Welcome, welcome, nice to see you all, children are our future and so on and so on and on! Hah hah hah, you know, you’re nearly as big as some of the line workers! Don’t tell Eddie I said that, he’s touchy about his height.
Welcome! To the Isomorphics Industries primary human factory! You’ve all had a chance to get your water bottle, you’re all now getting your last chance to get your water bottle, and soon we’ll be going inside, where I hope you’ll have brought your water bottle because we’re going on a bit of a stroll and being thirsty sucks.
Questions? No? Yes? Maybe? You!
Why yes, this is the original human factory. Sort of! Ship of Theseus and all that, right? The old buildings have been renovated right down to the foundations something like four times – the last was just a little while ago – and thank goodness for that because man, this was NOT a big operation when it started. Back in the day it was just some crazy kids who left the australopithecine shops behind with big dreams and stupid ideas and no way to tell one from the other! Back in the day we could barely keep a population stable through a minor ice age! Back in the day… ah, but we’re not here just to talk about that. We’re here to talk about the now, the new stuff!
So let’s get into it!
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This is the main factory floor. It’s a little overwhelming on first glance, but remember, everything here has been refined systemically over the entire lifetime of Isomorphics Industries. There’s no casual whim to the layout, and a lot of hidden meaning! See, if you look down there – just down there, right, no no, to the left, I meant ‘correct’ when I said ‘right’ – you can see the culture vats.
That’s the most important part. And if you’re familiar with other organism production models, you might be raising your eyebrows – and rightly so! What about the genetics? What about the cells? What about the biology? And yeah sure, that’s important, without it you don’t have any humans. But without culture you don’t have any humans either, you just have some really sad and useless apes with really sad and useless hair.
So yeah, that’s why you can see an entire full-steam full-scale biological matter facility all the way over THERE….but the central factory floor is culture vats. We cook up human bodies the same way we did all the way back then, from toenail to brainstem, but the culture is where the real magic happens. It burbles and boils and bubbles over itself and under itself and through itself and by the time it’s done it isn’t.
That’s why we’ve got a few zillion varieties and all of them are works in progress. You can never tell when you’ll be just standing there checking a perfectly tepid pool of mainstream so-and-so and then it belches out a little offshoot and instead of falling back into the blend like the last sixteen thousand did it heaves itself out of the pod and starts trying to run away. And as you can see by the scoops and nets, we believe in preparing for being unprepared.
Also note the protective suits. Cultures are fascinating things, but sudden immersion without adequate preparation and study can be something of a shock. That’s why all the hair on my right arm is prematurely grey.
Is everyone still good? Need more water? I mean it’s too late for that, , but do you need more anyways? No? Maybe? Yes?
Good! On we march!
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This is the baking area. After you’ve gotten some good generic human biology and steeped it in whatever culture you’ve got to hand, you don’t want it coming out half-baked. You want to make sure it soaks down there and spreads evenly, without crusting or puddling or forming reactionary clots – that sort of thing can shut down the whole system. Ideally you want a smooth, flowing texture that is firm while retaining malleability. The elasticity WILL fade over time, but a proper mix is the difference between losing it when the human’s forty and losing it when the human’s fourteen. Nobody likes a forty-year-old teenager.
You like the lights? So do they. Baby humans love to look and reach at things, so we give them some stars to reach for. It seems small and silly, but when we removed it we got all kinds of weird outcomes and it made things a bit worse so we brought it back. That’s the difference between a mature, sophisticated industry like human production and more fringe stuff: we’ve had time to try all the crazy stuff and find out what was and wasn’t crazy and which crazy was good crazy or bad crazy. You don’t have to have crazy for it to work, but it helps.
Do you need water? You can’t have water in the baking area. It’s okay.
Look at this little fella, bubbling away. You can see he’s just about ready to go; his eyes are following trains of thought around the room and he’s got robust enough knees and elbows to crawl around and explore implications. Soon he’ll be replicating his own memes! Adorable, just adorable when they’re this size. Don’t put your fingers too close; they bite.
***
This is shipping. Not shipping and receiving, just shipping. Like most earth industries we’re working with old material here; it’s not quite a closed system but we don’t import much that isn’t sunlight and that more or less runs itself.
I see a raised hand. You’re about to ask a question about solar senescence, aren’t you? You think that’s clever, don’t you? Well, we know about it, and look, it’s not as big a deal as you think it is. You know how long it took the bottom to fall out of the nonavian dinosaur industry? Two hundred million years. You know how long we’ve been working on humans here? Couple million or so, I forget. Point is, we’re not going to go worrying about far-fetched sun-swallows-the-planets doomsdays when those doomsdays are a couple dinosaur-spans away from us, okay? Okay? Stop looking at me like that!
Sheesh.
Anyways we load ‘em up and take them down to their habitats from here. As you can see we’ve gotten pretty good at space conservation. It’s all down to the elbows; nobody really thinks about the elbows. You gotta make the elbows fit and then everything else follows.
Don’t bring water in here. Human reproduction already involves a lot of water and mess at the far end; we don’t need to add to it. Please. You can’t have more water.
What d’you mean ‘they all look the same’ first of all wow that’s pretty bigoted and second look, I TOLD you we were using culture as a driver here. The basic biology is a bit inbred; I think the farthest related any of these guys can be from each other is something like eighteenth-cousin-removed. We had a small operation at the start, I told you that too! Quit being so picky! Are you plants? If you are, that’s illegal – you can’t work as a secret shopper when you’re underage and this isn’t even shopping this is a school tour group!
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Okay.
Okay I’m feeling better. Sorry about that. I could use a drink. Not water. You can’t have any water.
One last thing
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Gift shop time!
Here, you can have a mug! You can have a bottle! You can even fill them with complimentary water, you can have water again, isn’t that nice? And all products in this gift shop are made with recycled atmospheric human carbon, so in a way you’re helping maintain a viable biosphere for them – not that they need it right it’s just a rough patch, little bumps and jolts that mean a system’s healthy and working fine hah hah hah. No you can’t put your hands up, too late, should’ve done that during the tour! No more questions! It’s all fine!
Thank you for visiting the Isomorphics Industries primary human factory! If any of you are reporters I hope that some of you are cops because that would have been illegal trespassing and we’ve got lawyers! There are no problems here, and we are responsible, serious, careful stewards of a single small segment of the biomass on a living planet whose parts all work in harmony by far-sighted industry regulation and careful regulation, AS WE HAVE REPEATEDLY TOLD YOU ALL.
Now get out of here. And don’t you take that water with you without paying!