Yldra, raging with self-contempt, grunted and tossed a yellow tablet into his mouth. The tanks, all six, bore some flaw, some failure demonstrating yet another ineptitude on his part. A genetic repurposing worm in tank one had a coding error. Instead of laying fresh skin, it ate a carved path from the specimen’s lower eye to the solar plexus. An unrecognizable catastrophe in eighteen hours, he estimated.

The other tanks showed equal incompetence. Tank two’s retinas failed at their endpoints. He wheezed watching them bulge from the skull with freak show effect. They’d be cantaloupe-sized in a week. Tanks three and four acquired sentience too soon. Convulsions and seizures looped as the unfinished lungs, used to fluid breathing, caused a constant drowning and the specimen’s arms ceaselessly smacked the tank window.

Six was brain dead. The vein structures had collapsed onto themselves. Now the floating corpse was a raisin’d husk.

It was five where Yldra had rested his highest hopes. The lungs were stable, the circulatory system, too. Alerted by specimen one, the skin coding sequence error was corrected and here it laid flawless skin from cheek to toe.

In persistent pain, Yldra shuffled to it and touched the glass with a fool’s hope the tactile response would illicit the missing link. Its eyes opened. There was life, no doubt, and consciousness, for it peered back at him with burning disdain.

It scanned Yldra’s body, curling its lips in disgust at each wrinkle ravaged limb and squinting at Yldra’s straining right hand gripping the cane that bore his weight. At Yldra’s chest, its gaze paused. Furious, it slammed two fingers against the glass pointed directly to Yldra’s heart.

“I know!” Yldra sneered, crushing another yellow tablet in his teeth. He’d fixed this iteration’s failing heart valves but Yldra’s would cease within a day no matter how many pills he took now. There were no flaws in his equations on that point. His perfect recreation would be trapped in its liquid prison. Turning away from his ninety-year younger self, the irony stung. The maturation cycle timer read: 47 hours to completion.