Husbandry

Chapter 1: Ambient Noise

The ward smelled of antiseptic and something underneath it — something organic and warm, like the inside of a greenhouse after rain. Erik Hauer had stopped noticing years ago. Now it was simply the smell of work, of routine, of the twelve women in their beds arranged in two neat rows of six.

He arrived at 5:47 every morning, thirteen minutes before his shift officially began. The extra time was important. It allowed him to walk the ward slowly, checking each garden's IV drip and nutrient line without rushing, adjusting pillow angles, noting any changes in skin coloration or fluid output. He kept a small leather notebook for observations that didn't fit neatly into the digital reporting system — things like the way Garden Four's left hand sometimes curled into a loose fist during the night, or how Garden Nine's breathing pattern shifted when the overhead lights first flickered on.

The notebook was not required. Nothing about it appeared in his job description. But Erik believed in thoroughness, and he believed that the small details mattered even when no one was watching.

Viridis Compound Production Facility sat on eleven acres of former farmland outside Wernfeld, a town that had lost most of its population during the crisis years. The facility's main building was a converted dairy operation — long, low, practical. The pharmaceutical company, Lohengrin Biologics, had purchased the property in 2031, three years after the World Health Organization declared the global fertility collapse a species-level emergency. They'd gutted the milking parlors, poured new concrete, installed climate control and biosecurity airlocks, and turned the place into something that looked, from the outside, like a particularly well-maintained agricultural research station.

From the inside, it looked like a hospital ward that had forgotten it was supposed to discharge its patients.

Erik set his thermos of coffee on the supply counter and pulled on nitrile gloves. He started, as always, with Garden One.

Her name — her former name, the one listed on her intake documents — was Brigitte Lanz. Erik did not use it. None of the technicians used the former names. The orientation manual was explicit: gardens were to be referred to by their bed numbers. This was not cruelty, the manual explained. It was clinical best practice, designed to maintain appropriate professional distance and reduce the psychological burden on care staff.

Erik had read the manual twice during his first week and had not opened it since. He didn't need a manual to tell him how to be professional.

Garden One lay on her back, her modified skin catching the fluorescent light with a faint sheen. The skin changes were the most visible result of the modification process — a progressive thickening and textural shift that made the epidermis resemble something between leather and the surface of a mushroom. Smooth, pale, slightly translucent in places. Her scalp was bare. Her eyes, when they opened, showed the characteristic milky film that developed over the first six months post-modification. She could likely still perceive light and shadow, but detailed vision was gone.

Her vital signs were stable. Her compound output levels, displayed on the bedside monitor, were within normal range. Erik checked the catheter line, the nutrient IV, and the secondary IV that delivered the cocktail of immunosuppressants and metabolic regulators that kept her body functioning in its altered state. Everything was clean. Everything was where it should be.

"Good morning," he said quietly. He said it to all of them. He knew they couldn't respond — the vocal-cord procedure performed during modification ensured that — but he said it anyway, because it cost nothing and because silence felt wrong.

He moved to Garden Two.

The routine took approximately forty minutes. By the time he finished his first pass through all twelve beds, the overhead speakers had begun their daily cycle of ambient music — gentle, formless compositions that Lohengrin's behavioral science division had determined reduced cortisol levels in modified subjects. Erik had selected the current playlist himself from the approved library. He favored the ones with slow piano progressions. They reminded him of something his wife used to play on their home speaker system while cooking dinner, back when there was a wife, back when there were dinners.

Annika had died in 2029, during the second wave of the crisis. Not from infertility itself — that was a slower, statistical death, measured in declining birth rates and empty maternity wards — but from the civil unrest that followed the WHO declaration. A supply-chain riot at a distribution center in Dortmund. She'd been there to pick up allocated medications for her mother's dialysis. Seventeen people died when the crowd surged against a police barricade. Annika was number eleven.

Erik did not think about this every day. But he thought about it most days, usually during the quiet interval between his first pass through the ward and the arrival of the morning data upload from Lohengrin's central servers. It was a small window, five or ten minutes, when the ward was still and the ambient music played and the gardens lay in their beds producing their compounds and Erik stood at the supply counter drinking coffee from his thermos.

He thought about Annika, and then he thought about the work, and the work made sense of the loss. That was the architecture of his belief: the world had broken, and what he did here was part of fixing it.

The morning data upload arrived at 6:30. Erik reviewed it on the ward terminal — compound yield reports, supply delivery schedules, any flagged anomalies from the overnight monitoring system. Today there was one flag: Garden Seven's compound output had dropped 3.2 percent over the past seventy-two hours. Erik noted it in his leather notebook and scheduled an additional blood panel.

At 7:15, the ward door opened and his supervisor walked in.

Marta Fischer was fifty-three, compact, and precise in her movements. She wore her gray hair cropped close and favored dark, practical clothing — navy slacks, black blouses, flat shoes that made no sound on the ward's sealed floor. She had been at Viridis since its commissioning and had overseen the facility's expansion from eight beds to twelve. Before Lohengrin, she'd worked in veterinary pharmaceutical production. She never mentioned this, but Erik had seen it on a framed certificate in her office during his initial interview.

"Morning, Erik."

"Morning. Garden Seven's yield is down slightly. I've ordered bloods."

