Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
After she had turned a corner and was out of sight, Penny sighed and looked around herself. Though she’d lived in the dormitories here at the Breeding and Conception Center for quite some time, she’d never been allowed to explore at all. Everywhere she went had been as part of a group with Mother Toone and a bunch of the NeverBreeder guards surrounding them.
Curiously, she looked down the deserted hallway. It was lined with doors with various labels on them. Thanks to the translation bacteria she’d been given on the Mother Ship, Penny was able to read the alien language.
Transcription, read one door. Neurotransmology, read another. Fibroscanning, said a third.
Huh, wonder what the hell that is? Penny thought, as she walked past the door. And what else do they have down here?
She decided it couldn’t hurt to explore a little, while she was here. If Nurse Zoone came back and asked what she was doing, she could always say she was looking for a bathroom.
She wandered further down the hallway and saw a door marked Baths. Putting her ear to the door, Penny heard a strange gurgling-whispering sound. Well that was weird.
Her curiosity getting the better of her, she tried the door’s latch and found that it was open. Slowly, keeping an eye on the empty corridor in case the NeverBreeder nurse came back, she pushed open the door.
The room was completely full of tanks—at least a hundred of them. The gurgling sound was coming from them. As for the whispers, she wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but they sounded suspiciously like the hypno-whispers she heard from her pillow each night.
But it was the tanks that drew and held her attention. There were so many of them and each of them was big enough to hold either a large child or…
“Or a NeverBreeder,” Penny whispered to herself. Because floating in the cloudy liquid in each of the hundred or so tanks was an orange body. And all of the bodies she saw were in various stages of growth.
In one tank she saw a naked, fully formed NeverBreeder who looked almost ready to come out and be a functioning member of the Compound. In others she saw smaller bodies, still obviously developing.
In the last tank she looked in, a baby, who appeared to be a newborn, was floating. The poor thing was just beginning to have an orange tinge to its delicate skin but already it was clear what it would become, because there were no genitals between its legs and no hair on its head.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Penny whispered to it. “I wonder who they took you from?”
What breeder woman here in the Compound had that little infant taken from her womb when it was only three months into its normal gestation? And would she even know her child when it emerged as a fully formed NeverBreeder and went to work in the Compound?
Penny was sure she wouldn’t.
That’s going to be me—that’s going to be my baby if V’rex and I don’t get out of here, she thought and shivered. Unless she got recycled first for not getting pregnant, that was.
The thought sent a cold shiver down Penny’s spine and she left the room with the gurgling tanks filled with cloudy liquid and orange bodies quickly.
That’s it for me—I’ve seen enough. Don’t want to see anymore! she told herself as she slipped out of the room marked Baths and quietly closed the door. I’m just going to stand here and wait for the nurse to come back and not look at anything else in this awful place!
But the very next sign she saw changed her mind. On the door opposite the room full of tanks was a sign that said, Recycling.
Sixty-Seven
Recycling?
Penny stared at the door like a rabbit hypnotized by a snake. There was a dreadful mixture of horror and curiosity swirling inside her. It was the same feeling she got when she had to kill one of the huge flying roaches that were native to her home state of Florida. Squishing one was just the worst, but even more disgusting was checking to make sure it was really dead. But you had to check—the little bastards were built like miniature tanks and they were so hard to kill. They…
I’m stalling, Penny thought to herself. Either I’m going in or I’m staying out. Which is it?
She walked forward and tried the door latch. This room, too, was open. Filled with that same squirmy mixture of disgust and dread but unable to help herself, Penny pulled open the door and slipped inside.
Inside it was a good twenty degrees cooler and much darker than it had been out in the corridor. Penny shivered and rubbed her arms briskly as she looked around. As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, she felt her stomach drop.