Subject E-12:

With the latest test subject in what I’ve so creatively dubbed the “E” line, named after the outpost in which we now operate, we’ve finally made minor progress toward our end goal of successfully integrating the parasite into our reptilian friends. These enormous brutes have proven to be rather hard to capture alive, a bit surprising I suppose but irritating nonetheless. Failure in all eleven of our prior attempts to infect the larger specimen of this planet have forced us to resort to more, let’s say, humble methods. With no progress being made and with larger subjects so rare, we’ve switched our focus to smaller members of this planet’s ecosystem which immediately showed promising results.

In the prior eleven attempts to infect a larger host with the parasite all subjects appeared to be immune to its effects, at first we attributed this to a mismatch in the genetic code of our subjects and the parasite, perhaps they were just too dissimilar from what the parasite was intended to do. Upon completion of the tests conducted on subject 12, however, we have seen results that could disprove our prior hypothesis. After successfully infecting a host taken from one of the smaller species of the planet we took a look at their genetic code and compared it to that of the larger species and we found that key genetic markers that would be changed by the parasite are identical in both the larger and smaller species, suggesting that some other mysterious force is behind the failed attempts to infect the larger species.

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Going forward I have devised a few key points I want to focus on in future experiments. The first is testing whether or not we can now infect a larger host by using a sample of the parasite taken from the infected, smaller, host that we already have. Next if this fails perhaps we can infect a larger host by increasing the amount of parasitic biomass introduced at the time of infection, it sounds a bit pedestrian but it won’t hurt to check all avenues of investigation in this matter. And on that point I also want to do a deep dive into the specific anatomy of the immune system of these creatures, perhaps our initial assumptions of the mechanisms of these creatures are missing some key detail that could prove to be the reason behind the resilience of these creatures. Regardless of the slow progress I’ve found that I have grown quite fond of these strange “monsters” as my colleagues have taken to calling them, their behavior, although a bit brutish at times, shows flashes of intelligence and empathy that you wouldn’t find on creatures from our home world.