Human Grade

Chapter 1: Extraction Protocol

The first feeling Renata Suarez purchased that morning was calm.

She held the ampule between her thumb and forefinger, tilting it until the liquid caught the fluorescent light of her bathroom. The compound was the color of weak tea, almost golden, and it moved with a viscosity that suggested quality. Grade A. Batch-verified. The pharmacy label read SERENOL-4: Tranquility (Moderate Duration, 6-8 hrs). She'd been taking this particular formulation for nine months, ever since the grief compound she'd relied on had been reformulated and the new version left her with migraines.

She cracked the seal, drew the compound into the applicator, and pressed it against the hollow behind her left ear. The dermal patch hissed. Within forty seconds, the familiar warmth crept through her temples and settled behind her sternum like a hand placed gently on her chest. Not happiness. Not excitement. Just the absence of the terrible blankness that greeted her every morning before she dosed.

Calm. Purchased, delivered, absorbed.

She set the empty ampule in the recycling tray beside three others from the week and studied her reflection. Thirty-four years old. Dark hair pulled into a regulation knot. Skin that held the permanent pallor of someone who worked under artificial light twelve hours a day. Her eyes were steady, which was the point. Steady hands, steady eyes, steady temperament. That was the job.

Renata was an extraction technician at Lumen BioSystems Facility 9, located forty minutes east of the city in what had once been agricultural land and was now a sprawl of low white buildings behind perimeter fencing. She'd worked there for three years, two months, and eleven days. She knew the count because her hiring date was also the date of her diagnosis — Acquired Emotional Deficit Syndrome, Stage 2 — and the two events had become fused in her memory like a before and after.

Before: a woman who cried at films, who laughed too loudly at parties, who loved Mateo Faber with the kind of irrational, consuming devotion that made her drive across the city at two in the morning just to sleep beside him.

After: a woman who performed the motions of feeling the way an amputee might flex a phantom limb.

AEDS had swept through the population like a slow tide. The pandemic — they called it the Graying, though the medical literature used the term "mass affective denervation" — had begun seven years ago with scattered cases. People who woke up one morning and simply couldn't feel. Not numb, not depressed. The neural architecture of emotion had been stripped clean, as though someone had reached into the limbic system and switched off every light. Within two years, an estimated sixty percent of the adult population in developed nations had been affected to some degree. The cause was a prion-like pathogen that targeted the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, and no one had found a vaccine.

What they had found, almost by accident, was that cerebrospinal fluid harvested from a specific subset of neurologically atypical humans contained compounds that could temporarily restore emotional function. The compounds bound to damaged receptor sites and mimicked natural neurotransmitter cascades with extraordinary precision. Joy felt like joy. Grief felt like grief. Love felt like love — or close enough that no one who'd been without it for years was inclined to complain.

The humans from whom these compounds were harvested were called vessels.

Renata dressed in her facility uniform — white scrubs, soft-soled shoes, ID badge clipped to her breast pocket — and drove to work. The highway was quiet. Most people commuted early; the morning dose window was narrow, and employers had learned that an un-dosed workforce was an unproductive one. She passed a billboard for NeuVida, one of the consumer brands that packaged emotional compounds for retail sale. The advertisement showed a woman laughing with her children, her head thrown back, sunlight in her hair. Beneath the image: FEEL EVERYTHING AGAIN. NeuVida. Because You Deserve to Be Whole.

Renata did not look at the billboard for long.

Facility 9 occupied twelve acres behind a double fence topped with sensor wire. The outer perimeter was landscaped — ornamental grasses, a walking path for staff, benches no one used. The inner perimeter was concrete and steel. Renata badged through three checkpoints, submitted to a retinal scan at the main entrance, and walked through the decontamination corridor, where ultraviolet light and aerosolized antiseptic stripped her skin of anything the facility didn't want brought inside.

The extraction wing was on the third floor. It was the cleanest place Renata had ever worked, cleaner than the hospital where she'd done her clinical rotations before the Graying changed the trajectory of her career and everyone else's. The floors were seamless polymer. The air was filtered and temperature-controlled to within half a degree. Every surface was white or pale gray, and the lighting was calibrated to reduce shadow. The architects had designed it to feel like the inside of a cloud.

