A typical shift for Jared, a lab technician working at a ChimeraTech breeding facility. He oversees the breeding of genetically-engineered catgirls during their heat. It's a hard job, but it comes with perks. Very dark content rating, 5.5k words.
Content warnings/tags: dubious consent; slavery (of genetically engineered humanoids); medical kink; forced pregnancy/insemination; hormone treatments for fertility purposes; anal; careless use
Jared had scored his job as a night tech at the ChimeraTech breeding facility nearly a year ago, and he could still barely believe his luck.
ChimeraTech was one of the biggest companies on the modern market. Ever since the regulations had been put into place regarding genetically-engineered human hybrids--outlining exactly what thresholds on intelligence and lifespan were necessary for them to be legally pets and not people, and what ratio of human DNA was required for them to be legally fuckable--and ChimeraTech had demonstrated its ability to walk that thin line with its patented SynthDNA process, Chimera-brand pets had become a household name.
Not that every household had one, of course. Genetically-engineered pets were exclusive and expensive. Even the common breeds, the catgirls and dogfolk, typically cost as much as a small yacht. Exotic Chimeras--leopard-men with their dazzling spots, and the alien-looking bird chimeras with their colorful feathers and decorative wings--were only affordable to the super-rich, bred in very small batches and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a down-payment just to reserve an appointment to look at a litter.
Of course, ChimeraTech offered convenient payment plans, allowing customers to pay them even more money in the form of interest for the privilege of spreading out the cost of their new pet over ten or fifteen years; considering that the average Chimera pet had a natural lifespan of thirty-five years, it didn't seem that bad a deal to many people. Some had even managed to turn a profit, re-selling early model pets with unique quirks that had been designed out of later generations.
Those rare cases of profit had ignited a craze, people convinced that they were somehow making an investment now by taking out a loan for a pet. Some customers had even tried to pressure ChimeraTech into releasing sexually intact pets to them, with all sorts of excuses--"I just can't imagine him without his balls", "I want to fuck her while she's in heat", "I don't believe in spaying something humanoid," and so on--but really all they wanted was a chance to try and breed off-brand Chimera pets themselves, to make some money.
There was no chance of it. Purchased pets remained in Chimera housing until the age of maturity, only permitted supervised visits with their legal owners. On their eighteenth birthday, they were put under for a quick spay or neuter, and only then were they sent out into the world.
The only place on earth where Chimera pets could be bred were in the highly exclusive ChimeraTech breeding facilities. Facilities like the one where Jared worked.
A lot of people he talked to assumed that "breeding" was a kind of euphemism. They asked him if the Chimera-brand pets were created in petri dishes, grown in test tubes or artificial wombs.
It was a reasonable question, especially when it came to the catgirls, which was what Jared's facility happened to work on.
There were, after all, no catboys--at least not released to the public; occasionally, a freak genetic slip would turn up a boy in a litter of girls, and they were typically held back for study. But the genetics that ChimeraTech had designed for the catgirls was meant to only produce females, because there just wasn't much demand for catboys, and they tended to be a bit too aggressive for the standard pet market. An owner might reasonably suspect a risk of a bite or scratch from a man patterned with leopard-spots, but not from one with the innocent white ears and fluffy tail of a normal housecat.
So it was understandable how people might struggle to imagine natural breeding for an all-female synthetic species. When his friends and family asked, Jared kept his answer simple: "Artificial insemination."
It was enough of an answer for them, typically. They didn't want to know more. That was fine by Jared; though he hadn't read the employee handbook cover-to-cover, he assumed there were certain realities of the breeding process that ChimeraTech wouldn't want him to spread around, and there were some details of his job that he just didn't want to discuss with his aunt over Thanksgiving dinner.
The reality looked like this: a stable of dozens of catgirls, each one approved for breeding by a ChimeraTech genetic specialist, each one allowed to mature into womanhood intact. They lived in comfortable little dormitory-style rooms; many had a roommate, a best friend who they were pair-bonded to. Others were kept alone, if they were too territorial or insecure to tolerate another girl in their personal space, but they all socialized together before and after their mealtimes.
They were provided with entertainment appropriate for their interests and intelligence--easy arts and crafts projects, simple board games, motorized cat-toys to chase, and daytime television. Plenty of good food to keep them at a healthy breeding weight, and routine exercise in fenced-in courtyards so they could get sun and fresh air without risking abduction or an altercation with wildlife. It was a very humane set-up.
Since breeding was only meant to occur within a ChimeraTech facility, their reproductive cycles weren't entirely self-starting, and they required regular hormone injections. That was a big part of Jared's job. The first thing he did when he started his shift around eight PM was check the list of which catgirls were due for their doses--hormonal maintenance for the fallow ones, and a cocktail of hormones and genetic material for the pregnant ones, a proprietary blend that stacked the deck in terms of their litter producing a perfect little batch of kitten-babes.
That took several hours, and was probably the least fun part of his job. Most of catgirls disliked receiving injections, and would do their best to make it difficult for him. Some just pouted and cried, but it wasn't unusual for them to hiss and swear at him. The pregnant ones were often the meanest, most likely to actually try to scratch him in retaliation even after the procedure was done, swiping at him as soon as he released them from their restraints.
He didn't mind, though. It was all worth it for the chance to work directly with such marvels of modern technology--and for the second part of his shifts: the time he spent in the breeding lab.
That was where the receptive catgirls were kept.
Like their namesakes, catgirls went into heat at least once a month when they weren't pregnant, some even more often. As soon as the symptoms started to show, they were pulled from their cozy little dormitory rooms and into the lab for supervision and insemination.
The girls in heat could be even meaner than the pregnant ones, especially if they were left to their own devices; they were hormonal and frustrated, overwrought, caught in a storm of instinct demanding that they find a catboy to fuck them hard and often and stuff them up with kittens.