by Neil Clarke
The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.
As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.
“Hi, Mr. Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”
“Nonsense!” Mr. Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”
“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”
“You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to …” Mr. Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr. Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.
Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymized, which is quite a change from usual. She pops the earpiece in.
“Yeah, Mr. Chan?”
“This isn’t Mr. Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”
“All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help too.”
“I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.
“Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”
“I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the 8th of August. 38.1 to 40.2 millimeter thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info. KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”
“I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”
Shit.
A Sculpere 9410S only takes thirty minutes to disassemble, if you know the right tricks. Manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off to expose the inner screws, and detach the print heads before disassembling the power unit. There are a few extra steps in this case—for instance, the stickers that say “Property of Hong Kong Scientific University” and “Bioprinting Lab A5” all need to be removed—but a bit of anti-adhesive spray will ensure that everything’s on schedule. Ideally she’d buy a new printer, but she needs to save her cash for the name change once she hits Nanjing.
It’s not expulsion if you leave before you get kicked out, she tells herself, but even she can tell that’s a lie.
It’s possible to get a sense of a client’s priorities just from the documents they send. For instance, Mr. Chan usually mentions some recipes that he’s considering, and Ms. Huang from Gyuuzen tends to attach examples of the marbling patterns she wants. This new client seems to have attached a whole document dedicated to the recent amendments in the criminal code, with the ones relevant to Helena (“five-year statute of limitations,” “possible death penalty”) conveniently highlighted in neon yellow.
Sadly, this level of detail hasn’t carried over to the spec sheet.
“Hi again, sir,” Helena says. “I’ve read through what you’ve sent, but I really need more details before starting on the job. Could you provide me with the full measurements? I’ll need the expected length and breadth in addition to the thickness.”
“It’s already there. Learn to read.”
“I know you filled that part in, sir,” Helena says, gritting her teeth. “But we’re a printing company, not a farm. I’ll need more detail than ‘16—18 month cow, grain-fed, Hereford breed’ to do the job properly.”
“You went to university, didn’t you? I’m sure you can figure out something as basic as that, even if you didn’t graduate.”
“Ha ha. Of course.” Helena resists the urge to yank her earpiece out. “I’ll get right on that. Also, there is the issue of pay …”
“Ah, yes. I’m quite sure the Yuen family is still itching to prosecute. How about you do the job, and in return, I don’t tell them where you’re hiding?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but even then I’ll need an initial deposit to cover the printing, and of course there’s the matter of the Hereford samples.” Which I already have in the bioreactor, but there is no way I’m letting you know that.
“Fine. I’ll expect detailed daily updates,” Mr. Anonymous says. “I know how you get with deadlines. Don’t fuck it up.”
“Of course not,” Helena says. “Also, about the deadline—would it be possible to push it back? Four weeks is quite short for this job.”
“No,” Mr. Anonymous says curtly, and hangs up.
Helena lets out a very long breath so she doesn’t end up screaming, and takes a moment to curse Mr. Anonymous and his whole family in Cantonese.
It’s physically impossible to complete the renders and finish the print in four weeks, unless she figures out a way to turn her printer into a time machine, and if that were possible she might as well go back and redo the past few years, or maybe her whole life. If she had majored in art, maybe she’d be a designer by now—or hell, while she’s busy dreaming, she could even have been the next Raverat, the next Mantuana—instead of a failed artist living in a shithole concrete box, clinging to the wreckage of all her past mistakes.
She leans against the wall for a while, exhales, then slaps on a proxy and starts drafting a help-wanted ad.
Lily Yonezawa (darknet username: yurisquared) arrives at Nanjing High Tech Industrial Park at 8.58 AM. She’s a short lady with long black hair and circle-framed iKontakts. She’s wearing a loose, floaty dress, smooth lines of white tinged with yellow-green, and there’s a large prismatic bracelet gleaming on her arm. In comparison, Helena is wearing her least holey black blouse and a pair of jeans, which is a step up from her usual attire of myoglo-bin-stained T-shirt and boxer shorts.
“So,” Lily says in rapid, slightly-accented Mandarin as she bounds into the office. “This place is a beef place, right? I pulled some of the records once I got the address, hope you don’t mind—anyway, what do you want me to help print or render or design or whatever? I know I said I had a background in confections and baking, but I’m totally open to anything!” She pumps her fist in a show of determination. The loose-fitting prismatic bracelet slides up and down.
