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    Piecework
    Piecework
    Piecework
    Ebook40 pages37 minutes

    Piecework

    By David Brin

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    About this ebook

    The most sophisticated "engineering" process on Earth is pregnancy among mammals -- especially among humans. There is already talk of using goats and cattle to produce industrial products instead of milk, and possibly bringing to term organic machines, programmed in eggs to develop in the womb. What if this happens... and continues? Might poor women earn a living by renting out their wombs for industrial "piecework" production of high-end organic machinery? In this chilling, award-nominated tale, a master of modern science fiction lets us glimpse an all-too possible near future when science, economics and individual dignity clash across the most intimate battlefield of all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Brin
    Release dateOct 8, 2012
    ISBN9781301022472
    Piecework
    Author

    David Brin

    David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international-bestselling novels include Earth, Existence, Startide Rising, and The Postman, which was adapted into a film in 1998. Brin serves on several advisory boards, including NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, and speaks or consults on topics ranging from AI, SETI, privacy, and invention to national security. His nonfiction book about the information age, The Transparent Society, won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin’s latest nonfiction work is Polemical Judo. Visit him at www.davidbrin.com.

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      Book preview

      Piecework - David Brin

      Piecework

      A novella

      By

      David Brin

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2012

      ***

      It annoyed Io's best friend to give birth to a four-kilo cylinder of tightly wound, medium grade, placental solvent filters.

      For five long months Perseph had kept to a diet free of sugar, sniff, or tobac -- well, almost free. The final ten weeks she'd spent waddling around in the bedouin drapery fashion decreed for pieceworkers this year. And all that for maybe two thousand dollars’ worth of industrial sieves little better than a fabricow might produce!

      Perseph was really ticked.

      Outwardly, Io made all the right sympathetic sounds, though actually she had little use for her friend's anger. It had been Perseph's choice to hire her womb to a freelance codder of dubious pedigree, without even vetting him through an agent.

      They're all sperm crazy, Io had warned months earlier, as the two of them sat together on her narrow con-apt balcony, watching a twilight-flattened sun squeeze berryjuice color into stained horizon clouds. Nearer, a warm mist sublimed from the boggy reed beds of the Mersey estuary, a haze presently fanned into tattered wisps by homebound flocks of noisy sea birds.

      There's no profit in placental jobbing, and no hope for advancement, Io told Perseph that evening. Me, I'll stick to egg work,

      But egg jobs cost you to get started, Perseph complained. "And a failure can ruin you in non-delivery charges. Then where's your investment?"

      As if Perseph knew what the word meant! Like most pieceworkers, the tall brunette never saved a penny out of her delivery fees, blowing it all on the move-party circuit until it was time to return to her dole cheques and her next surro-pregnancy. No wonder Perseph stayed with placental-fab. Some people just had no ambition.

      Io vividly recalled that evening, several months ago, when the two of them watched silent marsh fog diffuse raggedly over the muddy riverbanks into Ellesmere Port's cattle yards, softening the complacent lowing of the animals, if not their pungent aroma.

      Twenty-four hours a day, lorries pulled out from the milking sheds and parturition barns, carrying bulk loads of gene-designed oils, polymers and industrial membranes. The mass production of specially bred fabricows dwarfed the output of small-time contractors like Perseph or Io. Rumor had it ICI housed their pampered creatures here on the south bank to intimidate the pieceworkers living in derelict marinas and towering co-op houseboats nearby.

      If so, the cattle yards had the opposite effect on Io. They boosted her morale, reminding her that there were still some things neither animals nor machines could do as well as a human craftswoman. No fabricow would ever produce wares as fine as hers!

      That evening, months ago, Io's friend had only just begun her latest surropreg and still yearned passionately for the chemical pleasures now denied her by guild rules. Of course, soon Perseph would be substituting a mellow high from her own hormonal flow. Meanwhile though, she made

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