007: Noctis Body Farm
Officially termed the "Noctis Biological Materials Production Facility", this sprawling complex at the north edge of the Noctis Labyrinthus is unofficially referred to by everyone not on the Skineasthesia memetics management team as the Body Farm. Amid rows and rows of transparent tanks, they build the population of Mars.
Before the Fall, the total population of the Red planet was only four million. Now, it's closer to two hundred million, around half of them biomorphs of some sort. While there was significant immigration to Mars in the wake of the Fall, the vast majority of immigration was done by egocast. While records are imprecise, over the course of ten years, engineers at Skineasthesia and their various subsidiaries and competitors have produced over eighty million morphs, mostly mixed between Mars-adapted Rusters and common-variant Splicers. This is especially impressive because, despite the nanotechnological capabilities of modern healing vats, a complete biomorph takes approximately eighteen months to create. Though estimates vary, the total number of body tanks capable of producing a biomorph is, at a minimum, twelve million body tanks. Most estimates are substantially higher, with the total production capacity estimated at fifty five million body tanks spread across the surface of Mars and Mars orbit. If you count the unmade among Mar's people, a full fifth of the planet's total population is waiting to be decanted in a body tank.
And those tanks are housed at places like the Noctis Body Farm.
The Farm is a company town, with the minor problem that no one can agree on the company. Almost every hypercorp involved is a star somewhere in Skineasthesia's vast constellation, but true to hypercorp fashion, the subsidiaries and subcomponents are largely left to their own devices and the vagaries of the local market. Construction is nearly constant, with a Starware subsidiary dropping down prefab habitats and structures down as fast as it can rent them out to biotech companies looking to start their own production lines. Physical and electronic security handled by two different companies, and law enforcement/arbitration handled by a third. Along with cheap housing and server space for infomorphs, security is provided by a deal between Skineasthesia, Starware, and Fa Jing, making their Facility Committee the de facto government.
But the real work of the facility is morph production. Production domes are squat lenticular constructions, two thirds of a kilometer in diameter, separated into multiple layers, each host to tightly packed tubes of incomplete morphs and nutrient feeds. Most of the time, these facilities are a silent as a tomb, watched over only by indentured watchdogs and quality control techs peering out through an array of cameras. Morphs are separated into batches of hundreds, but on any given day it is unlikely that any batches from a particular facility will be done. Instead, dozens of batches will finish at the same time, and that dome will become a hive of activity as synthetic workers (and their organic overseers) will dismount the tubes containing fresh biomorphs, and send them to testing and post processing facilities. All of these will be an array of contractors, from the watchdogs to the movers to the genetic designers.
By the time they're decanted, market research and genetic technology is likely to be out of date; rather than try to interfere with the development, most prefer to handle this in post processing. Each individual batch is likely to be clones, or near clones with well understood variations in height, hormonal balance, facial structure, racial phenotype, etc. Morphs are re-dunked into special healing vats, and cosmetically altered to match the needs of individual clients, or given updated and patched augmentations. This is where, for example, mesh inserts are added on most civilian model biomorphs, or more in depth cybernetics such as oxygen reserves. A few contractors here specialize in more exotic cybernetics, including reflex boosters and hardened skeletons for military-spec morphs.
A series of smaller separate domes handles testing. Each morph must be sleeved in, run through basic checkups, cycled through medical stasis, and put back down for transport. Some fraction of these, especially for newer designs, may be singled out and more extensively tested for abnormalities.
The Noctis Body Farm is connected by maglev to Olympus City and Noctis-Qianjiao; once tested, morphs are shipped to the space elevator for orbital distribution, or else locally to Noctis-Q, where they may be further routed by train or ground carrier.
The Body Farm isn't the only facility of its type, but it's close to typical of it, and perhaps the most famous due to its proximity to Noctis - most other production facilities are more remote. It's the type of infrastructure target that worries Firewall because of the sheer volume of output, and how the centralized location with decentralized responsibility makes it much easier to subvert. If an Exsurgent were to compromise the lightly-defended production facilities, it could enable mass outbreaks across Martian space.
The Body Farm, and facilities like it, worry companies like Skineasthesia and Fa Jing, too, if for different reasons. The relative scarcity of bodies has thus far made their production immensely profitable; however, body prices have been dropping rapidly since approximately 7AF. In a world where bodies are no longer rare (and with such extensive production facilities, no amount of rarity would be possible to sustain), much of Skineasthesia's relative power and profitability would decline. The corporations, however, are split on how to resolve this. Fa Jing has pushed heavily for planned obsolescence and mandatory genetic service packs, arguing that limited service life enables innovation and more capable morphs for everyone. Skineasthesia, while not officially denouncing Fa Jing, has quietly discouraged the use of GSPs among its major brands. Instead, they've been spending a good deal of time working with Experia and other media corps on ways to promote replacing ones morph with a newer model as a sign of being trendy and well off, as well as ways to make a wider variety of morphs of differing capabilities (with premium capability demanding, of course, premium price).
For the majority of transhumanity, life, one way or another, begins here.
Plot Hooks:
- A series of incidents - habitat sabotage, strange biochemical experimentation, forbidden research - investigated by Firewall reveal strange spontaneous behavior with no apparent connection, until some background research indicates that the morphs of all perpetrators were from the same batch on the Farm.
- Barsoomian activists want to end GSPs - and the easy way is to cut them off at the source. The PCs are hired to infiltrate the Farm and introducing GSP-eliminating code into highly-secured databanks.
- The Farm is a production facility; Skineasthesia's mostly conducts experimental research elsewhere. However, Firewall's scanners have raised some concern that those experimental labs are transferring a great deal of data to the Farm - perhaps they are getting ready for a production run of something new? Even more worryingly, the lab in question has been suspected of buying TQZ artifacts in the past.
