In times like these, stem cells were unusually hard to come by and were considered a luxury on par with diamonds when it came to trade between the colonies. In the right hands it could be a pathway towards a breakthrough or a guarantee for survival and for Hyperion. It was a wellspring of potential to develop artificially crafted proteins without the necessity for now extinct megafauna. The first time Shiloh saw anything of sort was from a wet specimen which at this point had become synonymous with Hyperion. It was pretty symbolic — a two faced bovine head cleft in two reminiscent of the god Janus. The thing must have been well over a hundred years old with tissue frayed by age and formalin and the interiors grayed to a sickly alien color of flesh devoid of any suggestions of prior life and denied the grace of decay. It was backlit showing the innards, the basking light highlighting its slightly inhumane glory.
Essentially when you are exposed to things like these you begin to accept them as a norm like an imprinted duckling setting its sights on its mother. The view becomes normalized so does death and artificiality. The animal of the human psyche recoils at the sight, unaccustomed to this reality but the apparent world tells a different story. The inherent invertebrate softness becomes squashed out by the uncanny and the natural order grows increasingly disrupted until it reaches an apex of entropic dissolution. When unregulated, true scientific discovery does not care about form, but it cares about potential. From what Shiloh could survey it was entirely possible to make something almost from scratch — something almost alive. They could not be fazed by a gallery of undulating mass, something equally as pale as the calf and almost if not more biomorphic.
More lifelike than life itself, bearing every semblance and suggestion of the natural yet its origins being entirely man-made. There were past forewarning about man interfering with nature, but at this stage it seemed like a natural step of the process. What was not used was swiftly disposed of, yet in their gut Shiloh could not help but feel like it was deeply wicked. An animal sense of unease pushing onto the precipices of genuine fascination.
It’s a beautiful world full of white light and unconscious angels. They could map out every pathway and winding corridor in their head like a pyramid receding down to the tomb. Some would say it was the most life for miles. A carved out sanctuary for intelligence with nothing but a barren wasteland above only wetted by the rot of what had been thrown away.
You never forget the stench.
