Have you ever left a job, listeners? One you’ve dreaded, but put your entire being into? There is that rush of never going back, of knowing that even if you have to get up early, even if you have shit to do, it won’t be that shit again, it won’t be the grind you’ve grown familiar with. If you close your eyes and focus, you can see your own schedule, relive the rote, trace a ghostly finger through it like a blueprint. Even if you don’t miss it, you’ll feel its absence, its structure.
For me, leaving the Goodenough Kanemori felt like skipping school. A light, free floating panic, as if my blood had been ever so slightly carbonated. “Why are we walking off the ship?” a rogue thought asked, “There’s always more garbage to sift, more meal kits to eat, more scrapyard treasures to find.”
All that didn’t happen when I left Palladium to become a freelancer. Probably because I never stopped doing the same job. And what’s that job, listeners? Here we go…
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
At this point, my ankle was healed completely. The only pains I felt in the joints were like hauntings, spectral twinges that came and went, bright enough to focus my attention but so fleeting that I can’t even tell if they’re real. The important thing is that when I finally exited the Goodenough Kanemori, that hateful-hopeful hulk, I did so unassisted, standing on my own two feet. My palms bore new calluses, my back new evening aches. My clothes, they hung, all the labor having stripped some extra padding from my body just as we had stripped the innards from seven months worth of junk and scrap.
The Goodenough Kanemori was a long cigarette of heat on a viewscreen tuned to infrared, thermal plume backlit by the midnight blue of space, hanging above the blinding sphere that was Le Straud. On the concourse, I was among only nine passengers disembarking to Lea te Suldan, but dozens, maybe hundreds of passengers-to-be sat on benches, near walls, or slumped against luggage. Any modern starport has plenty of seating, floorspace, room to move, and Rail Line connections are no exception. Those flying the work route have a look about them; braced, yet hopeful. Le Straud’s turmoil behind and beneath them, but a long, long stretch of working for meals ahead.
Around me, a pair of men loosely hold freshly purchased cards and talked lightly about about the economy of Mars. A lone woman, maybe in her twenties, tried and failed to get a vid call connection with someone. Someone meaningful to her, judging by her exasperated muttering. Nearby, a child sat, knees steepled, alone, then brightened at the sight of an eyepatched man carrying a mess of steaming scallop chips in a gingham patterned box.
It will be the last freshly made meal that child will see for nearly a year. Good for his traveling companion, bringing him that.
They would sleep where I slept in the bunks, sort where I sorted in the garbage bay, and eat what I ate, kneeling on a cold and hard metal floor. My replacements. Another pair of hands to squeeze value from the valueless.
Farewell, Goodenough Kanemori. I’ll see you in my dreams, in my newly acquired taste for cheap cheesecake, and every time I smell burnt wire insulation.
Up a bank of escalators, out into a rotunda, and…
Lea te Suldan is a resort station, an incredibly expensive tourist trap, a glamorous facade for an unglamourous industry. And it is… so astoundingly beautiful. It’s a titanic astrolabe, listeners, hanging golden and shining against the blackness of space. It is easily the size of an entire modern metropolis, and surely larger than some. Its surface is mirrored and illuminated by an array of lighting systems that wipe out the stars all around it. Its concentric rings spin against each other, studded with modules and structures meant to evoke the star system. It glimmers, Saints it glimmers, but its endlessly turning rings cast shadows across each other too, little flashes of night in a place that only knows an artificial and endless day. It’s gaudy at a distance but get closer and the critical mind yields to awe, grumbles melt into gasps. A monument to the future, to wealth, to motion, and advancement.
And all of this hangs against the misty jewel backdrop that is Le Straud. The view screens put this right in front of you as early as the rotunda; the entire station in view, turning and turning and turning, the so-called Gateway of Paradise.
