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hills above the Pajaro Valley to touch Noogenics’s thousand square kilometers of biovat domes. The company is a heavyweight politicorp, with production facilities similar to this in countries all around the world. Six years ago he started out as a vat rat, wading through growth ponds of putrescent ecotectural sludge in a biosuit. Now Rigo is a systech in charge of his own crew of vat rats, monitoring the growth of gengineered plants designed by various ecotectural engineering firms. With any luck, his experience at Noogenics will get him into an ecotectural engineering program. He’s already taken a few online introductory classes in organic chemistry, biostructural design, and mechanosynthesis, and applied for an educational grant from Noogenics. All he has to do now is come up with enough credit to pay for half of his education, and the politicorp will cover the other half. Easier said than done.
    Most of his team is already in the locker room, stripping off morning sprayons and slipping into biosuits, by the time he arrives. The mood is upbeat, jovial. Rigo likes to think that it’s more than the pherions they’re dosed with to enhance productivity, foster teamwork, and improve morale. He likes to believe his crew is held together by a sense of camaraderie, an esprit de corps, that would exist even without the bond created by the pherions.
    “Hey, bro,” Rigo says, giving each one a slap on the back or punch in the arm—Antoine, Naguib, Luis, TomE and Hsi-Tang. Even Claribel and Rana, when they join the group from the women’s locker room. He treats them like any other brother—no easing up or lowered expectations—and likes to think they appreciate the equality. That goes for the whole team. Give everyone the same respect, and in return they’ll respect not only him but each other.
    Rigo dons a biosuit. He doesn’t have to wear a suit, but still likes to get his hands dirty, muck it up with the rest of them on a daily basis. It helps keep him in touch with his team, lets them know he’s not above any of them.
    “Rig, you’re looking a little wrung out,” Naguib says good-naturedly as they head out to their vat buildings.
    “Yeah,” Rana says, chiding him. “I’d say those
cojones
are drooping a little.”
    “You’re just jealous,” Rigo quips, slipping easily into the locker room banter.
    “Fuck that noise,” Claribel, the resident same-sex advocate, says.
    “Well, I wish I’d gotten some,” Luis says. “My nuts are definitely not sagging from fatigue.”
    Antoine grins. “Those aren’t
cojones
you got, dude, those are udders. You ought to visit a dairy farm.”
    “Or a milkmaid,” Hsi-Tang says, getting into the act.
    One big, happy family, with none of the fuckedupness that comes with actually being related. Together they’re responsible for ten vats. The project they’re currently assigned to involves the cultivation of warm-blooded plants. As a result, they work in sub-zero temperatures. Their biosuits contain piezoelectrics that generate heat through movement. The worst part, aside from the ass-freezing cold, is the dark. For three months now, they’ve been working in low-light conditions. It’s depressing. With only a few hours of sunshine in the morning, at lunch, and after work, it’s like living in eternal night. Could be worse. At least they don’t have to work in zero-g. The next phase of the project involves the modification of these same warm-blooded plants for the colonization of Mars and big, ice-covered asteroids in the Kuiper belt. Noogenics and Xengineering, the ecotectural firm that designed the plants, have already snagged a Kuiper belt comet and brought it into high-earth orbit, where alpha-phase testing and training will take place to see if warm-blooded plant settlements are even feasible.
    They pod out to their assigned vat buildings, riding the monorail between geodesic domes, smooth opalescent hemispheres, dodecahedrons, and diamond-paned greenhouses, all of