Chapter Text
Nala Se sat at her private laboratory in Kamino, and considered the problem of daemons.
Their first batch of alpha clones were developing to specification, every altered gene expressing precisely as it should to create a flawless product. Certainly, the clones were temperamental, but that was to be expected as the Cuy’var Dal streamlined their training program. It was no flaw with Kaminoan engineering.
Nala Se had scientists working on behavioral modifications anyways. She would not allow the failings of Mandalorian trainers to tarnish her perfect creations.
Which only made their clone’s other aberrant phenotype all the more vexing. 100 Alpha-class clones, identical in every way, perfect machines of war. 100 daemons, shifting form ever since decanting. Strong discipline from the trainers had maintained uniformity of species, 100 Mandalorian grey wolves kept in line by harsh punishments for shifting. Clone cadets had been kept strictly away from all wildlife, whether directly or in holo-image. The only other daemons they saw were their own, those of their trainers, and those of the Kaminoans.
And yet when the daemons began settling, there was not a single wolf. There were bears and lynxes, hawks and pythons. Fierce, predatory creatures all, but no two the same. No uniformity. In a perfect world, Nala Se would scrap the whole batch and try again, but the alpha clones were, regrettably, useful as a control group.
Their second experiment had gone even worse. As soon as she’d seen the irregularities that daemons brought, she’d attempted to excoriate them. An intercision chamber was readily built, and newly-decanted clone units placed within, permanently severing the bond to their infant daemons.
The experiment had been successful in creating non-shifting daemons. It had not been successful in producing useable soldiers. The infant clones no longer moved, or cried, or spoke. They did not respond to language or visual stimuli. They still grew, according to the carefully calibrated hormone cocktails they were injected with, but were effectively brain dead. A few such failures were still alive in laboratory conditions for further study, though Nala Se privately suspected that their only remaining utility would be vivisection. The rest were found to be a waste of credits, and decommissioned.
It was a frustrating failure. The intercision chamber still saw experimental use for clones at various growth stages, but with no success. Not only did its use halt all cognitive development, but as the clones ages increased, the procedure grew an ever higher fatality rate. Any clone younger than ten years old still needed time for development, and would be rendered useless by intercision. But by ten years old, the death rate from intercision would be over 50%. Given the resources necessary to raise and train a clone for ten years, such a procedure could never be cost efficient. The whole thing seemed a cruel paradox.
She flicked through her notes on the holopad in front of her, pulling up a long spreadsheet of daemon experiments. First on the list, early intercision. The outcomes column glowed up at her in damning red light: “Failure to achieve desired results.” The next row, “Daemon vivisection and surgical modification. Result: Failure to achieve desired results.” The datapad listed over a hundred experimental procedures, including dozens of drug cocktails and disciplinary measures. All with the same red statement of failure in the final column. Scrolling further, she paused before one outlying result, colored the grey of an inconclusive experiment.
“Experiment: physical handling of clone daemons by facility staff,” that experiment read. “Result: Insufficient data collection. Inconclusive.”
Nala Se remembered that experiment. She had been called to the lab herself, after an assigned trainer had refused to follow experimental procedure. More trainers had been called in, ordered to remove their gloves and touch the squalling wolf cub on the table. To a man, the Cuy’var Dal had refused. Nala Se had threatened to terminate their contracts. “We will not break the Taboo,” each trainer had replied, and held fast.
The Taboo. Such foolish superstition. She supposed this was her reward for hiring from a planet as traditional as Mandalore. Although, her rational brain noted, every planet from the most conservative to the most lawless, upheld the great Taboo. No sentient is to touch another’s daemon. The rule so fundamental that it went unwritten and unsaid, because every being in the galaxy could feel it in their bones.
It was superstition, it must be, something to be overcome in the course of true scientific pursuit. And yet when Nala Se had removed her own gloves to approach the little wolf cub, her throat had tightened. Her own daemon Semorox was tightening his coiled body around her long neck, climbing all the way to the base of her skull in agitation. His twin adder heads, normally so articulate, were only hissing their distress, emotion thrumming across their bond more strongly than it had in years. His twin jaws unhinging as if to bite-
She had ceased her approach, still a meter away from the crying cub, and replaced her gloves. The Cuy’var Dal were dismissed to their tasks, and the clone used in a different experiment. As Nala Se emerged from her recollections, her long fingers hovered over the phrase “Insufficient data collected.” With a few quick taps, she replaced the result with another red “Failure.” It wasn’t as though the experiment would have been of use anyways.
Turning to another data set, she pulled up a particular holo projection for the umpteenth time; the brain scan of a mature clone, performed as intercision occurred. Rotating it, she noted the places where neural activity heightened and heightened, before cutting off entirely. The neural anchor of the strange connection between sentient and daemon. Some said it was the Force that connected the two, others said it was something else entirely, a mysterious phenomenon they named Dust.
Nala Se neither knew nor cared about the theology. Neuroscience, however, she could work with. Cutting the bond was not a solution. But perhaps, there was a way to permanently suppress the bond, without ever breaking it entirely.
Already, she was crafting new experiments to run. If she correctly identified the neural nodes associated with the daemon bond, what would happen if activity in those nodes was suppressed? What was the minimal amount of nodal activity necessary to maintain the bond? If she manually maintained minimal bond activity over sustained time, would there be long term consequences?
The solution to her daemon problem could be as simple as long-term neural network manipulation. And a biochip, designed to reduce aggression and hold hidden, long-term orders, might be just the tool she needed.