An inside look at the JitaMoo! dairy farm.
Fresh Milk
"
GOLD TEAM, ONE THREE FOUR DELTA ONE THREE."
Moira Jiitannen stepped off the shuttlerail car. Her breath echoed within the bright yellow plastic suit, a shield of normalcy smelling of harsh sterilizers and advanced polyplastics she couldn't even pronounce surrounding her body. Dim blue light flooded through her visor, webs of shadows from piping and gantries casting odd shapes across her otherwise pretty features.
"
ONE THREE FOUR DELTA ONE THREE, REMOVAL REQUIRED PLEASE.”, the intercom repeated.
"Row 134, Stack D...", muttering to herself as her eyes panned across the endless rows of machinery and production tanks. "130...132... here we go."
The sprawling 612,774 m
2 JitaMoo! 'dairy farm' of Niyabainen III is one of the most advanced producers of Dairy Products within the Forge, though remains a comparatively small-time producer thanks to the limited scope of ownership. Moira worked here as a 'farmhand', a quaint name for a job title that no longer had anything to do with agriculture. Her small hands were useful in this job, able to squeeze between tightly packed pipes or into sensitive orifices. In this case, she merely pressed a button. She worked with ‘gold team’, yellow suited technicians who handled disposal and cleanup.
The gantry shuddered with a loud bang as the motor began to turn, hideous fleshy masses swinging from their connection points. Production Frame-134 rotated slowly, moving each stack of dairy units slowly down to ground level in their own turn. When D-Stack finally moved within reach, Moira didn't take long to find the dead unit. Illuminated by a red warning light, the genetically engineered
thing had only just begun to show signs of accelerated necrosis and bacterial inflammation. Next to the light read the handwritten label, 134-D/13. The dead unit listed on her report.
“
DOCTOR YUURI, FOUR EIGHT SEVEN ALPHA ZERO TWO. DOCTOR YUURI, FOUR EIGHT SEVEN ALPHA ZERO TWO, PLEASE.”
It is considered something of a fool's errand, raising actual cows for their milk. Cows are dirty. They're prone to disease and poor production. They're inefficient creatures with troublesome personalities and require space to live and move about. Far better to engineer something vaguely cowlike that merely produces milk, isn't it? In YC52, Hyasyoda Corporation revealed to buzzing public reception the first genetic profile of a Non-Senient Dairy Production Unit. In the near century since then, the NS-DPU has only improved in lifespan and production capability. Hyasyoda still owns the lucrative patent on DPUs, and all producers pay licensing to run their own farms. Traditional milk production has all but been eliminated in the State.
Moira struggled to move the canvas cart under the dead unit, with one particularly inflammed mammary gland hanging too low for her to get the cart underneath completely. With a swipe of the laser saw, she excised the part and tossed it into the cart before sliding it under the now slow-bleeding DPU. Another press of a button, and the half ton corpse released from the gantry with a sickening slump into the canvas cart labeled for biohazard. Taking her time, Moira began the arduous process of unfastening the feeding tubes and injector needles. Another technician would clean and prepare the gantry for insertion of a new unit later. Checking her notes a final time, Moira completed her removal ticket on the datapad and slid it into the side pocket of the cart.
To some, the NS-DPU is a horrifying example of ethical and moral bankruptcy where industry and science merge. To others, it is the only ethical and moral option that does not enslave sentient creatures to a life of pain, servitude, and waste. For most, it is simply a poorly understood method of how milk is produced. Who really
wants to know where their milkshake comes from anyways? These sterile bags of flesh hanging by their own sinew upon cruel metal frames produce milk 24/7. No brain, no eyes, no limbs. No organs other than the mass of mammary glands kept alive by computers and specially designed nutrient-blood. Motionless, the occasional pulse of yellow 'blood' slithering along varicose veins is the only sign of life aside from complicated status monitors. A DPU, milked constantly, can produce more than 250 gallons of milk per day every day for an average lifespan of 5-7 years, all with minimal oversight. Therefore, a single DPU can safely expect to produce around 500,000 gallons of milk in its lifespan. A living cow, however, produces only 19,000 gallons in its lifetime with far more waste and expense.
Moira pushed the cart along the designated lane. Markings on the floor indicated her destination, occasionally interjecting annoyingly friendly mottos and reminders. Safety! - Quality! - Teamwork! She passed by countless workers, some she knew and some she’d never met. Blue suited repair technicians gathered around a gantry with one of the hangar arms removed. They bickered over it, clearly discussing whether to repair or replace the gantry arm. She passed by a doctor in a white coat, who predictably did not reply in the slightest to her smile. When she finally passed two blood-soaked gold team members, one of them playfully slapped the dead corpse in her cart and laughed. “You still on for tonight, Moira?”, he asked whilst leaning against the cart.
“Uhm... I don’t know. I have a lot of things to--”
“Oh come on! You’ve been putting us off for three weeks! What’s one night out going to do?”
“Yeah yeah.”, grabbing his arm and pulling him to the side out of her way, “I’ll call you, Opi.”
“You better!”
“I will!”
The shredding room was, frankly, disgusting. Massive grinder units built into the floor could chew up a DPU - or a man - in seconds flat. The company would never admit to it, but most of gold team assumed that Fat Jerry probably followed a unit down the hatch several years ago. That or he threw his glove in there, quit his job, skipped town, and changed his number all in the same day. Moira lined cart up to the shredder, clamped it into place, and closed the safety gate. “SHREDDER UP!”, she hollared and waved to the controller in the cab. He waved back. Lights spun, klaxons sounded, and the gaping hatch doors opened up to reveal the slowly turning grinding wheels under them. The cart lurched and tilted slowly, rising in angle until the corpse and loose gland rolled out and into the hungry maw waiting beneath. Moira stood at the safty line and watched with morbid fascination. The flesh jiggled and wobbled. It pulled, stretching and groaning like a couch being ripped apart. Spatters of fluid, coagulated blood and rotten milk, arced from the shredder as it was torn asunder. Within fifteen seconds, giblets and strands of sinew stuck between the shredder teeth were all that remained of the half a million credit organism.
The empty cart, stained with fluid, slowly lowered into place. Moira unlatched the gate and pulled the cart out, closing the gate behind her as the shredder doors slammed to a close. She rolled the empty cart forward, sighing lightly to herself and glancing upward at the clock.
09:52“
GOLD TEAM, THREE TWO SEVEN GOLF ONE FOUR, REMOVAL REQUIRED. GOLD TEAM, THREE TWO SEVEN GOLF ONE FOUR, PLEASE.”
Moira’s datapad chirped as another ticket fell in her workload... “Seven more hours to go.”
.
Author
Topic: Fresh Milk (Read 592 times)