
Something you might find in the blood of an animal.
It was the blood of an unknown species, that predated living life on Earth.
Something that might've been foreign to the planet.
Unfortunately, before Entro could use every bit of his wealth to study what he discovered, disaster struck.
He quickly sealed all of it in this vial and stowed it away in the only place he felt he could still trust.
"Aurelian, we're going off course a bit. But it will be worth it."