They're referring to brood siblings that were decanted from the assembly tanks the same time they were

You can't log off yet - we don't have a large enough text corpus to train the Neutral Ambassador AI

That's the end of the story - the whole thing is here
www.online-literature.com/edith-nesbit...

From The Dragon Tamers by Edith Nesbit

I spent most of '99 flying between North Sea oil rigs upgrading the software on gas analysis equipment, all of which would have fallen over at the turnover.
Just one small part of one industry - globally, a lot of people were frantically working on it that year

From Osip Mandelstam's The Finder of a Horseshoe
(A Pindaric fragment), trans Stephen Donaldson languagehat.com/mandelstams-...