Leading Ladies Anthology [FEATURED STORY]

@LeighWStuart - Strawberry Pickers

Strawberry Pickers by Leigh W. Stuart LeighWStuart

Ch. 2 Monsters

This excerpt begins as Lina finishes her work gathering strawberries in one of the rooftop greenhouses. She then goes to her second job cleaning a laboratory.

Sometimes Lina had to ask herself why the dark thing in the last cage scared her the most out of all the monstrosities in the lab. Scared and fascinated. Did she see something of herself in its claws and wide eyes, trapped in the steel and glass?

Whenever she was there, its eyes would shine from the shadows of its cage, never blinking as far as she could tell. The only time it closed its eyes was when she set a strawberry in the food slot.

The strawberry pickers were done for the day. With a last sharp pinch from the inspector, she hurried to the platform. She had plenty of time since this building was on a direct metro rail link to Genieworks. That building also happened to house a strawberry greenhouse where her team was sent a couple times a month, and was how she found her second job. On those days, she had time to sit down.

Genieworks: Miracles in Genetic Enhancement. Your wish is our command. Rich high-rankers and stuffy government officials with homeland defense contracts only ever saw the sparkling entryway, the pale blues and greens of the upper hallways, smiling scientists in crisp white overcoats, not a speck of blood or any of their experiments' agony on them. Visitors breathed in the filtered air and perfume of modified lilac, with maybe a hint of antiseptic. Ah, yes, the building was kept very clean. The evening she had started there, she went through the main lobby on accident. That's how she knew that the smells and colors changed as you descended to the roots of the building.

It was always worse the lower you went. A universal truth if ever there was one in Pharm City.

She let herself through the security checks, her electronic chip beeping her along. The guards hardly glanced as she passed by, she was half invisible to them—as much a human being as the mops and vacs she pushed around on the floor.

Non-Viable Trials and Holding. She buzzed herself in. Two lab assistants working late turned to see who it was and immediately continued their angry discussion. She overheard some as she went in and out of the cloakroom and janitor closet.

"...can't be serious. Without new subjects for testing, this project grinds to a halt."

"It's a question of money. The gov defense contract is drying up and no more money means no more testing."

"They're the ones who wanted super-soldiers in the first place!"

"You know what they say..."

She got the elo-vac first, pausing to stretch her arms up and relieve the aching in her back before leaving the closet.

"...again, some of us will be transferred."

"Transferred? We should be promoted. If formula-E68U shows promise on new subjects it's because of our breakthroughs down here on #248."

She pressed on the wide vac and began sweeping, the low hum of elo technology drowning out the assistants at the far end of the desk area.

A few minutes later and several feet closer to the men she hear the word 'terminate.' Her ears pricked.

"What I don't get is that we have to advance termination of a living non-viable subject. It's because of it we isolated the longevity exon," the younger assistant said. "It still has a lot of testing potential for the defense program. It survives everything we do to it. Sure, get rid of the other subjects, but why it first?"