“I could choose not to eat.”
“You could. Sure. And that’s a fine, moral, high-minded choice. It’s not the choice your body would make, though, is it.”
“Well, I like to eat. Who doesn’t like a good meal?”
“That’s the First Law speaking through you. Of course you like to eat! You like to eat because you have to eat! You yourself are a part of the system that was built from the First Law, you’re not going to not enjoy fulfilling that Law, are you? An eating thing in the realm of the edible. Even if you wanted to stop eating, it’s not like you could! Oh sure, you could hold out for a while, maintain that moral stance, stay up there on your hungry high horse almost to the point of death with your skeletal hands seized on the reins and who knows, maybe actually take that mortuary hill by your efforts. Can’t see the point of it, myself. But look. Look. Say you’re doing this, flipping the bird to the archons and keeping your mouth shut. Here comes the airplane, open up those hanger doors so it can land, baby, but you’re fuckling stalwart, ain’t ya, you’re all nope not gonna do it, you bad boy you, you rebel! But let’s say you get to that point, that moment beyond which lies cessation and void and hark them herald angels singin’ to you, the beckoning bastards.
“And at that moment, I come to you where you’ve laid yourself, chained to some worthy, honourable notion of whatever, whatever, whittled down to the last tissue, all your fibres burned up and burning still just to keep you alive a little bit longer, and I come to you, Den. Are you listening? I come to you and do you know what I have, here in my hands? It’s for you, Den. I put it together for you, I made it with my own two paws, right here and it’s warm, Den. Warm and fragrant and ready. What is it, Den? What have I got for you.”
“Jesus.”
“Gotcha. What is it? I’m curious.”
“It’s a bowl of...”
“Yeah?”
“It’s that...it’s a bowl of the Cream of Wheat my mom used to make me. With the spoonful of jam in the middle.”
“Wow! Wow. Did she know how racist that was?”
“Of course. But it’s only food, Gregor. Mom liked to own that kind of thing. Our music, our authors, the foods we liked. She just took it back. It’s just food.”
“Sure it is, Den. Breakfast, right. Break the fast! Eat the thing! That’s the stuff, right there. That’s the stuff!”
“It is. I get it.”
“And you’d eat it, too, that concentrated solar energy converted to bran and germ and endosperm! Yum! Right? All racist marketing aside. That splash of bovine lactation? Super yum! The fucking jam? That’s your jam! If I brought it to you at that moment. Your jam. You would be the First Law in that moment.”
“I would. I would.”
“And that is what has informed every interaction between elements of this reality from the moment it began to crystalize in solution. That law. All other laws, grand and interesting as they may be, serve the First Law. Laws of physics, the laws of men and beasts, all bow before the First Law, which must be obeyed. Obey or die. Some choice, huh.”
Here in the shitbox, it’s soy-based meals. Nutrient pastes and spreads on stale crackers. Ramen. Water and weak teas. Some days the community kitchens in the area get in some fruit that’s not too far gone.
I’d kill for a bowl of Cream of Wheat, Gregor.
His range as a chef astonished. Breakfasts were hearty and savoury. Eggs that shone like gold in the pan, rashers of thick bacon with an aroma that rolled your eyes back in your head, chicken-fried steak, steak-fried chicken. Waffles. Mythical morning meals from another time. Once there was a grapefruit on my plate.
“I didn’t think they grew these anymore,” I said.
“Which they?” he asked back.
Rich pâtés, the livers and organs of various waterfowl pureed and spiced; stews and rustic ratatouilles; clam chowder with potato and leek and locally sourced sea salt; oysters in masala, with acorns; a salad niçoise with seared black sesame tuna, and more: any of these just a simple lunch for Gregor. I wondered where he found the time to prepare the food; it always seemed to happen when I was either speaking with Li’l Dougie or during short breaks in our interviews. Clearly, I didn’t wonder very hard; there was a spell about the whole production that put me off questioning, for a while. I had never before looked forward to a meal like I did while eating at Stonefish House.