Renata's station was Extraction Bay 7. She shared the floor with eleven other technicians, though they rarely spoke beyond the necessary. The work didn't encourage conversation. It encouraged focus, repetition, and a particular quality of detachment that Renata had once mistaken for professionalism before she realized it was the AEDS.

Her morning began the way every morning began: she reviewed her assigned vessels on the intake screen, checked the calibration of her extraction apparatus, and pulled up the day's protocol notes. Three vessels were scheduled for standard draws. The procedure was straightforward — lumbar puncture, cerebrospinal fluid collection, filtration, and compound separation. Each draw took approximately forty minutes. The vessels were sedated throughout. Renata had performed the procedure over two thousand times.

She was good at it. Her yields were consistently among the highest on the floor, and her complication rate was the lowest. These were the metrics by which she was evaluated, and they appeared on her quarterly review in clean columns of numbers that translated into bonuses deposited into her account. She used the bonuses to buy better compounds. The cycle was elegant in its self-reinforcement.

The first vessel of the day was a male, mid-twenties, designated V-4417. Renata didn't use names; the vessels had identification numbers that corresponded to their breeding facility of origin and batch sequence. V-4417 was unremarkable. Pale skin, shaved head, muscle tone consistent with the limited movement permitted by the containment protocols. His eyes were open but unfocused, the pupils dilated from the pre-procedure sedative. He breathed in the slow, rhythmic pattern of deep unconsciousness.

Renata positioned him on his side, swabbed the lumbar region, and inserted the needle with the precision of long practice. The fluid that filled the collection vial was clear with a faint opalescence — healthy, viable, rich in the precursor molecules that the processing lab would refine into marketable compounds. She monitored the pressure gauge, adjusted the flow rate, and waited.

Forty minutes. No complications. She sealed the vials, tagged them for processing, and signaled the orderlies to return V-4417 to his housing unit.

The second vessel was female, younger, designated V-5023. Same procedure. Same result. Renata's hands did not tremble. Her breathing did not change. She thought about what she might have for lunch.

Between the second and third procedures, she took her midday compound — a low-grade contentment formulation that smoothed the transition between her morning calm and the alertness she'd need for the afternoon. She ate a protein bar in the break room and scrolled through her messages. Mateo had sent a photo of the sunset from his office window on the administrative floor, two buildings over. Beautiful, right? he'd written. She studied the image — bands of orange and violet above the facility's roofline — and tried to determine whether the beauty she perceived was real or pharmacological. She couldn't tell anymore. She'd stopped being able to tell about a year in.

She typed back: Gorgeous. See you tonight.

The third vessel was new.

Renata noticed the transfer flag on her intake screen when she returned to Bay 7. New arrivals weren't unusual — vessels were rotated between facilities based on yield performance, health status, and production demand — but this one had been flagged for an orientation period, which meant Renata would need to conduct an initial assessment before the first extraction could be scheduled.

The vessel's designation was V-7781. Female. Age twenty-three. Transferred from Breeding Facility Cascadia, which was one of the larger operations on the West Coast. The transfer notes were sparse: Healthy. Yield projections above average. Neural profile consistent with standard vessel classification.

Renata pulled up the full file on her tablet and walked to Holding Room 4, where new arrivals were kept during their acclimation period. The room was small and white, furnished with a padded bench that served as both seat and bed, a nutrition dispenser, and a waste unit. A reinforced observation window separated the room from the corridor. The glass was one-way; the vessel couldn't see out, but Renata could see in.

She looked through the window and stopped.

The vessel — V-7781 — was sitting upright on the bench. This was not, in itself, unusual. Vessels could sit, stand, walk, and perform basic motor functions. Their neural stunting, performed in utero through a targeted chemical intervention, was designed to eliminate higher cognitive function while preserving the autonomic and limbic systems that generated the emotional compounds. They were, according to every piece of literature Renata had read, every training module she'd completed, and every regulatory briefing she'd attended, biologically human but neurologically equivalent to organisms operating on pure instinct and reflex. They could not think. They could not plan. They could not recognize faces, form memories, or understand language.

