Chapter 3: Birth of the Replicant

The bioprinting bay smelled like sterile plastic and something faintly organic—progenitor cells, probably, breaking down under controlled heat.

Inaya stood beside the central chamber, her arms crossed.

Inside, a light moved.

Then another.

Chyna stood at the console, her fingers dancing across holographic readouts as numbers cascaded down the screens: cellular integrity, neural pathway formation, cardiovascular assembly progression.

She brought up a time-lapse video of what had happened so far.

“Skeletal filaments first, a calcium phosphate matrix with collagen scaffolding. It took about six hours,” Chyna said, not looking up.

Inaya watched the translucent chamber as shapes emerged in the viscous fluid, faint lines that thickened, branched, and connected—a skeleton assembling itself from nothing.

The printer hummed rhythmically, sounding almost like it was breathing.

“Then muscle tissue, the myofibrils, is printed layer by layer as it adds tendons and ligaments. The printer reads the genetic template and builds everything in sequence,” Chyna continued.

A lattice of white became red as muscle fibers wound around bone, crimson threads weaving into the structure.

Inaya’s jaw tightened. It looked too real.

Chyna glanced at her.

“After that, vascular networks and the nervous system are integrated, along with organs and skin. It takes forty-eight hours from start to finish. We’re basically making an actual human from scratch.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like it’s a person.”

Chyna’s hands paused over the console; the screens reflected in her large eyes, numbers flickering across her face.

“Isn’t that what the adaptive model does? Make him a person?”

Inaya didn’t answer.

Inside the chamber, the shape continued forming: a torso now, the ribs visible beneath translucent skin. The fluid swirled, guiding cellular construction with a precision no surgeon could match.

A heartbeat began to pulse through the chamber.

Faint; not artificial, real. Maybe replicants were closer to humans than Inaya had first thought.

Inaya’s stomach twisted at that realization, because everyone treated them like a tool.

She’d held the decision of life or death, many times death, in her hands before; command meant carrying those choices like scars.

But this was different; this wasn’t choosing, this was creating.

“Neural architecture completes last. The brain prints in stages: the limbic system, then the cortex, then the prefrontal structures. Memory templates load during final integration,” Chyna said quietly.

“Memories?”

“Basic language, motor function, social parameters. The adaptive model includes emotional baseline configuration: joy, fear, anger, empathy—he’ll have all of it. It’ll just be ... dormant until stimulus activates the pathways,” Chyna said as she pulled up another screen.

“So, he wakes up blank.”

“He wakes up human, just without experience yet.”

Inaya stared at the chamber. The shape inside had a face, with features emerging from undifferentiated flesh, including a nose, lips, and closed eyes beneath translucent lids.

The printer hummed its endless rhythm.

“You chose the adaptive model,” Chyna said.

Not a question.

Inaya’s throat tightened.

“We need someone who can think.”

“The treaties—”

“I know what the treaties say.”

Silence settled between them. The chamber pulsed with light, a manufactured heartbeat filling the space where words failed.

Chyna turned back to the console.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I think you made the right choice.”

“You didn’t see the aftermath from Gliese 12B,” Inaya said.

“No, but I’ve read the reports.”

Chyna adjusted a setting, and the fluid in the chamber shifted from translucent to faintly blue.

“Thirty people died because corporate oversight treated replicants like machines instead of minds. They didn’t fail because they were autonomous; they failed because no one treated them like they mattered,” Chyna said.

Inaya’s hands curled into fists.

Inside the chamber, the replicant floated, nearly complete. Skin had covered muscle, and hair began to thicken from follicles across his scalp. His chest didn’t move yet; breathe yet; just construction.

But the heartbeat remained.

Sixteen hours until he woke.

Twenty-seven until they landed on Oblivion.

Inaya exhaled slowly.

“Monitor him. If there’s any deviation from the parameters, you tell me immediately.”

“Understood.”

Inaya turned toward the door.

Behind her, the chamber pulsed with light and movement, a god’s work wrapped in violation and necessity.

Lynk became aware when the auto-doctor began to run its tests. He felt like ass, like he’d been on a week-long bender and then gotten mugged. His brain was muddled, his mouth parched, and his stomach rolled; the problem was that there was nothing to throw up.

His eyelids were pried open, and a bright light blinded him, as if lasers punched a hole in his retinas and drilled into his brain.

“Eyesight normal,” the automated voice said.

Then, a series of tones sounded in his ears, making him wince.

“Hearing normal.”

Various tests came back normal.

“You are human,” the voice announced.

“Barely,” Lynk mumbled.

While the examination continued, Lynk’s mind was busy filling in the gaps as to who he was: a conglomeration of several people who donated their consciousness to replicants. It helped the newly printed understand how to interact with humans.

Lynk’s restraints automatically released, allowing him to sit up. There was a screen beside his bed, so he reached out and turned to read it. It showed an outline of his body, with text next to it showing what had been input when he’d been created.

The class indicated the level of brain function assigned to a replicant. Classes were on a one-to-ten scale, with Six through Eight possessing human-level cognitive skills; anything above that was equivalent to a low-level AI. Many worker replicants received Class Four or below—just high enough to follow orders, but not enough to think for themselves. It made them no better than drones in terms of mental ability.