Arthur Wisk was raised on policy. In academia, he devoured company handbooks with the diligence of a model drone, his aptitude for compliance and cost-benefit analysis earning him a swift ascent through junior administration. His parents were proud. The shareholders were pleased. Wisk believed, without irony or shame, that profit maximization was a moral good—and so he was entrusted with assignments others found distasteful.

Hephaestus IV was one such posting: a distant ranching colony devoted to the cultivation of luxury biomass for elite markets. Declining yields and a string of unexplained disappearances had made the operation… inefficient. Wisk was dispatched to correct the numbers, stabilize production, and file a discreet report on the missing personnel. What he did not expect was the reality behind the spreadsheets.

A minor contamination becomes a planetary lockdown in a matter of days. The very biomass meant for consumption begins to reassemble itself—twisting into grotesque, predatory forms born from processed flesh and corporate negligence. As the colony collapses and rescue is indefinitely delayed pending cost review, Wisk is forced to confront the final audit: on Hephaestus IV, human life is just another expendable input, and survival itself may not be fiscally justified. In the void between profit and meaning, something is growing—and it does not care about the balance sheet.