Your name isn’t particularly important— if it was, then your supervisor would’ve probably made at least a token effort to remember it. No, you go by your employee number: 24601 (because someone up there has a sick sense of humor). You work as a maintenance tech at a Uneeda Biolabs facility up near Cleveland— officially, at least. In actuality, you’re also a fluffy pony wrangler because someone in Corporate thought it was a good idea to go and strike a licensing agreement with Hasbio for what’re basically magic beans with technicolor coats and bowel control issues and you drew the short straw when the plant manager decided to give out the…new assignment.
Fortunately, they aren’t running a “proper” breeding operation here, with dozens and dozens of fluffies in cages. No, they’re catering towards a wealthier clientele…one that wants their fluffies fine-tuned to the smallest detail.
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It’s past midnight as you enter the production room. As per usual, the only other sound besides your footsteps is the whirring hum of the cloning vats’ subsystems— pumps to keep the nutrient solution inside circulating, some sort of doodad to keep it oxygenated, another one to filter away waste products, a UV sterilizer for after it’s opened, and so on. None of these matter tonight, though, because none of them are acting up— if they were, then your supervisor’d be screaming through your earpiece to fix them.
No, tonight you’re emptying a vat— No. 8, specifically. By the time you reach it, the nutrient solution is practically gone, and you’re left with the payload: an alicorn filly with an off-white coat. Only people who know what the mane’s going to look like are the customer, whoever in Sales processed the order, and the lab techs who made it.
As per protocol, you give it a flick on the rear. Almost immediately, it begins coughing up the last of the solution, and it’s lungs fill with air for the first time.
“Ground control to 24601,” your supervisor announces. “Status on No. 8?”
“Got the foal.”
“Then do your job and bring it to the nursery— last thing we want is the customer making a stink about “delayed delivery”.”
You look back at the creature in your hands— bought before it was conceived, grown and birthed from a glass tube, and soon to be nursing on reconstituted formula and listening to a computerized “mummah song”. As far as you know, it’s less a pet for “huggies and wub” and more a status symbol for some nouveau riche “influencer” (whatever the hell that is).
“24601, hurry it along. I need you to check on that order of reticulated pythons we’ve got in the east wing.”
You groan before turning around and walking off towards the “nursery”, not least because you have a pretty good idea as to the target demographic for cloned constrictors… and what sort of diet they’ll be subsisting on, if what you saw with your friend Jim’s snake is anything to go by.