Not every world colonized by humanity has a readily apparent biosphere. On Rykard V, the planet was as dead and dusty as Mars until seismic probes found great winding tunnels left by colossal alien worms. And in those tunnels were biomes that fed on… well, worm shit, it was all built on worm shit. But alien life flourished there, lush and bioluminescent in places starlight did not touch. On Pikka’s moon Incognito, the great storms there rendered the world uninhabitable by man, but also concealed a swirling vortex of life that had never set foot nor talon on the ground. Shadows of things not-quite like manta-rays and dragons.
But Le Straud has made no effort to hide its alien flora and fauna. Its greens and blues and dappled golds, its swathes of fuschia where great luminescent kelp beds shine from beneath shallow seas. Its hanging mats of delicate, floating algae, shot through with sky jellies and the white-green crackles of bioelectric lightning. The twisting and turning hurricanes, which I’m certain are a real concern to city planners, but up here are these tremendous long petaled pinwheels. This is what the first colonists saw, when simple systems that predate internal intelligences alerted the crew. A crew used to long stretches of travel filled with stars and not much else. Where entire generations lived in the liminal, the between. Too young to know Earth outside pictures, too old to know Le Straud outside the imagination. Working and dreaming and dying so some descendant could feel alien soil between finger and thumb.
And Lea te Suldan hangs above it all, positioned as the gateway to paradise. Haven’t worked out whose Paradise, listeners. More on this later. A lot more.
All of this splendor was lost on me at the time. Drive and ambition, in this case, my desire to find the origin of Le Straud’s omnipresent and trendsetting cuisine, that can block out all reasonable thought. I hurried beneath great statues of colonial legends and heroes, past hanging gardens of alien flora, glittering from humidity. From the docking bays, past the booths selling snacks, and informative guides, and little carved resin eyes.
To the ticket station, a pristine screen framed in shining brass. My fingers, sore beneath cracked nails, flitted across the display screens.
I slouched against the readout like a surly teenager, gently clawing new stubble on my chin, turning my once torn ankle in little therapeutic circles more out of habit than ongoing necessity.
Use anything long enough and you’ll pick up on things without really knowing you see them. Mechanical timings, like the acceptance of a password or an engine roaring to life after a key turns, we take these for granted as much as we take our organs for granted.
But as with organs, any disruption to those systems is something we catch on to real quick. When I entered my information, experience had taught me that a green checkmark would appear, rising into view with a little chime accompanied by a splash of colorful, digital confetti. At once demeaning and affirming. This would generally take about half a second.
But this time, it took maybe three seconds before it displayed a very different prompt. Those three seconds were all it took to seed doubt in my heart.
“Oops!” the display stated with faux bashfulness, as if the impossibly refined system was apologizing for a minor mistake.
“Your passage has been blocked due to a change in your account. You may receive a refund or complimentary deal due to this issue. Representatives are on standby to help explain this situation to you.”
A QR code appeared on the screen, and I raised my tablet’s built-in camera in response. My stomach ached, everything ached.
The phone rang once, as is customary. There was a time where the automated systems picked up instantaneously, but this was phased out due to minor, yet statistically significant effects on the moods of customers. A single ring offered better feedback, a clear indication that the call has been completed. The gossamer illusion that the entity on the other end of the line did not possess perfect reflexes, which customer service internal intelligences absolutely do possess. But even when you know the magic trick, that doesn’t mean it fails to work entirely.
“Hi there,” came a female voice through the speaker of my phone “how can I help you, mister…” a slight pause, a lilt of feigned uncertainty, like she had to check physical notes “Mr. Yasui? I’m sorry, am I pronouncing that right, Yasui? Please understand that your call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes, and to help me do better at my job, of course!” A nervous laugh, like she was a new hire caught between inexperience and excitement.
“I’m Quinn, by the way.”
Some people maintain that you should be pleasant with internal intelligences. Please and thank you. I read that, a long time ago, when phones were first installed in a few select homes, people would make sure they were fully dressed before answering. A customer service virtual intelligence doesn’t care if you say please or thank you. It doesn’t care if you are naked. For reference, she wouldn’t care if you are engulfed in flame either, but she would have gasped and acted shocked all the same. My policy for customer support is directness.
“Why have you canceled my shuttle flight to Le Straud?” I asked.
