Meat

The room was a level four clean lab – thorough decontamination but only a basic filtering of the air. Of course, they were growing food, but the stuff their ancestors ate was brought up in much more unsanitary conditions.

The meat grew on sloped shelves on a rotating conveyor. Each day they would do a spot check on each slab every three hours, and a cell sample at noon and midnight. It was quite a feat to grow muscle and fat cells without any other organs, and every so often some extras growths appeared. They were never allowed to develop into anything – at least not in the main lab.

The Workshop, as the secondary lab was known as, housed meat that was less carefully pruned. One fellow had arranged a set of ribs into some kind of tree-like structure. Partial hearts, kidneys and lungs grew out of the chunks of meat, even though the framework supplied all the needed nutrients and waste removal.

Life wanted to live and that meant the cells wanted to differentiate into all the needed types. In a dark corner, a brain was growing, and it knew where it was.