The Time Before (Undertale)

1 ~ Unintentionally Intelligent

This was quite dangerous, Dr. WingDings Gaster knew. Very dangerous, in fact, not to mention illegal. If it were found out, he could quite possibly not only lose his job as the Royal Scientist, but...

Well, there was no prison in the Underground, but they very well could make one for his imprisonment.

Technically, it was only mildly illegal right now, as both DTW-Subjects 642 and 643 were physically alive, but had no Souls. A case could be made that the creation of and experimentation on them was not much different that the growth of and experimentation on plants. Annoying Dog knew they were no more sentient than one.

On top of that, he had not yet even removed S643 from its suspension tank, and therefore, hadn't technically experimented on it at all.

There was the small matter that they were made of the organic matter and Magic of a living monster, and, indeed, this matter had to be taken from a living host through some rather unorthodox means (a laser cutter, what might have been considered overdosing on painkillers, and much agonized cursing may or may not have been involved), but as said living host was Gaster himself and not a random volunteer, he also thought that he could make a rather convincing argument as to why what he was doing was perfectly alright, as, as far as he was aware, there was no law against cutting out parts of yourself for your own scientific interests. Regardless of the holes in his hands.

Yes, he was convinced that if he left the project as it was, and if it were discovered, he could wiggle out of any tricky ethical situation he might be put in, especially considering all his past experience in doing so.

Unfortunately, he could not leave the project as it was.

The entire purpose of the DTW project was to create a weapon strong enough to destroy humanity once the Barrier was broken, and bonus points if said weapon could also break the Barrier. But, in order to do that, the weapon had to be either one of two things. It could have been a machine of some kind, but Gaster ruled that out not only because that meant the machine would require an operator, but also because the subjects were most certainly not machines. Otherwise, at the very least, the weapon had to have more cognitive capacity than that of a vegetable.

Which, currently, neither S642 nor the still-suspended S643 had.

Fortunately, Gaster had a pretty good idea of how to jump-start S642's mental ability: give it a Soul, or, at least, a fraction of one. And if it didn't work, well, he could try something else with S643.

There were two problems with this, though. Firstly, Souls didn't exactly just grow on trees, ripe for the picking and shoving into cloned skeleton monster frames' chests. Secondly, the instant that he put that Soul piece into S642, his experiments on it became much, much more illegal. Because no matter how stupid and unintelligent S642 might be, if it had a Soul, it was considered sentient, it could feel emotion. And if it could do that...

Well. After Gaster's last few mishaps involving monster volunteers, the experimentation on sentient monsters had been banned.

Gaster had even been made to sit through a twenty minute lecture from Asgore about not experimenting on monsters, regardless of whether or not they volunteered. He had nodded obediently through the whole thing, and at the end, had promised not to do that anymore.

That was the whole reason for S642 and S643. He had planned on making a test subject. S642 was the first subject he had attempted to create using living matter, instead of monster dust, S643 the second. They were also the first mildly successful attempts, out of his 643 tries.

Hence the DTW-Subject 642, and then 643.

But then there was the whole issue of them being completely incompetent. And not just stupid. Since removing S642 from the suspension tank, Gaster had found, it didn't have the intelligence to swallow water that was poured into its mouth.