V-7781 was looking directly at the observation window.

Not in the vague, wandering way that vessels sometimes oriented toward light or movement. She was looking at the specific spot where Renata was standing, as though she could see through the one-way glass. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they were focused with an intensity that made Renata's purchased calm flicker like a candle in a draft.

Renata checked the glass. It was properly calibrated — opaque from the interior side, transparent from the corridor. There was no way the vessel could see her. It was coincidence. A reflexive orientation toward the sound of Renata's footsteps, perhaps, or toward the subtle vibration of the door mechanism.

She entered the holding room.

The vessel tracked her movement. Not just her general direction — her face. Those dark eyes followed Renata as she crossed the room, consulted her tablet, and approached the bench. The vessel's expression was — and Renata hesitated over the word even in her own mind — attentive.

Vessels did not have expressions. They had muscular configurations that sometimes resembled expressions, the way a sleeping dog's face might twitch into something that looked like a smile. That was the training. That was the science.

"V-7781," Renata said, pulling up the assessment checklist. "Initial evaluation. Pupil response."

She clicked on her penlight and leaned in. The vessel's pupils constricted normally. Renata noted the result. She checked reflexes — patellar, plantar, corneal. All within normal parameters. She palpated the cervical spine, checked the lumbar region for any abnormalities that might complicate extraction. The vessel's skin was warm and smooth, unmarked by scars, which meant she hadn't been subjected to excessive draws at her previous facility.

Throughout the examination, the vessel sat still. Compliant. But her eyes never left Renata's face.

And then, so softly that Renata almost missed it, the vessel began to hum.

It was a melody. Not a random vocalization, not the tuneless moaning that vessels sometimes produced when their sedation wore off. It was a melody with structure — a rise, a fall, a repeated phrase. Renata didn't recognize the song, but she recognized that it was a song, and the recognition landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.

She stepped back.

The vessel stopped humming. She tilted her head — another gesture that was too deliberate, too responsive — and watched Renata with those dark, focused eyes.

Renata looked at her tablet. She looked at the vessel. She looked at her tablet again.

Under "Behavioral Notes," she typed: Minor vocal activity during assessment. Consistent with residual limbic output. No indication of higher cognitive function.

She saved the file, left the holding room, and walked to the break room, where she stood at the sink for two full minutes, running cold water over her wrists. Her purchased calm was still active — she could feel it sitting in her bloodstream like a floor beneath her feet — but something was pressing against it from below, something that the compound couldn't quite suppress.

She dried her hands. She went back to work.

That evening, she drove home in silence. Mateo was already there, standing in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove. He was tall and lean, with the kind of face that looked perpetually amused even when he wasn't, and he wore his facility ID badge on a lanyard around his neck even at home, which Renata had once found endearing and now found — she searched for the word — familiar.

"How was your day?" he asked.

"Fine. New transfer. V-7781."

"Cascadia batch?"

"Yes."

He nodded. "We've been getting a lot of those. Cascadia's downsizing their holding capacity. Budget thing." He tasted the sauce, added salt. "Yield projections?"

"Above average, according to the file."

"Good. We need it. Q3 numbers are soft." He looked at her. "You okay? You look tired."

"I'm fine."

They ate dinner. Mateo talked about a staffing issue in his department — someone had filed a grievance about shift rotations, and the union rep was being difficult. Renata listened and responded at the appropriate intervals. The contentment compound was fading, and the evening dose she'd taken — a mild warmth formulation, the kind designed for domestic settings — was settling in with its usual gentle pressure.

She thought about the vessel's eyes. The melody. The way the head had tilted.

Minor vocal activity. Residual limbic output.

She washed the dishes. Mateo kissed her on the temple and went to read in the living room. Renata stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the darkness beyond the glass, and for a moment — just a moment — she thought she could feel something beneath the compound's warm, artificial floor. Something cold and sharp, like a splinter working its way to the surface of the skin.

She took a supplemental dose and went to bed.