Evening meals were small but intense sorties into realms of flavor I had never imagined could exist. Purple artichokes with a spring lamb’s liver. Tissue-thin prosciutto with grilled asparagus in lemon. Braised rabbit with rosemary and lavender. At one point, I am fairly sure I was served roasted ortolan, but the experience was transporting enough that now, here, I believe I must have dreamed it. I dreamed of food a lot during that time.
Eventually, though, after a week of “white tablecloth” dining (a shockingly elitist term I had to learn from Gregor; they used to rate restaurants, there was an industry built up around it), doubt, and possibly gout, began to set in. Each improbable serving only served to push me away from the comfort it was offering, until finally, after a long afternoon of interview and poring over unsettling footage in the media room, I found myself pushing a plate away after only a few morsels. I couldn’t even say what I had been eating, though Gregor had announced it as he set the table. I felt my mind giving way to a kind of turbulent blankness. Gregor looked up from his plate.
“Appetite problems, Den?”
“Where’s it all coming from?” I whispered. I’d asked it before. This time I meant it; the food on the plate seemed to squirm and nausea bloomed in my guts at the sight. The Goya hologram centerpiece seemed to leer directly at me.
“What’s that again?”
“Where’s it all coming from, Gregor? The food. How are you making this. Shit, when are you making these meals?”
Gregor sighed and set his cutlery down on the plate. “It did seem to take you a while, Den. I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t make the connection.”
“It’s just all been so...” I stammered a bit. “So good, Gregor. Like, amazing. I didn’t want to ask.”
“Heh. Few do. That’s an easy corollary to the First Law, kid. All part of the big show. Tastes good, don’t ask where it came from. Well, here, help me clear the table and come with me to the kitchen.”
There, moments later, Gregor showed me his technique.
“It’s all just arrangements, Den. Assemblages of data across all the scales, from the atomic up to the cellular. Beyond that, even. Information, coded to behave in certain ways. This plate, for instance.”
He brought a plate to the table.
“Ceramic. Clay, right? An inorganic compound, metal in a non-metal base. Atoms in arrangement, held in ionic or covalent bonds, depending.”
He held a hand above the plate.
“And that’s you or me or anything. Anything in and of the Stonefish. From the very start, from the moment they pressed go on this jambox. Information, behaving as what it’s supposed to be, according to the First Law and all the laws that follow it. Concentrated and compressed and convinced to fucking behave.”
“Okay, but the plate is real,” I countered. “It’s a plate. All this is real.”
“Sure it is. Sure it is. And if I smash this plate over your head, it’s gonna shatter. And you’d be injured. You’d bleed. Your skin, coded as such, would behave as skin, and split, inflamed. Your blood cells, your plasma, would behave as such and start leaking out, clotting, repairing. Every part of you with that commitment to the bit that keeps you you and makes the whole world go round. My point is...ahh, y’know what, Den? Fuck it.”
I was watching his face, and he squinted, briefly. A tremor, barely noticeable, seemed to pass through him. If he moved his hand at all where it hovered above the plate, I didn’t see it.
“Dessert is served.”
On the plate there rested a single strawberry, and a thimble’s worth of white sugar in a little pile next to it. I leaped back fro
m the table, overturned the chair I’d been sitting in. Gregor picked up the plate with the strawberry and came after me as I scrambled backwards. He may as well have been holding a viper for the way I reacted.
“Look at it, Den! Hell, taste it!” He picked it from the plate, threw the plate to the floor. It shattered, behaving. Sugar crystals fanned out into the air. My back was to the wall and Gregor pinned me to it with one forearm so he could press the berry to my face. “At least smell the thing! I can give you the name of the molecular compound that produces that aroma but shit, son, that’s just so much abra-goddamn-cadabra at this point, don’t you think?”
I didn’t want to open my mouth. The look in Gregor’s eyes said he would get the strawberry in there if I did. “Get it away!” I managed to hiss out through a clenched jaw.