Helena blinks at Lily with the weariness of someone who’s spent most of their night frantically trying to make their office presentable. She decides to skip most of the briefing, as Lily
doesn’t seem like the sort who needs to be eased into anything.
“How much do you know about beef?”
“I used to watch a whole bunch of farming documentaries with my ex, does that count?”
“No. Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises—”
“Oh, by the way, do you have a logo? I searched your company registration but nothing really came up. Need me to design one?”
“Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises, we make fake beef and sell it to restaurants.”
“So, like, soy-lentil stuff?”
“Homegrown cloned cell lines,” Helena says. “Mostly Matsusaka, with some Hereford if clients specify it.” She gestures at the bioreactor humming away in a corner.
“Wait, isn’t fake food like those knockoff eggs made of calcium carbonate? If you’re using cow cells, this seems pretty real to me.” Clearly Lily has a more practical definition of fake than the China Food and Drug Administration.
“It’s more like … let’s say you have a painting in a gallery and you say it’s by a famous artist. Lots of people would come look at it because of the name alone and write reviews talking about its exquisite use of chiaroscuro, as expected of the old masters, I can’t believe that it looks so real even though it was painted centuries ago. But if you say, hey, this great painting was by some no-name loser, I was just lying about where it came from … well, it’d still be the same painting, but people would want all their money back.”
“Oh, I get it,” Lily says, scrutinizing the bioreactor. She taps its shiny polymer shell with her knuckles, and her bracelet bumps against it. Helena tries not to wince. “Anyway, how legal is this? This meat forgery thing?”
“It’s not illegal yet,” Helena says. “It’s kind of a gray area, really.”
“Great!” Lily smacks her fist into her open palm. “Now, how can I help? I’m totally down for anything! You can even ask me to clean the office if you want—wow, this is really dusty, maybe I should just clean it to make sure—”
Helena reminds herself that having an assistant isn’t entirely bad news. Wolfgang Beltracchi was only able to carry out large-scale forgeries with his assistant’s help, and they even got along well enough to get married and have a kid without killing each other.
Then again, the Beltracchis both got caught, so maybe she shouldn’t be too optimistic.
Cows that undergo extreme stress while waiting for slaughter are known as dark cutters. The stress causes them to deplete all their glycogen reserves, and when butchered, their meat turns a dark blackish-red. The meat of dark cutters is generally considered low-quality.
As a low-quality person waiting for slaughter, Helena understands how those cows feel. Mr. Anonymous, stymied by the industrial park’s regular sweeps for trackers and external cameras, has taken to sending Helena grainy aerial photographs of herself together with exhortations to work harder. This isn’t exactly news—she already knew he had her details, and drones are pretty cheap—but still. When Lily raps on the door in the morning, Helena sometimes jolts awake in a panic before she realizes that it isn’t Mr. Anonymous coming for her. This isn’t helped by the fact that Lily’s gentle knocks seem to be equivalent to other people’s knockout blows.
By now Helena’s introduced Lily to the basics, and she’s a surprisingly quick study. It doesn’t take her long to figure out how to randomize the fat marbling with Fractalgenr8, and she’s been handed the task of printing the beef strips for Gyuuzen and Fatty Chan, then packing them for drone delivery. It’s not ideal, but it lets Helena concentrate on the base model for the T-bone steak, which is the most complicated thing she’s ever tried to render.
A T-bone steak is a combination of two cuts of meat, lean tenderloin and fatty strip steak, separated by a hard ridge of vertebral bone. Simply cutting into one is a near-religious experience, red meat parting under the knife to reveal smooth white bone, with the beef fat dripping down to pool on the plate. At least, that’s what the socialites’ food blogs say. To be accurate, they say something more like “omfg this is sooooooo good,” “this bones giving me a boner lol,” and “haha im so getting this sonic-cleaned for my collection!!!,” but Helena pretends they actually meant to communicate something more coherent.
The problem is a lack of references. Most of the accessible photographs only provide a top-down view, and Helena’s left to extrapolate from blurry videos and password-protected previews of bovine myology databases, which don’t get her much closer to figuring out how the meat adheres to the bone. Helena’s forced to dig through ancient research papers and diagrams that focus on where to cut to maximize meat yield, quantifying the difference between porterhouse and T-bone cuts, and not hey, if you’re reading this decades in the future, here’s how to make a good facsimile of a steak. Helena’s tempted to run outside and scream in frustration, but Lily would probably insist on running outside and screaming with her as a matter of company solidarity, and with their luck, probably Mr. Anonymous would find out about Lily right then, even after all the trouble she’s taken to censor any mention of her new assistant from the files and the reports and argh she needs sleep.
