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The workstation stinks of hot vegetable oil. The oil used to make plastic on the Asterion comes from canola, and the bright yellow plants grow from many of the walls, threatening to coat passersby in pollen. The canola oil is treated with ozone and formed into versatile plastic sheets. These sheets form the raw material in many of the fabricators. It is this canola plastic that is spilled out like a mass of spaghetti across the workstation where you and Virginia Rein stand.

Virginia is dressed in practical blue overalls and solid work shoes. Her blonde hair is buzzed back in what was once a regulation haircut back in her military days.

"This reminds me of the Ceres expedition," she says. "We wanted to get a new housing for a, uh, some kind of measuring instrument I forget which. Well, we set the machine to go and all went to sleep and when we woke up we were damn near choked by all this plastic webbing gooping up everything. Machine wasn't properly calibrated for zero-g, it turned out."