“Yeah? No room for a little sweetness?” He stepped back, the fruit between thumb and forefinger, glowing like a bright coal. “Fine.” Gregor tossed it in the air with a flick of his wrist and before the thing had reached its zenith, it evaporated. Gregor hung his great shaggy head and retreated to the table while I slumped to the floor, gasping. He almost sat down on the remaining chair, then thought better of it, retrieved a bottle of wine and a corkscrew from the cupboard. Finally, he sat and went to work on the cork.
“Bread and raw fish was all he could manage, Den,” he mumbled. “You get me?”
“I get you, Gregor.”
“This is part of their terrible gift. Hey, ya gotta eat! they say, so they give this ability to their chosen people. Have I told you? They speak from their abdomens; you hear them in your intestines and it’s—...” there was a dull pop as the cork left the bottle neck. Gregor immediately took a long pull of the wine. “It’s really the worst. Hearing them like that.”
“Fuck, Gregor. I mean, Jesus!”
“Loaves and fishes, baby!” Gregor held up the bottle in mock triumph. “Loaves and fucking fishes!” He took another long drink, then carefully placed the bottle on the tabletop. “I mean, he did that wine thing, too, but you know, still. Amateur stuff.”
“Why? Why would they do this?”
“It’s a game to them, Den. A game.” Gregor drew the word out, clamped teeth around the ending of it. “Extract some code that behaves like a man, groom a saviour out of it, plug it back into the simulation, generate some novelty.”
“With magical food?”
“Miraculous food, Den! A real showstopper. Eat the food of fairyland and become trapped there. Stuff their faces before they ask how you made it! Scale that up all the way! Because the First Law!”
I picked myself up from the floor, righted the chair and sat down across from him. Gregor Makarios looked beaten. He looked twice his age.
“And you’re okay with this?”
“Uh, no.” The wine bottle was back at his lips instantly. “No, sir, I am not, as you say, oh kay. With that.”
There was more to it, and I would learn it, but not that night. We sat in silence. Gregor finished that bottle, and then another. Finally, he laid his head on the table and slept.
After a few minutes, I got up to get a drink of water at the sink. The water was cool and clean but I gagged on it all the same.
***
I made our breakfast the next morning. There were boxes of stale cereal in a pantry, and tetra packs of soy milk in a fridge. Some long ago Eidolon chef had frozen a few plastic baggies of blackberries; I opened one, and chipped at the mass with a bread knife until a chunk of the fruit came away. The crushed berries smelled all right as they thawed, so I filled a bowl and brought it all to the table.
Gregor dragged himself in a few minutes later.
“Ah. You beat me to it, Den.”
“I figured you could use a break from the kitchen. Or whatever.” Chuckling, he sat down, poured cereal and soy milk into a bowl and immediately began rapidly scooping the food to his mouth. At one point he gave me a thumbs up as he ate.
“Good stuff, Den. Thanks. You want to do the cooking from now on, maybe?”
“How’d you make it happen, Gregor? The strawberry?”
“The strawberry? The sugar was the harder part.”
“Okay. The sugar, then. But all of it. The meals.”
“Usually I’ll work with something as a base. The protein slurry for the printer. Starches. Loose grain, minerals. It’s rarely that I pull it out of the air. It takes a bit out of you, basically.”
“Do you mean that literally or figuratively?”
“Little of column A, little of column B.”
“I can’t eat that anymore,” I announced.
“It’s totally organic, Den.”
“Don’t care.”
“All natural materials. One hundred percent locally sourced, artisanal Stonefish.”
“Doesn’t matter. Won’t eat it. Not if you have to magic it up out of nothing.”
“You don’t even know the point you’ve just made, Den.” Gregor got up from the table, cleared his place. Already he seemed more energetic, more himself. With a gesture he offered to clear my food away but I held up a hand.
“And what point is that?” I said.
“It’s all out of nothing, son. Every morsel that’s ever passed your lips. Making something out of nothing is the gig, it’s just that most of the time there’s more steps to the process. I feel you, though, on this thing. Your loss of appetite. But! It means we’ll have to do a little hunting, a little gathering. It’s still the same Stonefish stuff, but...” He gave me a cold stare from the counter. “You up for a return to our native state?”
