[Spoilers for From Your Memory]
I really got to ask, what made you write that version of Membrane being kind of a mad scientist with his children (clones?)? You made him even craftier and intimidating to rival Zim!!
Asking bc, reading it before, it blew my mind. It became my fav fic of yours too. And I started having an interest for dark!Dr. Membrane stories since (not that i could find any that specific but i tried).
I gave a more extensive answer about From Your Memory in general in this post here, but to answer this specific question:
Professor Membrane was a lot of fun, and I sometimes wish I could find inspiration or an appropriate place to put in another version of evil Membrane. A lot of people, including myself, typically write Membrane as an oblivious obstacle to the main characters rather than being outright evil, which is a lot of fun, but fully embracing him as an evil mad scientist was my favorite part about From Your Membrane.
Basically, from the purpose of From Your Memory, the story really needed a background character who had enough authority over the main characters to be deliberately obstructive, but was also free to move around behind the scenes doing nefarious things. I made basically a mental list of who that could be, and while a lot of the people on that candidate list were enemies, none of them really wielded the amount of threat I wanted except Membrane. And then once the idea that he could be the bad guy caught on in my head, I quickly developed a lot of the story around it. Well-meaning father? What about well-meaning creator? 'Good intentions' is so subjective. What if public opinion inflated Membrane beyond criticism, or beyond the reaches of oversight committees? Human experimentation is one of the most taboo subjects to exist in the scientific community with heavy restriction for good reason, and yet so many people prosecuted for it claim to have done so for the benefit of humanity, when in reality, it was for the potential credit success would garner them.
I think I've read maybe 2(?) stories personally of Professor Membrane being a baddy, but both were actually really dark, mid-2000's ZADR fics, and it was less mad-scientist and more overtly-abusive-parent. Or gaslighting parent, which is pretty evil, but not evil-evil, ya know? One of my friends did tell my they did see a surge in 'Zim saves Gaz from a fire' scenes after From Your Memory came out, which I think is really funny, but if I could pick a trope to insp others, I'd ask for evil!Membrane.