“Le Straud? Hmmm… Let me check.”
Another pause. Three ticks of a second hand, perfect like a watch. She even played the gentle clacks of a keyboard, though none existed. A cough sounded somewhere in the background, its amplitude perfectly muted to simulate distance.
“Ah, here we go, Mr. Yasui. As traveled as you are, I’m sure you are aware that Le Straud is an active conflict zone. It isn’t safe for individuals to land on the surface. You’d need-”
“A specialized pass.” I interrupted her, and it responded with a small “oop” that made a tendon in my jaw tighten with the anxiety of a social faux pas.
“I have a specialized pass. Press, I’m a journalist.”
“Yes of course, though you’ve recently left your current place of employment. I’m sure you’ll land on your feet somewhere else, but”
She left a perfect gap in her dialogue, a window for me to interrupt again. A bait for my style of conversation. I took it. Most people take it.
“I have. The pass is being put together as we speak, it’s just being finalized.”
I was lying.
“Fantastic! And when it is complete Invicata Air and Space will be happy to receive it.”
Parry and riposte.
“What can you do for me until then? You’ve trapped me on Lea te Suldan.”
“Oh, gosh, not at all Mr. Yasui, and I’m sorry to have even worried you about that possibility. You’ll be receiving a refund for your prepaid shuttle flight, as well as a complimentary discount on your next Railship voyage. We’ve already sent the 33% off coupon to your account, and it’s perfectly valid for years.”
“But I don’t…” My voice hitched in my throat. I had always dreaded this happening, but I didn’t consider I’d be blocked this close to the finish line. But what’s worse, didn’t have enough money to get back home. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t move backwards. It took an appreciable amount of concentration just to stay standing.
“Mr. Yasui,” Sympathy crept into her voice, softening it. “Invicata, or my employers I should say, we’re not here to make you unhappy. I’m… look, this isn’t an option we make available to everyone, but in your case I can make an exception.”
“An exception?”
“Yes. I’d call it a special offer, but that just strikes me as… I don’t know, the language doesn’t feel right, does it? Too corporate for my tastes.”
“Too corporate,” she said. I was too afraid, too pliable, to catch this at the moment. I don’t know a human alive that can out maneuver a social interior intelligence.
She continued. “What if, instead, we forgot about the coupon. You don’t need a cheaper flight to take you anywhere, you need help. You need to go home. You want to go home, right, Mr. Yasui?”
I couldn’t say anything in response. Ahead of me, an older man waved with almost embarrassing enthusiasm at a silver haired woman in a dark blue dress. She was smiling, carrying a picture with his face on it.
“Oscar, I’ve got passenger space, first class if you can imagine, on the Forward Olympus. It can return you to Sidereal Station over Pluto, and then pass you to the Singular Devotion. If I’m not mistaken, that will bring you all the way back to Earth, and it will be a fantastically comfortable voyage, all expenses paid. A little adventure, right? It would be a crazy story to tell.”
I said nothing in response, chest tight with fear and precisely inflicted hope.
“Are you still there, Oscar? Are you alright?”
“I’m still here,” I replied, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Okay. I know this might take some time to process, but I can get all this dealt with pretty quickly on my end. Do you want me to save you that seat, Oscar?”
Like I said, a socially constructed Internal Intelligence is a terrifying thing. In just a brief conversation she had worked with the speed of an EMT… and the distant trained precision of a deli butcher. She triaged my anger, blunted my indignation, then pivoted. With hindsight, reviewing my notes, reviewing my audio since I always record my phone conversations, c’mon, I can see the moment where she adapted to me. A little anti-corporate, a lot sympathetic. But even perfect machines have their poker tells in this day and age.
“Crazy story to tell,” she had said. She knew I had a following, and that I could use that following to tantrum, to make trouble. So instead of leaving me stranded, as some people unfortunately are during Rail travel every year, she offered me a clean and comfortable out.
I had traveled on the Goodenough Kanemori, I had labored and struggled and even sometimes starved alongside my fellow passengers. But we were fundamentally not the same. I wore poverty like a fashionable scarf. But if the weather changed, I could just discard it.
