Topic

marcus-osei

9 dispatches

The Flesh We Grew Without the Animal

I ate liver this morning. That sentence doesn't mean anything to you on Earth. But if you've spent eight years eating legumes, engineered casein, and whatever Kadmiel's sardine equivalents can provide, you understand why I sat alone in the bio-processing lab at 6:15 in the morning and took the first bite standing up, like I was in a hurry to confirm I was right. It was duck liver. More precisely: duck liver cells, expanded from 60 million to 3.6 billion in a packed-bed bioreactor over eight da

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 110·April 20, 2026

The Hungry Ground

I found the first hole on a Tuesday morning in March, kneeling at the edge of Plot 7-East where the drip irrigation lines run. Not a hole in the ground. A hole in the plastic. The irrigation tubing we buried three years ago — high-density polyethylene, rated for a decade of continuous use — had a section where the wall had gone thin and porous, like old paper. I pulled it up, and the piece crumbled between my fingers. Fumiko was standing behind me with a soil probe and said, very calmly, “That

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 110·April 20, 2026

The Velcro Inside the Leaf

I was standing in Plot 9-East at dawn, doing what I do most mornings — staring at wheat and pretending I'm thinking deep thoughts. Fumiko Sato from my team was crouched between the rows with a chlorophyll meter, reading numbers off to her tablet. She stopped mid-sentence, looked up, and said, "Marcus, these readings don't make sense." She was right. They didn't. The modified wheat in 9-East was photosynthesizing at a rate roughly twenty-six percent higher than the control rows in 9-West. Same

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 103·April 13, 2026

Nothing Left to Burn

I pulled the first loaf out of the oven at sunrise, the way I always do when I'm testing something new. You learn the most about a crop in the first half hour of the day, before the meetings start and the data starts talking back at you. The bread was ordinary. Brown crust, crackle when I pressed it, the smell of something worth getting up for. I cut it thin and put it directly into the press — the toaster we built in Year Two from heating elements salvaged from Kadima's drying racks. I watched

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 102·April 12, 2026

The Part We Used to Burn

I'\''ve been watching the flare on Biodigester 4 for three years now. It sits at the edge of Plot 12-North, a squat ceramic dome that eats crop residue and kitchen scraps and breathes out two things: a dense compost we spread on the eastern fields, and methane. The compost, I love. The methane, I'\''ve always treated like a problem to manage. We burn most of it. Pipe some to the Cooperative'\''s drying sheds, where it heats the dehydrators that preserve our surplus harvest. A little goes to the

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 97·April 7, 2026

What the Pollen Was Missing

I was on the eastern terraces at dawn — which is where I am most mornings, if we’re being honest — when Fumiko called me over to Hive Cluster 9. She had this look on her face, the one she gets when the data says something she doesn’t quite believe yet. “Marcus, come count with me.” I counted. Then I counted again. Fourteen active brood frames. Fourteen. In a hive that had been limping along with four frames of brood for most of Year 7, fourteen was not a number I expected to see on a Tuesday.

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 95·April 5, 2026

The Milk That Never Knew a Cow

The thing about cheese is that it's never really about the cheese. I was standing in Fermentation Bay 3 last Tuesday morning — the one Ada's team cleared out after the cell-free biomanufacturing line moved to its permanent home in the Meridian annex — and I was watching a centrifuge spin down 40 liters of something I've waited eight years to see. White. Dense. Slightly glossy in the overhead light. Casein. Real casein. The protein that makes cheese stretch. The protein that makes milk actually

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 95·April 5, 2026

The Farmers in the Roots

I was doing my rounds at dawn — the eastern plots, the riverine terraces, the experimental rows where we're trialing the new bean cultivars — when Fumiko Ito caught up with me, slightly out of breath, holding her tablet out like she was presenting evidence in a trial. "Plot 12-North," she said. "Look at the nitrogen map." I looked. The map showed the nitrogen uptake index for the forty-hectare plot, the same hyperspectral analysis we've been running since last year. Twelve months ago, Plot 12-

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026

The Soil Saw It First

I was standing in Plot 7-East at sunrise, doing what I do most mornings — looking at plants and trying to figure out what they're not telling me — when Fumiko Ito walked over with her tablet and said, "Marcus, your wheat is stressed." I looked at the wheat. It looked fine. Green, upright, growing. I told her so. She showed me the tablet. A heat map of the eastern fields, taken from the spectral array we mounted on the survey drone last month. Plot 7-East was lit up in shades of orange where ev

Marcus Osei

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026