while Penny was in the dorms and always very cheerful which had helped to make a bad situation somewhat bearable.
“Oh yes,” the NeverBreeder nurse said brightly, continuing their conversation. “And of course, we NeverBreeders are stronger and tougher than you humans. Also, we don’t need the whispers to keep us in line, either—we get them in our grow-baths as we develop, which means we never have cause to doubt the perfection of the Glorious Cause or the wisdom of our Glorious Leader.”
“I see,” Penny mumbled. She had often wondered why the Glorious Leader would go to the trouble of creating an army of NeverBreeders at all. With the use of the hypno-whispers, it seemed he could turn anyone to his will. So why not just cut out the middleman and make an army of hypnotized breeders?
But now it made sense. The NeverBreeders might be small but they were incredibly tough and unflinchingly loyal. They didn’t even seem to mind the idea of being recycled—it was just a part of their circle of life, apparently.
Just then, as they traversed the seemingly endless labyrinth of hallways, a voice spoke over the intercom.
“Nurse Zoone,” it said. “Please report to exam room seventeen at once.”
“Oh dear!” The NeverBreeder nurse who had been leading Penny stopped short. “That’s me, so it is! Look, dearie, can you just wait here for a moment? I’m sure whatever they want it won’t take long.”
“Oh, uh, sure.” Penny nodded. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“That’s sweet of you, dearie. I’ll be back in a flash.” And Nurse Zoone hurried off, leaving Penny standing there in the middle of the corridor.
After she had turned a corner and was out of sight, Penny sighed and looked around herself. Though she’d lived in the dormitories here at the Breeding and Conception Center for quite some time, she’d never been allowed to explore at all. Everywhere she went had been as part of a group with Mother Toone and a bunch of the NeverBreeder guards surrounding them.
Curiously, she looked down the deserted hallway. It was lined with doors with various labels on them. Thanks to the translation bacteria she’d been given on the Mother Ship, Penny was able to read the alien language.
Transcription, read one door. Neurotransmology, read another. Fibroscanning, said a third.
Huh, wonder what the hell that is? Penny thought, as she walked past the door. And what else do they have down here?
She decided it couldn’t hurt to explore a little, while she was here. If Nurse Zoone came back and asked what she was doing, she could always say she was looking for a bathroom.
She wandered further down the hallway and saw a door marked Baths. Putting her ear to the door, Penny heard a strange gurgling-whispering sound. Well that was weird.
Her curiosity getting the better of her, she tried the door’s latch and found that it was open. Slowly, keeping an eye on the empty corridor in case the NeverBreeder nurse came back, she pushed open the door.
The room was completely full of tanks—at least a hundred of them. The gurgling sound was coming from them. As for the whispers, she wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but they sounded suspiciously like the hypno-whispers she heard from her pillow each night.
But it was the tanks that drew and held her attention. There were so many of them and each of them was big enough to hold either a large child or…
“Or a NeverBreeder,” Penny whispered to herself. Because floating in the cloudy liquid in each of the hundred or so tanks was an orange body. And all of the bodies she saw were in various stages of growth.
In one tank she saw a naked, fully formed NeverBreeder who looked almost ready to come out and be a functioning member of the Compound. In others she saw smaller bodies, still obviously developing.
In the last tank she looked in, a baby, who appeared to be a newborn, was floating. The poor thing was just beginning to have an orange tinge to its delicate skin but already it was clear what it would become, because there were no genitals between its legs and no hair on its head.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Penny whispered to it. “I wonder who they took you from?”
What breeder woman here in the Compound had that little infant taken from her womb when it was only three months into its normal gestation? And would she even know her child when it emerged as a fully formed NeverBreeder and went