Manufactured and marketed by the Kinder Brut Anstalt, the Kinder Brut ® is a mechanical crèche, sold for the purpose of fertilizing a human egg, making genetic modifications on the resulting embryo (if so desired by the parent), gestating the fetus (providing womb-like protection and nutrition during those first nine months of its life), and monitoring the child’s health and wellbeing until age two (standard cycles), after which time it is up to the parent to keep it from killing itself before reaching adulthood. Translated from the extinct ancient Terran language known as Deutsches, its name means “Children Brood,” which pretty much says it all. In the Institute’s advertising holos, inventor of the Kinder Brut, Maximo Edmunds, explains that he was trying to fill a void (and the wombs of sterile humanoids) by giving the aging galactic population a better way to reproduce.

It seems that, after the Krystal Drive revolutionized space travel and more average Joes and Janes were spending more of their time blasting around the multiverse at near light speed (see: Thought Speed), their planet-bound pals and loved ones needed a way to level the playing field age-wise. No one wanted Mom to jet off to the system next door and return looking like his or her granddaughter! Once the term “Geezers” came into popular usage, referring to those who chose to remain in a “gravity-rich” environment, great minds began working on the problem of life extension and great pocketbooks funded them. And with great success! But while most popular means of life extension, such as the controversial Running In Place ®, could keep bodies youthful-looking and healthy indefinitely, they could not give a humanoid female any more than her natural allotment of eggs, or keep a tri-century-old male’s sperm swimming. And it was soon discovered that the use of artificial life-extension in a pregnant mother was dangerous to a developing fetus. The Kinder Brut, which could either incubate the parent’s own frozen embryos, or splice their genetic information into a donor egg, was just what the doctor ordered… literally.