There were air quotes around that last.
“Sure, Gregor. Why not.”
GREGOR ON NATURE (1)
We were preparing to leave the compound. Gregor had a rifle in pieces on a bench, wiping down parts of it with oil on a rag, while I packed our bags with gear. He didn’t expect to be out long, but overnight was a possibility.
“It’s not like they’re going to let us starve here,” he said.
“The archons.”
“Don’t get me wrong, they will allow a lot of fucked up, illegal things go down on their watch, Den. I mean, look at the world. They made the rules, so they get to break them, and they get their sick kicks watching the things they made being forced to break them. Not the First Law, though, and especially not here.”
“It’s fucked up, Gregor. It’s not right.”
“Oh, you’re telling me now? Naw. It’s like you said, this is their little piece of paradise. Nobody goes hungry in Eden, least of all their—” and here Gregor made an odd face, mingled alarm and pride, while he waved his hands around himself in close circles. He started putting the rifle back together; a series of harsh, clean sounds filled the room as he did so.
“You ever hunted before, Den?”
“Not animals.”
“What! You don’t mean...”
“I meant virtually. Like, game style.”
“Damn, son. You were this close to being interesting there for a second. The most dangerous game! Ah well.”
“Where did you learn?”
“Here. The first year. I’m not great at it. Who is, these days? Probably why they gave me the direct line to fairyland food. The game around here is all theirs, too, though, so it’s easier to hunt than in the outside world.”
“And why would that be?”
“They get up to unpleasantness, out there in the trees, Den. Verily, they toy with the beasts of the field and do exercise their dominion over them. Take the deer. I’ve had this happen twice, which is two times too many. So, imagine, you’re out there and you’ve been tracking one for a while—...”
“A deer?”
“A deer, yeah. And you think you’ve got the animal figured out, its movements and habits and favourite places to feed, and you spot it through the brush one dewy morning. Perfect shot, too, so you raise your weapon, because it’s about to go down. The ancient dance! And then, then the docile fucker sits down on its haunches like a tired a
ccountant! Hooks its forelegs over a log or the carcass of some smaller critter you hadn’t notice in the brush, drags it over to itself. Then it puts one of its hooves in its mouth, which you know, you know that shouldn’t be possible, given how they’re put together. Just the act of placing a hoof in the mouth, the angles are all wrong. But it manages it, somehow, and it gets its meek herbivore teeth around the hoof. Like, a really decent grip, jaw strength you wouldn’t guess at just by looking at the thing. And the deer pulls its own hoof right off. Slides off like a cuff, or a glove. Which I guess is pretty much what it is. And there’s this small hand underneath, pale and wriggling. It uses that hand to pull off the other hoof, and there’s another one. I mean, Jesus. The shock of it. Those hands go to work on the log, or the carcass, picking away at something you can’t see through your scope. The deer is totally into it, sliding those black eyes all over the thing, moving those small hands in circles, fingers like grey grubs, picking away, picking away, god. Never the males, though. I’ve never seen a buck do this. Pretty sure only the females have the hands. It’s a doe thing. I can’t figure it.
“But then, fuck, who knows, right? Who the fuck knows. It’s them and their little games. Once you’ve seen something like that, how can you ever be sure of anything again.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It’s not great, no. Not a thing to see.”
“Did you kill it?”
“And piss off whichever of those hairy bastards are responsible? Nope. Not the first time I saw the dexterous deer and definitely not the second time. Not sure I’d have been able to eat it if I had. Would you?”
“Probably not.”
“Damn skippy, Den. You all packed there?”
I was about to answer when a high-volume keening filled the room. Echoes of the sound filtered in from the outside as well; an alarm. Gregor shouldered the rifle and stepped to a console on the wall, slapped at it.
“Li’l Dougie. What do we have?” The AI’s petulant voice slid from concealed speakers.
“Perimeter activity. Northeast corner this time.”
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