It
was a bright and sunny day along the shopping boulevard of a typical
Imperial agricultural world. Automated transports whirled by on
anti-grav thrusters, longer distance teleporters flickered into
existence to expel or accept occupants, and random passerbys strolled
the streets.
A young woman, barely a century in age, flaxen hair tied up in a
ponytail with a pale complexion walked through the commotion with a
pip in her step. She had just come of working age and it was her
first day on the job; plus, it was just the job she had always wanted
to try: working in a pet shop!
She deftly weaved through the busy foot traffic and glanced at the
visual assistant that flickered in and out of her peripheral vision,
guiding her to her destination, and as she rounded a corner her
sapphire eyes locked onto the storefront of Trixie’s Exotic
Animals, she had arrived.
Her gait slowed as she passed the display items facing the street,
tiny lizards of various species and sizes, more moderate sized fuzzy
creatures, and a single viciously predatory looking bird of some
kind, or maybe a dragon? She wasn’t quite sure. Regardless, as she
arrived at the door her heart began to race, ever since she was a
little girl she’d always loved animals and here she’d get paid
to
work with them! She was the luckiest girl alive! With that thought,
and a deep breath, she turned the handle.
The
inside of the store was… plain, not in a bad way, but in a sterile
kind of way. Of course it would have to be, she thought, it’s a pet
store. The walls were lined with cages and enclosures, the pets she
had seen on the storefront were merely a fraction of what the store
had to offer. Birds and lizards, aquatic life and flora for the
animals. The shop had it all.
In
the back corner, tucked away almost as an afterthought, stood the
matron of the establishment. Trixie herself, her brunette hair
flowing down to the small of her back, her hands flickered across
some machines as she worked; her focus dedicated entirely to whatever
she was doing.
“Umm…
excuse me, miss Trixie?”
Trixie
twitched in surprise, jumping up a little and turning to her guest.
“Yes?
Hello? What can I help you with, the store is closed for another hour
you know, right?”
“Yes
ma’am I know, I’m Elise, I applied about a week ago on-”
Elise’s
statement was cut short as Trixie’s somewhat surprised facial
express faded, she
strode
over, smiling, and placed her hands on Elise’s shoulders.
“Elise!
Right!” she said as she patted her shoulders and sized her up,
“you’re just in time you know! I need another pair of hands today
and my previous part-timer went off to the capital world to try to
‘make it big’ like some superstar,” she huffed in visible
annoyance. “Here, let me show you the front of the shop.”
Trixie’s
hands unclasped Elise and she motioned her to come with her. The
following hour was a haze for Elise, so many kinds of creatures, so
much information to process, but her virtual assistant recorded it
all for her later use. Which animals were carnivorous, which were
herbivores, how best to care for certain creatures, it was all so
much! And her giddiness grew with each passing fact, this is exactly
what she wanted from a job! Eventually, though, the fun had to end.
“Aaand
that’s it! Every animal in the front of the store! Which is
basically everything we sell to customers live other than food. You
ready for service? The store is going to open soon.”
Elise
relaxed, knowing the tirade of new information had passed.
“Of
course! What do you want me doing today?”
Trixie
smiled, “That’s the spirit! Could you work the counter for the
first half of the day? I was dreading going on a supply run in the
afternoon, but with you along it’ll be easy as cake!”
Elise
nodded and smiled, “Sure thing!” She set up shop behind the
corner counter and synced her virtual assistant to it, before long
customers began filing in and she helped them the best she could.
Elise was a quick study, supplying every tidbit of information she
had absorbed to customers while filing out there orders. A few hours
in a young girl came in and marched straight up to the counter.
“Hello!
Who are you? I’m May! Is auntie Trixie here?”
Elise
looked at the girl with a bit more scrutiny, same blue eyes as
Trixie, the same brown hair, she saw the resemblance.
“Oh,
hello May!” Elise began with a smile that she always gave children,
“I’m Elise, Trixie is in the back, would you like me to go get
her?”
“Yeah!
I wanna pick up my package!”
“Okay
sweetie, I’ll be right back.” Elise headed into the backroom of
the pet shop to ask Trixie about whatever May’s package was and was
greeted by a strange sight. Half the backroom was what she expected,
pallets filled with dry foods, cleaning supplies to keep the front
area sterile, but the other half was filled with incredibly thin
transparent trays
stacked
into towers. Trixie stood at the towers scanning them and doing,
well, Elise wasn’t quite sure, but doing something with intense
concentration.
“Hey
miss Trixie-”
“Please,
Elise, call me Trix” Trixie interjected quickly.
