Page 79 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

When settling the Solace Ring, the founding members of our community made a serious error: nobody remembered to bring any of the cultures necessary for producing vat-grown cacao cells.

Starting from scratch with this crop has been a challenge, and as it is a luxury good, it has not been prioritized as highly as other projects. However, it has proved to be an excellent training project for this greenhouse’s apprentices. Now that the Solace Ring’s baseline agricultural needs have stabilized, we are pleased to finally upload a functional Theobroma template into our Primer supplement.

Dwarf cacao stands at approximately one meter in height, with a reasonable tolerance for variant levels of humidity and a much lower irrigation need than the starting template. However, even with these eased requirements, this remains a species with tropical ancestry, and we recommend you read our additional suggestions on ideal growing methods.

Theobroma cypsela is a fertile strain. Seeds printed from this template or harvested from mature plants should germinate within two weeks. At current printing, this template’s rate of successful germination is 85%.

Addendum: The head of this greenhouse’s kitchen finds the cocoa powder produced from dwarf cacao beans to be of a quality on par or even better than what she remembers of vat-grown and deems it more than suitable for both baking and brewing. (Obviously, the taste of any batch of cocoa produced with Theobroma cypsela will vary greatly depending on your fermentation methods and the surrounding microbiome.) As per her request, I am including her recipe for hot chocolate.

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp. cocoa powder

1–2 Tbsp. beet sugar or sorghum crystals (depending on desired sweetness)

1 cup of milk (any kind of plant milk will do, but oat tends to work best)

Small splash of vanilla flavoring

Pinch of salt

This recipe will make one small mug of hot chocolate. Feel free to scale it up if you’re making a batch for several people (or want a nice big mug all for yourself).

Heat the milk until it is steaming hot but not boiling. Whisk in the cocoa powder. Whisk in your desired amount of sugar. Add just a little bit of vanilla and salt. Pour into a mug and enjoy right away.

Chapter 32 Signy & Cora, Fortune

Genes are nothing more than

instructions conveyed with

chemicals. Now, if you wanted

to be pedantic, you could

argue that every instruction

you’ve ever parsed—whether

you obeyed it or not—was also

conveyed with chemicals. Paint.

Ink. Pixels on a screen.

What about light? Light’s

not a chemical.

Light is not a chemical, but

if we want to generate it

mechanically, that requires

filaments and batteries and

so on, which are all made of