I never trusted the spliced abominations they called "the future of farming" and after my last mission I can safely say I was right. They're supposed to be "lightly biomechanically enhanced" to prevent diseases etcetera - imagine never having to vaccinate your livestock because you can download the structure of vaccinated cells and download them right into the beasts.
Sounds genius - isn't anything like they advertised of course. The reality is that the download units are only partially developed in utero and currently they aren't able to be naturally born. They share eight to one long tube-shaped chamber that acts as a cross between a womb and a robotics lab where the embryos are fused with the biomechanical parts as soon as they're big enough to survive the procedure.
After that they get "born" and grow up to be mostly normal looking aside from the metallic sheen to their meat and the multitude of ports and odd squarish shapes that sit just beneath their skin. Apparently it's completely painless as the implanting happens before their pain receptors develop but I've seen the aftermath and they couldn't be further from the truth.
I'm part of a team that generally works with the company's computing units but recently we've been trained to debug the livestock. Those poor creatures can get stuck in endless loops of the same action until their muscles literally tear themselves apart. Once we were sent to a sheep farm experiencing a virus through their stock.
It was beyond us - beyond anything but a bullet to the head in all honesty. We heard their broken bleating as soon as we pulled up at the farm, they sounded barely organic and kept glitching and shrieking and playing some popular tune we'd been hearing on the radio.
When we were let into the pens the owner collapsed. In the half hour since he called, nearly all of the stock had crashed and were twitching in pools of their own blood. All but one poor lamb who's systems must have been using the latest software, just strong enough to block the virus.
It was covered in blood from the older lambs around it who'd ruptured almost all at once by the look of it. Thanks to their tech they hadn't died yet - something the ads won't tell you is that the livestock can't die until you perform a final diagnostics check and upload the cause of death to the system.
There must have been a good hundred sheep in that one set of pens, waiting for us to sign off their deaths.
Sounds genius - isn't anything like they advertised of course. The reality is that the download units are only partially developed in utero and currently they aren't able to be naturally born. They share eight to one long tube-shaped chamber that acts as a cross between a womb and a robotics lab where the embryos are fused with the biomechanical parts as soon as they're big enough to survive the procedure.
After that they get "born" and grow up to be mostly normal looking aside from the metallic sheen to their meat and the multitude of ports and odd squarish shapes that sit just beneath their skin. Apparently it's completely painless as the implanting happens before their pain receptors develop but I've seen the aftermath and they couldn't be further from the truth.
I'm part of a team that generally works with the company's computing units but recently we've been trained to debug the livestock. Those poor creatures can get stuck in endless loops of the same action until their muscles literally tear themselves apart. Once we were sent to a sheep farm experiencing a virus through their stock.
It was beyond us - beyond anything but a bullet to the head in all honesty. We heard their broken bleating as soon as we pulled up at the farm, they sounded barely organic and kept glitching and shrieking and playing some popular tune we'd been hearing on the radio.
When we were let into the pens the owner collapsed. In the half hour since he called, nearly all of the stock had crashed and were twitching in pools of their own blood. All but one poor lamb who's systems must have been using the latest software, just strong enough to block the virus.
It was covered in blood from the older lambs around it who'd ruptured almost all at once by the look of it. Thanks to their tech they hadn't died yet - something the ads won't tell you is that the livestock can't die until you perform a final diagnostics check and upload the cause of death to the system.
There must have been a good hundred sheep in that one set of pens, waiting for us to sign off their deaths.
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