Elise
relaxed and spoke, “There’s a girl named May up front asking for
a package? Also, what are you doing back here? What are these?” she
asked motioning toward the towers.
“Oh,
these? These are my supply of live food for the carnivores, or at
least the ones that prefer live food. They’re called humans.”
“Humans?”
Elise’s eyes darted to the edge of her vision, where her virtual
assistant would tell her about the unknown species only to see it
display…
nothing, that piqued her interest immediately.
“What
are humans?”
“Here,”
Trixie motioned to one of the towers, “take a look.”
Elise
took a few steps forward and bent over to take a look inside. It
looked like… a seething mass of pale movement. There wasn’t
really much to see at this scale so she squinted, her virtual
assistant automatically magnifying her vision. She saw some pale
bipedal creatures, teeming swarms of the things, there must have been
tens of thousands of them, all in various states of action or
inaction. Most lazed around, but some of the creatures were paired
off, connected to each other in various positions and wiggling.
“Umm,
Trixie, what exactly are they doing?”
“Huh,
what do you mean?” Trixie zoomed in with her own assistant, “Oh!
Sorry this is one of the breeding towers” she blushed a tad, “the
ones that are kind of attached to each other are mating, kinda gross,
right?”
Gross indeed, Elise thought, shrugging and casting her glance away from the activity in the enclosure,
“they’re
just animals right? Animals do these sorts of things.”
Trixie
let out a tiny laugh and smiled at Elise. “Now see,” Trixie began
in a more jovial
voice,
“you might think that, but I’ve noticed that they have some
rudimentary intelligence, see look back in the tower, some of them
have started noticing that you’re new here.”
Elise
wordlessly raised an eyebrow at Trix before doing as requested. She
squinted back into the enclosure and, sure enough, more than a
minority had begun to notice the new titaness, some of the ones that
were mating even took notice, stopping in the middle of coitus, their
reproductive parts separating, flopping apart…. gross… to gawk up
at her.
Elise
grimaced, unsuccessfully, trying to mask her disgust at having
watched the creatures copulate. She understood why Trixie kept them
in the back…
“Why
are you breeding them back here?” If Trixie noticed her squeamish
tone of voice she took no notice, continuing on chipper as before.
“Oh
that’s simple,”
Trixie
began, “see I mainly use them as live food for the carnivores
right? And I make sure they all see which trays I take for feed. My
virtual assistant monitors each tray, the tray with the fewest
successful copulations per month
from
each tower I use as feed for the month.” Trixie grinned from ear to
ear as Elise stood perplexed.
“How
does that help?” Elise was dumbfounded.
“Oh
Elise! It’s because they compete! They really go at it the closer
we get to the end of the month too.
More
mating means
more young that can be used as
feed
or reproduce themselves in the long haul. Ever since I discovered
them about half a century ago I’ve saved about twenty percent on live feed!
They can double their population in as little as a year, though...”
Trixie frowned a little before continuing, “they can’t actually
reproduce themselves until their mid-teens, but once they hit that
age I can anti-grav sort them into a new breeding tower and bam! Now
that new tower
is doubling every year.” Trixie was all smiles.
“Huh,
do you really not have any problems with the setup? Like how can you
crowd them so much?” The creatures were absolutely packed in the
trays, most animals wouldn’t put up with it.
“Oh,
uhh yeah,” Trixie shuffled nervously, “I kinda did at the start,
but I found that a ratio one male to about seven or eight breeding
capable females
curbs fighting in the containers to acceptable levels. The males are
really the fighters, they’ll fight over access to females, but when
I balanced the ratios most fights over mates simmered down. They’ll
still bicker over… whatever it is they bicker about, but most
fights aren’t deadly or permanently debilitating, so it’s fine."
Trixie
shifted her gaze from the tower onto Elise, “Actually there is one
thing that I need to fix with them, there’s too much inbreeding,
the initial stock I brought back was only around fifty thousand
individuals, so I need some fresh stock to put some variety back into
the gene pool. That’s what I was planning to do in the afternoon,”
Trixie paused for a moment, “you’re okay taking a teleporter off
world right? It’s a planet I found out beyond the frontier when I
went camping with my boyfriend at the time. He wasn’t too pleased that I found
some ‘stupid mites’ more interesting than him, but he was a bit
of an ass anyway.” Trixie glanced up toward Elise expectedly.
Elise
was… hesitant, but she probably couldn’t squirm her way out of
this one. She loved animals! Big fluffy animals, smaller reptiles,
giant birds! Not… some mites being raised and bred as cheap
protein. But what choice did she have?
“Of
course I’l go!,” Elise said graciously, “it’s my job, after
all.”