Climbing out of the vent, I made my way carefully over the hexagon-shaped openings to the nearest inhabited portal. Lying inside a clear porous organic container was a human infant, perhaps six months old. Its upper torso was naked, its lower half concealed beneath some kind of sensory blanket. It was hairless, with brown irises and big red pupils, which it used to stare back up at me, expressionless.

Curious, I examined the container lid to see if I could open it.

WARNING: INCUBATOR CONTAINS SENSORY DEVICES.

“Chill out. It’s not like they don’t know I’m in here.” Sliding back the lid, I lifted the sensory blanket.

“Oh, geez.”

There were no sexual organs to speak of, nor legs for that matter. The child’s spine and pelvis simply ended in several bundles of wires and conduits that were plugged into the cradle’s base assembly.

A feed tube was connected to its still-present umbilical cord.

Transhuman Andria … So this is how it begins, your life as a Hunter-Transport.

I moved to the next occupied space and found another infant, only this version of my fiancée was asleep on its belly, revealing a pair of flesh-covered wings protruding from where its scapulae should have been.

Incubator after incubator, row after row. There were more transhuman spiders and bats, a dozen babies with tree roots for legs, a few lizard combos—all thankfully dead, and some seriously disturbing attempts to genetically bond a human with a cephaloped. None of the latter looked like they would survive. Those that appeared to be the healthiest specimens seemed absorbed in watching the inside of their artificial womb, which ABE determined to be a neural projection screen.

Not one of the infants cried.

BABIES WHO ARE NEVER LOVED DO NOT CRY. THERE CANNOT BE LACK UNLESS ONE EXPERIENCES SOMETHING AT LEAST ONCE.

Pretty profound, ABE. Now calculate the best escape route into that jungle we saw and get me the fuck out of here!

PROCEED TO THE UPPER COMBS. EXIT FROM A VENT CLOSEST TO THE ROOT SYSTEM.

It took me thirty minutes to scale the interior of the hive to reach the ceiling—a labyrinth of thick roots that supported the growth and its core clusters of glowing citrus electrical conduits.

ABE selected an access vent and I crawled through, the exit point placing me a few feet from the redwood’s trunk and only a short ascent to the next tree limb. Reaching for a vine, I climbed out, hiding behind the immense stem supporting the hive.

An army of transhuman spiders were scouring the hive and tree trunk. Crawling along the exterior of the hive, their search appeared to be concentrated along the sphere’s lower hemisphere.

Using the root system as cover, I climbed up to the next tree limb, hiding in the tall lemongrass in order to get my bearings.