silently, and the worst thing was that her face and body were not yet sufficiently destroyed to hide how attractive her counterpart must be. I walked unsteadily back to the main room, shutting the door behind me.
I drank half a bottle of Jack, injected two mg of Rapt into my arm, and lay facedown on the bed with cushions pushed hard over my ears. And still, as I drifted into the twilight of an overdose which left me unconscious for over seventy-two hours, I thought I could hear the sound of bodies twisting unknowing against each other in the gloom.
Luckily, I guess, Ratchet the droid found me. I’d vomited onto the bed and, sharp thinker that it was, the machine had worked out I was not in the best of shape. It monitored me for the next two days, turning me over when I threw up again, and made sure the spares were fed at the regular times.
Maybe it also whispered to me in my sleep, because when I eventually made it back into the land of the living, I returned with a sense of purpose that seemed to come from nowhere. You’re going to need some back story to understand. Bear with me on the medical stuff, because it isn’t really my field.
The deal with the Farms is this.
The world’s a dangerous place, even if you don’t go looking for trouble. Chances are your body’s going to take some knocks. Diseases, cuts, bruises. Most of these can be dealt with pretty effectively now. There’s only one area where we’re still consulting tea leaves and waving dead chickens at the problem.
There seems to be some inherent difficulty with getting damaged bodies to accept replacement parts. Tissue-typing and test-tube organs never really got sorted out, despite the fact that any number of apparently more difficult conundrums have been tidily solved.Donor organs or limbs would be rejected, and wither and die, and more often than not they’d fuck the patient up in the process. The doctors furrowed their collective brows over the matter, dallying with drugs and toying with synthetic antigens, nanotechnology and degradable bone scaffolds seeded with cells, but it just didn’t happen for them. The success rate climbed, but it was still too hit-and-miss, especially as the only people who could afford such treatments were exactly those who’d sue the ass off the hospital if the transplant went down the toilet.
And so, nearly twenty years ago, SafetyNet was born.
The company was founded by a biochemist who combined scientific ability with genius for cold-hearted, bloody-minded pragmatism which I trust will earn him a long stretch in the hottest corner of Hell. Almost certainly not, though. I’m sure Heaven takes Amex just as readily as everywhere else.
The idea was very simple. “Hey,” this man said to himself, one long dark evening in the lab, “we’ve got a problem here. People keep fucking up bits of themselves, and their bodies respond with a hard-line ‘accept no substitutes’ approach. Maybe we have to stop trying to fob them off. Perhaps we should try giving them something they’ll recognize.”
This biochemist approached his richest clients, got a positive response and venture capital, and so the Farms were born. For a sum which is not generally known, but which must be well in excess of a million dollars, when you have a child you can take out a little life insurance for it. You do this by creating a life, and then systematically destroying it.
After the child has been conceived, surgeons remove a couple of cells from the emerging fetus. These cloned cells are grown in a variety of cultures, test tubes, and incubators, the process matched to normal development as closely as possible. As soon as the fake twincan breathe, it is left with droids for a while, until it’s got the basic motor skills and perception stuff worked out. Then they bring it out to a Farm, put it in a tunnel, and forget about it until they need it.
Twice a day, a medic droid checks vital responses and gives each spare a carefully designed
I drank half a bottle of Jack, injected two mg of Rapt into my arm, and lay facedown on the bed with cushions pushed hard over my ears. And still, as I drifted into the twilight of an overdose which left me unconscious for over seventy-two hours, I thought I could hear the sound of bodies twisting unknowing against each other in the gloom.
Luckily, I guess, Ratchet the droid found me. I’d vomited onto the bed and, sharp thinker that it was, the machine had worked out I was not in the best of shape. It monitored me for the next two days, turning me over when I threw up again, and made sure the spares were fed at the regular times.
Maybe it also whispered to me in my sleep, because when I eventually made it back into the land of the living, I returned with a sense of purpose that seemed to come from nowhere. You’re going to need some back story to understand. Bear with me on the medical stuff, because it isn’t really my field.
The deal with the Farms is this.
The world’s a dangerous place, even if you don’t go looking for trouble. Chances are your body’s going to take some knocks. Diseases, cuts, bruises. Most of these can be dealt with pretty effectively now. There’s only one area where we’re still consulting tea leaves and waving dead chickens at the problem.
There seems to be some inherent difficulty with getting damaged bodies to accept replacement parts. Tissue-typing and test-tube organs never really got sorted out, despite the fact that any number of apparently more difficult conundrums have been tidily solved.Donor organs or limbs would be rejected, and wither and die, and more often than not they’d fuck the patient up in the process. The doctors furrowed their collective brows over the matter, dallying with drugs and toying with synthetic antigens, nanotechnology and degradable bone scaffolds seeded with cells, but it just didn’t happen for them. The success rate climbed, but it was still too hit-and-miss, especially as the only people who could afford such treatments were exactly those who’d sue the ass off the hospital if the transplant went down the toilet.
And so, nearly twenty years ago, SafetyNet was born.
The company was founded by a biochemist who combined scientific ability with genius for cold-hearted, bloody-minded pragmatism which I trust will earn him a long stretch in the hottest corner of Hell. Almost certainly not, though. I’m sure Heaven takes Amex just as readily as everywhere else.
The idea was very simple. “Hey,” this man said to himself, one long dark evening in the lab, “we’ve got a problem here. People keep fucking up bits of themselves, and their bodies respond with a hard-line ‘accept no substitutes’ approach. Maybe we have to stop trying to fob them off. Perhaps we should try giving them something they’ll recognize.”
This biochemist approached his richest clients, got a positive response and venture capital, and so the Farms were born. For a sum which is not generally known, but which must be well in excess of a million dollars, when you have a child you can take out a little life insurance for it. You do this by creating a life, and then systematically destroying it.
After the child has been conceived, surgeons remove a couple of cells from the emerging fetus. These cloned cells are grown in a variety of cultures, test tubes, and incubators, the process matched to normal development as closely as possible. As soon as the fake twincan breathe, it is left with droids for a while, until it’s got the basic motor skills and perception stuff worked out. Then they bring it out to a Farm, put it in a tunnel, and forget about it until they need it.
Twice a day, a medic droid checks vital responses and gives each spare a carefully designed
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