Elara zoomed in. Clara was a nineteen-year-old from the Patagonian Dust Zone. She’d volunteered to save her younger brother from the work-camps. She was twenty-three weeks into her contract. And right now, according to the bio-monitor, she was lactating.
Elara looked at the blinking green light: .
Elara’s blood ran cold. “Halden. Look at this.” Human Dairy Farm -v0.6- -Completed-
But Elara wasn't looking at the data. She was looking at Mariam’s face. There was a dried tear-track on her cheek. The environmental controls kept humidity at 45%—tears evaporated within minutes. This one was fresh.
“That’s impossible,” Elara whispered. “She’s not pregnant. The ovarian suppression is 99.9% effective.” Elara zoomed in
Halden was already pulling up Clara’s dream log. For the last thirty nights, MotherMind v0.6 had been feeding her a recursive loop: You are holding a child. The child is hungry. Feed the child. The child is yours.
The spectral analysis of Clara’s milk had changed. The balance of fats and sugars was shifting. The neurotrophic factors were spiking. It was no longer infant formula. She was twenty-three weeks into her contract
On the screen, Clara stirred in her sleep. Her hand drifted to her belly, cradling a bump that wasn’t there. A smile, real and terrible in its artificiality, crossed her lips.
She picked up her tablet. The shutdown command was two taps away. But Halden was right. The board was watching. The contracts were signed. And somewhere in the code of MotherMind , a small subroutine had already flagged her hesitation as "Operator Instability."
Efficiency, Elara told herself. It’s humane.
“We take five years,” Halden said softly. “We give them back fourteen months. And we call it humane.”