The oak tree that had dominated my last internal vision now occupied the airspace above my spread-eagled body, only the tree wasn’t a tree, it was a giant machine for aphaeresis—a process whereby blood is siphoned from a donor and the desired components extracted, with the unused remains returned—the entire procedure contained in a looping cycle. In this case the tree—a multitiered labyrinth of mechanically moving parts, was simultaneously siphoning DNA strands from the blood of hundreds of cephalopeds at a time and squeezing droplets through clear vinelike tubes on its way to the trunk’s collection basin.

Dozens of robotic arms extended from the sphere’s tubular walls. The telescopic devices operated in an incredibly coordinated multitasked singularity of purpose. As the drained, dead eight-legged donors were peeled away from their perches and dropped into one of several disposal tubes, another robotic arm would replace each fresh carcass with a live specimen extracted from a conveyor of oval traps. Fluttering around this living assembly line of bodies and bodily fluids were hundreds of the mechanized hummingbirds—miniature mobile sensors that fed bytes of information to GOLEM.

Then there was the “island of misfit toys,” something more akin to Mengele’s genetics lab. Set off in their own multitiered, bacteria-free acrylic habitat were the seedlings produced by GOLEM’s genetic engineering experiments—bizarre genome creations combining the DNA of multiple species with artificial devices in an attempt to harvest and sustain unique new life-forms. They were occupied by hairless rats with human faces and lizard-tongued humans that possessed tentacles, and by bats hanging upside down from perches using their opposable thumbs. Even more freakish was GOLEM’s garden of mutations, which featured rows of sunflowers equipped with human mouths and voice boxes that cried like infants and infants that sprouted upper torsos from trees.

There were also attempts to harvest aquatic species. Rows of water tanks contained human tadpoles and infant mermaids and human squids—genetic abominations of nature that struggled to coordinate gasps of air with gill slits, blue blood with hemoglobin red, each fleeting moment of life observed by GOLEM’s sensors, each tortured death dictating the next pairing of chromosomes into a slightly altered DNA strand as the supercomputer created life in the same manner one would solve a Rubik’s Cube.

The glowing orb of artificial intelligence responsible for this orchestrated mayhem hovered motionless above the fray, its internal solution strands churning like stars in a spiral galaxy.

The computer took a quantum second to glance down at me, its silence confirming my status as a solitary speck of stardust caught in a cosmic storm, and then the master … sorry, the mistress of its domain floated out of its genetics factory and disappeared into the night sky, perhaps to visit another facility on another continent.