Meanwhile, Lily’s already scheduled everything for print, judging by the way she’s spinning around in Helena’s spare swivel chair.
“Hey, Lily,” Helena says, stifling a yawn. “Why don’t you play around with this for a bit? It’s the base model for a T-bone steak. Just familiarize yourself with the fiber extrusion and mapping, see if you can get it to look like the reference photos. Don’t worry, I’ve saved a copy elsewhere.” Good luck doing the impossible, Helena doesn’t say. You’re bound to have memorized the shortcut for ‘undo’ by the time I wake up.
Helena wakes up to Lily humming a cheerful tune and a mostly-complete T-bone model rotating on her screen. She blinks a few times, but no—it’s still there. Lily’s effortlessly linking the rest of the meat, fat and gristle to the side of the bone, deforming the muscle fibers to account for the bone’s presence.
“What did you do,” Helena blurts out.
Lily turns around to face her, fiddling with her bracelet. “Uh, did I do it wrong?”
“Rotate it a bit, let me see the top view. How did you do it?”
“It’s a little like the human vertebral column, isn’t it? There’s plenty of references for that.” She taps the screen twice, switching focus to an image of a human cross-section. “See how it attaches here and here? I just used that as a reference, and boom.”
Ugh, Helena thinks to herself. She’s been out of university for way too long if she’s forgetting basic homology.
“Wait, is it correct? Did I mess up?”
“No, no,” Helena says. “This is really good. Better than … well, better than I did, anyway.”
“Awesome! Can I get a raise?”
“You can get yourself a sesame pancake,” Helena says. “My treat.”
The brief requires two hundred similar-but-unique steaks at randomized thicknesses of 38.1 to 40.2 mm, and the number and density of meat fibers pretty much precludes Helena from rendering it on her own rig. She doesn’t want to pay to outsource computing power, so they’re using spare processing cycles from other personal rigs and staggering the loads. Straightforward bone surfaces get rendered in afternoons, and fiber-dense tissues get rendered at off-peak hours.
It’s three in the morning. Helena’s in her Pokko the Penguin T-shirt and boxer shorts, and Lily’s wearing Yayoi Kusama-ish pajamas that make her look like she’s been obliterated by a mass of polka dots. Both of them are staring at their screens, eating cups of Zhuzhu Brand Artificial Char Siew Noodles. As Lily’s job moves to the front of Render@Home’s Finland queue, the graph updates to show a downtick in Mauritius. Helena’s fingers frantically skim across the touchpad, queuing as many jobs as she can.
Her chopsticks scrape the bottom of the mycefoam cup, and she tilts the container to shovel the remaining fake pork fragments into her mouth. Zhuzhu’s using extruded soy proteins, and they’ve punched up the gluta
mate percentage since she last bought them. The roasted char siew flavor is lacking, and the texture is crumby since the factory skimped on the extrusion time, but any hot food is practically heaven at this time of the night. Day. Whatever.
The thing about the rendering stage is that there’s a lot of panic-infused downtime. After queuing the requests, they can’t really do anything else— the requests might fail, or the rig might crash, or they might lose their place in the queue through some accident of fate and have to do everything all over again. There’s nothing to do besides pray that the requests get through, stay awake until the server limit resets, and repeat the whole process until everything’s done. Staying awake is easy for Helena, as Mr. Anonymous has recently taken to sending pictures of rotting corpses to her iKontakt address, captioned “Work hard or this could be you.” Lily seems to be halfway off to dreamland, possibly because she isn’t seeing misshapen lumps of flesh every time she closes her eyes.
“So,” Lily says, yawning. “How did you get into this business?”
Helena decides it’s too much trouble to figure out a plausible lie, and settles for a very edited version of the truth. “I took art as an elective in high school. My school had a lot of printmaking and 3D printing equipment, so I used it to make custom merch in my spare time—you know, for people who wanted figurines of obscure anime characters, or whatever. Even designed and printed the packaging for them, just to make it look more official. I wanted to study art in university, but that didn’t really work out. Long story short, I ended up moving here from Hong Kong, and since I had a background in printing and bootlegging … yeah. What about you?”
“Before the confectionery I did a whole bunch of odd jobs. I used to sell merch for my girlfriend’s band, and that’s how I got started with the short-order printing stuff. They were called POMEGRENADE—it was really hard to fit the whole name on a T-shirt. The keychains sold really well, though.”
“What sort of band were they?”