I think about the animal testing in Unwound Future a lot. Why would Dimitri have needed talking animals for time travel? Clive obviously didn’t need them for the mobile fortress. My theory is that the experiments were an attempt to make Clive be able to talk to animals as part of the future Luke ruse. So there is a good chance Clive actually experimented on himself out of obsession for the act to work

i think the animals were for testing to see if the time machine worked on them before dimitri hopped right on in

but the thought of clive desperately trying to talk to animals is really really funny