Spares..., The dark side of SR biotech (LONG!) Options

[Demosthenes]

I just want to preface this with a caveat: this is an extrapolation, a "What if?" based on the kind of technology that canon says exists in Shadowrun. I'm not saying that this stuff actually exists in the SR universe. Though it does IMG...

Has anyone here read "Spares" by Michael Marshall Smith?
I've been thinking about it lately, and it gave me a rather nasty idea for the "darker" side of the SR setting:

One of the central ideas of the book is the idea of therapeutic cloning gone a little bit awry. Specifically:

The wealthy purchase spares for their children when they are born. Spares are clones. The clones are fed and housed in barns, kept well enough to ensure that they are healthy and functional. They are not socialised at all, but are little more than human battery hens, if you wish.

Whenever one of these wealthy people has a serious accident or illness (you know, the kind of thing that would require a replacement organ or limb), the medical company chops off the necessary pieces from that person's spare.

In Shadowrun, this might even make a kind of twisted economic sense (bear with me here, this will take time):
We have evidence that it is possible to grow a human body in vitro, in the form of the Bioware sections of Shadowtech and M&M. Bioware is produced by fiddling with the genetic code of a bank of cells to optimise them for growing a particular piece of bioware. The bioware is harvested from the body that grows in the vat, and the rest of the material is recycled...

Cultured bioware costs 4 times as much as standard bioware of the same type, because they have to make it from scratch from your own tissues, right?

Therefore we can work out an approximate cost (retail, note) for producing a clone using SR biotech by looking at the cost of low end standard biotech (multiplied by 4 to account for avoiding "type O" tissue issues)...
And don't tell me the corps haven't tried to do it....

I haven't worked out a precise cost, but I figure UniOmni could produce a viable clone for somewhere in the region of 50,000¥.

After that, all you have to do is cover the investment for the "permanent lifestyle" - which will be a lot lower than for a normal person...you're keeping these poor souls in barns on corporate-owned land, with a rentacop outside, simsense feeds (maybe) to keep them happy, crap tasting (but nutritious) food to keep them going...

Say that it costs you 250,000¥ total over the lifetime of a Spare to grow and maintain. A DocWagon Super-Platinum contract costs what? IIRC 100,000¥ per annum. After three years, you're turning a profit. And if your subject (that lovely corp exec) decides to change his policy, or dies, or drops it, or defaults on a payment, you have a warm body on which to perform human experimentation.

And this person has no rights. He or she doesn't exist. Hell, he or she might not even be self-aware, depending on how you go about your cloning...