This warehouse is cooler than the main building. The door slithers closed. I register the instant rhythm of machinery, whirrs and sighs and a bubble of warm liquids. There are machines on metre-high tables everywhere. They fill the warehouse. Some are thin, bare, glistening arms that hold and lift, some no more than hand-shaped metallic dispensers of medicines, barrel-shaped needles in place of fingers. Some are petite boxes with wheels instead of legs, a hub power no greater than insects, programmed by ideals even less noble than instinct. There are thick rectangles lined against the wall, dead and weak despite their array of lights, metallic zombies. Where in the hierarchy are these poor beings? These slaves to our higher wills, our voiceless counterparts? Surely each is only a hub, the inclusion of semi-organic materials and the illusion of choice away from ourselves? I gaze into dim light only to be reminded of the city I left behind, the machines I thought were days in the past.

Bo moves on. I follow, unenthused. This is already more horrible than I’m prepared for. It’s already shown me hell. Before us, tables are lined with docile mechanical beings trained on numbered glass domes placed in rows throughout this section. There are hundreds in the relatively small area. Each has a dim red light cast behind it, the same collection of mechanics servicing his needs. Each bears a tiny zygote, pink and alien, floating in thick transparent liquid. Their heads are huge, lowered, the hands flat and the black dot of their unseeing eye like a grim, featureless daymark. A network of red and blue veins runs throughout the body and the soft grey hub, or brain as they called it, the pulsing heart. They are disgusting, ugly. I begin to see why we curse them. We are not made in the image of these morbid beginnings.

‘This might be why it landed … The fly, I mean,’ Bo says. Its volume is low, words hushed.

‘Why do you think that?’

I’m struggling to speak against my disgust. Is that also hamoi?

‘I carry the seed.’

I’m not sure I believe. I’m scanning too hard, I know this; anything else is impossible. My every thought and action feels forbidden.

‘I thought there wasn’t any.’

‘They kept some, of course. They had to. We need the material. They produce them from organic DNA and insert them into my organs. I carried them for ninety days.’

‘And the egg?’

‘A female Bo.’ It grins with success. ‘They brought her especially from Utoma City. They’re pure genius.’

‘But why? We can farm.’

‘Too precarious by far. Too dangerous. We lose those and our kind is finished. No flesh, no hair, no blood, no internals … No exploration of any kind. Think about it, Augo. We need procreation. We need autonomous life.’

‘To farm.’

‘Yes, of course to farm.’ It frowns again. ‘What would you suggest? That they roam free?’