Todd places the eye cover on Nyx’s eyes and leads her a short distance within the building into an elevator. The elevator takes a bit as it descends and then Nyx feels the chill, not a creepy feeling literally a very cold room. “You can remove the eye cover” says Todd and as Nyx removes it, she can see a large hive of aquariums, hundreds of them and in each aquarium there is a little naked pixie in some transparent fluid. Each of the pixies has a wire going from her head to what appears to be a massive octopus, a supercomputer filled with wires.
“This is where the magic happens” he tells her. “The little bodies are vat grown into maturity in just two months and their minds are rapidly developed by virtual reality. Basically, they all think that they live in a forest in France. It is beautiful really just like the real thing. We care very much for their welfare. We used genetic engineering to make them exceptionally smart and it enabled us to run the simulation at such a speed that these pixies live full and complete lives in just two months. In many ways, they are considerably smarter than you and I.
We are one of several farms like this that feeds Seattle’s vampires and in response the number of vampire related metahuman deaths is ever declining. The pixies are engineered to live just a few months so in a way, they would die one way or the other, and we use BTL chips to preserve the illusion until the very moment where they are eaten. They live full lives, but the end of these lives is well unpleasant - but old age is never pleasant.
They are quite the delicacy for vampires, and a single one costs 10k, it can sustain a vampire for 1-3 months depending on its lifestyle. Basically, middle class vampires can sustain themselves just for these delicacies, though the rich buy more because well... they can.“