"Good." Marta walked the ward with him, her eyes moving across the monitors with practiced efficiency. She paused at Garden Four's bed and studied the readout. "Skin integrity on Four looks better. Whatever you adjusted in her topical regimen is working."

"I increased the emollient concentration by fifteen percent. The manufacturer's recommendation was too low for her modification stage."

Marta nodded. "Your instincts are good, Erik. Your numbers are good. We've had the lowest mortality rate of any Lohengrin facility for two consecutive quarters."

"I just pay attention."

"That's exactly what I mean." She looked at him with something that might have been warmth, or might have been the professional satisfaction of a manager whose metrics were favorable. With Marta, the distinction was not always clear.

She left at 7:40. Erik continued his work.

The rest of the morning was routine. He administered the 8:00 medication cycle, adjusted Garden Three's bed angle to reduce the risk of pressure sores, and replaced a degraded nutrient line on Garden Ten. At 10:00, he performed the midmorning compound extraction — a process that involved connecting specialized collection apparatus to the subcutaneous ports installed during modification. The compounds seeped from the gardens' altered tissue into collection chambers, where they were filtered, stabilized, and stored in temperature-controlled units for weekly pickup by Lohengrin's logistics division.

The extraction process was painless, according to Lohengrin's clinical literature. The modification eliminated most peripheral nerve response in the affected tissue layers. Erik had no reason to doubt this. The gardens showed no visible distress during extraction — no flinching, no changes in heart rate or blood pressure. They lay still, as they always did, their clouded eyes sometimes open and sometimes closed, their altered bodies performing their single remaining function with biological efficiency.

Erik handled the collection chambers carefully. Each one contained compounds worth, according to the facility's inventory system, between forty and sixty thousand euros per liter. The primary compounds — a suite of immune proteins and cellular growth factors — were used in the reproductive medicine protocols that represented humanity's best hope for reversing the fertility collapse. Secondary compounds were used in various therapeutic applications. Erik didn't concern himself much with the downstream uses. His job was production and care, not distribution.

At noon, he ate lunch in the small break room adjacent to the ward — a sandwich he'd made that morning, an apple, more coffee. The break room had a window that looked out over the former farmland. In summer, the fields grew wild with grass and wildflowers. In winter, which it was now, they were flat and gray under low clouds. Wernfeld was visible in the distance, a cluster of rooftops and a church steeple. Erik could see the road that led to the facility's front gate, usually empty.

Today, a transport vehicle was approaching.

He watched it for a moment, then checked the day's schedule on his phone. There was nothing listed — no supply deliveries, no inspection visits, no personnel transfers. He finished his sandwich, washed his hands, and walked back into the ward.

Marta was already there, standing near the entrance with a tablet in her hand.

"We're receiving a new garden," she said. "Transfer from the Hamburg processing center. She'll be in Bed Thirteen — we're activating the overflow bay."

Erik frowned. The overflow bay was a small room adjoining the main ward, equipped for two additional beds but rarely used. "I wasn't notified."

"It came through this morning. Expedited transfer. She was modified nine days ago."

"Nine days? That's early for transfer. Standard protocol is three weeks minimum post-modification observation before—"

"I'm aware of standard protocol, Erik. Hamburg needed the bed. We have the capacity." Marta's tone was even, final. "Her file is uploading now. Get the bay ready."

Erik got the bay ready.

He worked quickly and methodically — checking the bed's mechanical systems, connecting the monitoring equipment, verifying the IV infrastructure, stocking the bedside supply cart. He set the room's temperature two degrees warmer than the main ward, which he'd found helped newly transferred gardens acclimate. He queued a separate ambient music stream, something softer than the main ward's playlist.

The transport team arrived at 13:20. Two orderlies in Lohengrin-branded scrubs wheeled a gurney through the airlock and into the overflow bay. On the gurney lay a woman.

Erik's first thought was that something had gone wrong with the modification.

The physical changes were present — the skin thickening had begun, most visibly on her torso and upper arms, and her hair was gone. But the progression was clearly incomplete. Her face retained much of its original structure and mobility. Her skin, while beginning to show the characteristic translucence, still had color — a flushed, almost feverish pink. And her eyes, when she opened them as the orderlies transferred her to the bed, were not yet fully clouded. They were hazel, with only the faintest milky haze at the periphery.

She looked at Erik.

He felt something shift in his chest — a physical sensation, like a gear engaging that had been idle for a long time. It was not attraction, not pity, not horror. It was recognition. She looked at him, and he was looked at, and for a moment the clinical framework he had built around his work — the framework of routine and necessity and species-level purpose — flexed under a weight it had not been designed to bear.

Her name, according to the file that appeared on his tablet as the orderlies finished their transfer, was Monika Klemm. Age thirty-one. Modified at the Hamburg processing center on the twelfth of January. Consent status: voluntary.

Her eyes followed him as he connected her IV lines.

And then she made a sound.

It was rough, broken — a scraping exhalation that barely qualified as vocalization. The vocal-cord procedure should have eliminated it entirely. But there it was: a sound, coming from a garden, directed at a human being.

Erik's hands paused on the IV line. He looked at her face and saw something he had not seen in three years of working in the ward.

She was crying.