|Sci-Fi|: Eras of Cain Ch 7 |Sci-IRL|: Space Food
Fic: Adam and Eve fight about how to keep Cain out of jail for murder and Trin nerds out about fresh food in space. Science IRL Article: You can also nerd out about food in space.
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Previously…Trin got drunk and participated in a two-person rave with Lucifer—Cain’s weird, overdressed (hot) Uncle. Trin’s sound and scent augmentations picked up things that simply can’t be true—that Lucifer doesn’t have a heartbeat, and his suit jackets smells like elemental star stuff.
Trin’s augs had never been affected by alcohol. But surely that was the explanation. There was no way Lucifer didn’t have heartbeat.
He tuned his sound augmentations to pick up Cain’s heartbeat. It kicked his eardrums so hard he turned the volume down by half.
Well, it was working fine now. He’d just listen for Lucifer’s heartbeat next time he saw him.
It’d been a long day. If only he could just sit down and think.
The room spun and Trin leaned on a barstool.
“You feeling okay, honey?” Rosie cooed from over the kitchen’s bar-style counter.
Trin’s eyes caught on the shine of copper cookware simmering on a genuine stovetop. The galley was a feast for the eyes. A pair of ovens nested in one wall neighboring a neat shelf where the delicate edges of real china plates gleamed. A shining silver dough hook worried an elastic lump.
Rosie’s eight arms cleaned, chopped, and sautéed raw vegetables. Her arms darted in and out of a rectangular cutaway in the counter, pulling up bright green, red, and orange vegetables. They dribbled clumps of soil from spidery roots.
The scent of damp dirt unearthed a memory of Ellis’s hands, sun-darkened and grass stained…
Trin leaned over the bar to stare through that dirt-splattered slot in the counter. It was a tiny window into a room beneath the galley filled with plants growing in scads of actual soil.
Cain sidled up to Trin and bumped his shoulder with hers.
“You have a real kitchen? And a garden?” Trin asked, “All on a spaceship?!”
Cain grabbed a gold coin of carrot and popped it in her mouth. Like a single raw carrot wasn’t worth a week of Trin’s income.
“Of course,” Rosie said, “The human digestive system cannot metabolize ether and stardust. You like cooking?”
Rosie handed Trin a bowl of greens she’d been rinsing. “Care to tear these up for me?”
Trin’s eyes bugged out. He was sure he’d never seen this color organically. It was so dark green, it was almost purple.
Like Lucifer’s impossible, star-stuff-scented jacket.
Trin swallowed.
“What is this?” Trin asked. He pulled a dripping leaf out of the colander. It was as long as his forearm, curled in on itself like bunched lace at the edges.
“Just kale, dear…” Rosie said.
Trin bent his head to sniff as he tore the leaves and his scent aug lit up, booking the plant’s chemical signature of sulfides and thiols in his food diary instead of the catchall database. He didn’t have to look to know that this was the first new entry there in over a year.
His throat threatened to close. Money had been so much tighter since Ellis…
Now without Griff, Trin wasn’t sure how he’d afford government-subsidized nutrient powder, much less pay tuition for Planck High.
The walls of the worldship seemed to edge closer like a deflating balloon.
Trin forced himself to speak. “Do you cook all the meals, Rosie?”
“Imagine Eve or Lucifer cooking!” Cain said, grabbing another carrot slice.
“Sure do, honey. Hurry up now, I used to only have two arms too, and I’m afraid I do get impatient…”
“Dad has a whole kitchen staff at our house,” Cain said, “He and Mom have the same obsession with ‘real’ food.”
Cain’s smile dissolved.
Trin heard Cain’s heart stutter and scented cortisol on her slow exhalation. His own gut wrenched in augmented empathy. Felt her surprise and grief as if it were his own. She’d said, ‘Mom.’
Trin wanted to just stay mad at Cain—he wouldn’t be able to afford to go to school any more because of her! Pity poor princess who suddenly realized she was a clone, not a shiny, traditional biological child.
She still had parents. Two of them! All he’d ever had were money-grubbing leeches attached to him by guardianship documents.
As if summoned by Trin’s thoughts, Mr. Richest Guy in this Universe himself and Mrs. Mysterious Space Explorer barreled through the galley hatchway like a stormfront.
“You can’t be serious,” Mrs. Planck hissed at Mr. Planck’s back. He whirled on her.
“Play it out, Eve, there aren’t any good options,” he said.
Mr. Planck crossed to the room behind Trin, who shrank against the kitchen counter and hiked his collar up to hide the bruises Griff had left there only hours ago.
Trin needn’t have worried the adults would notice—the celebrity couple were embroiled in a fight he was suddenly all too aware of. Their scent clouds pummeled him with very personal information they assumed was private, being unfamiliar with his particular batch of cybernetic augmentations.
Mrs. Planck’s spicy anger had a foundation in bitter sadness. Mr. Planck was surrounded by the must of old heartbreak like dry, old bones, reinforced with a tang of determined patience.
Mr. Planck’s scent cloud receded to the opposite side of the galley. Trin turned his augs off before he could be tempted to keep snooping.
“You want our girl imprisoned at sixteen? You take her back there, that’s what happens,” Mrs. Planck said.
“We call in favors, we work the problem. You think you can just keep her out here with you?”
“She goes to jail, Adam. And you think for a second that Lillian Simple won’t use this little incident of cyborg-on-human violence to challenge the Synthetic Intelligence Rights bill? Cain goes to jail and a dirty politician gets an edge against every augmented person in the universe.”
To be continued…
|Sci-IRL|: Space Food
What do you think is the most difficult thing about feeding people in space? We’ve come a long way from when folks thought it was dangerous to drink carbonated beverages in microgravity, but we have a long way to go.
For the most part, NASA’s entrees these days are dehydrated and packaged in little plastic pouches with a clever straw attachment that connects to a water dispenser’s spigot. An astronaut grabs a pouch, connects the spout to a hot/cold water dispenser, squishes the stuff around and it’s chow time.
There have been many experiments around growing fresh fruit and vegetables, since we’ll need to be able to grow plants if we want a sustainable presence in space. We have a long way to go and among the small-scale challenges are things like getting water around root systems to function without floating away, being too stagnant, and causing rotting.
At a large scale, it would be ideal to have a self-sustaining plant ecosystem that worked more like Earth’s, processing the CO2 humans breathe out, while providing sustainable food. Check out Biosphere 2—a longstanding research effort attempting to replicate a self-sustaining, self-contained ecosystem that would provide habitation support and food for crew on the moon or Mars.
In this chapter, Trin boggles at the garden aboard Eve’s worldship, given their planet-based society has also moved away from fresh food and depends mostly on industrially produced nutrition options.
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The description of kale was perfect - I just specifically like taking very day-to-day mundane things and expounding on how beautiful they really are and how it's a privilege to take that for granted. Nicely communicated to that point!
I love the idea of Trin's sensory augmentations. So fascinating to think about!