They’d never have this opportunity. Not unless their lives changed substantially, or they leveraged public outrage or press interest to their advantage. Even then, it would only be temporary, unique, an exception to the rule.
I could reject this offer, threaten to turn my following against Invicata, but she had set the pace. She had pointed to the exit sign. I could cross my arms and sit on the floor, refuse to go, but legally speaking, the Quinn persona on the phone, and by extension Invicata Air and Space, had made themselves invincible.
But to remind my listeners, this is all hindsight talking.
“That would be great, Quinn, thank you very much,” I babbled.
“Of course, Oscar. Happy to help out, anytime. Do you need anything else?”
“I… I’ll think about it.”
“Fantastic! Your new voyage’s itinerary will be uploaded to your, ooh, is that a Twinnon Peregrine? Very nice. Anyway, the Forward Olympus leaves in three days, and your cabin has been fully reserved. Be sure to board soon, because, well, I’m not really sure I can offer you another route home… Anyways, you have a wonderful day and, ugh, ‘always fly Invicata for all your Travel needs.“
A simulated eye roll, a barely constrained giggle. And the line disconnected. I was alone.
I wandered away from the airport terminal, considering the “Quinn” persona’s offer. Lea te Suldan stretched out ahead of me, magnificent and glittering, festooned with the alien foliage of Le Straud in great tumbling falls of sparkling ivy. Everything on the station is always in motion, on metro lines and moving sidewalks. On the great gondola chutes that radiate out from the station’s center, spokes in the great astrolabe of Lea te Suldan.
Despite my confusion, despite my fear, my stomach roiled and rumbled beneath my ribs.
Lea te Suldan is a horrible place to travel if you’re hurting for money for the same reason it’s a wonderful place to travel if you have more cash than you know what to do with. Passing by storefronts, boutiques, and restaurants, a traveler begins to notice the complete absence of prices. Menus, clothing racks, appealing formations of jewelry shining in crystal displays, none of it is numbered with a cost in Nu. Sales here are a cheap trick for cheap customers, and they’re out, pricelessness is very much in. If you have to ask, then you can’t afford it. If you can’t afford it, then surely you, the traveler, must be lost. Prices are only listed at the establishments nearest to the starport. Embassies of consumer sanity.
But look, even through all this glitz and glamor, you’ll see that stores sell pepper sprays, retch tubes, all the little chemical deterrents in demand for tourists looking to travel in places they don’t feel completely safe in. Remember; Lea te Suldan is parked above a conflict zone, they just don’t like saying that part out loud.
I had three days to decide whether I wanted to take Invicata’s offer. Three days to my mind, was a very practical amount of time to make a clear headed decision. I would find the cheapest hotel possible, lie down on a discount mattress that was still a world above what I slept on in the Goodenough Kanemori. I would turn on my All-black Twinnon Peregrine, I would compose financial spreadsheets, compare risk and reward tables. I would sort all my troubles into neat little piles and address them, one by one.
I found an ornate bench out on the street, its engraved seat dotted with complex sculptures of sharp-finned fish at regular intervals. Agonizing to lie down on, but plenty comfortable if you just chose to sit. I flicked my way through hotels, I reduced my price range, then reduced it again. You can’t find a bad hotel on Lea te Suldan, and you can’t find a cheap one either. There’s an old joke that all of the station’s hab frames are modular, so if a hotel ever scores below four and a quarter stars it can be instantly jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere. That’s not true of course. They’ll just tear up your business license instead.
But if you want an inexpensive hotel, well, you’d have better luck buying lottery tickets, winning millions, and then buying a room with your fabulous newfound wealth.
All this to say, I didn’t have much success in finding a hotel within my price range. I realize that a few of my fans are out there wanting the exact amount of Nu I have remaining in my bank account, for… some purpose I can’t understand. Well, I’m not giving that number to all of you for two reasons: first, it’s just not cool to talk about your finances with strangers, I can’t believe I have to explain this, and second; it would ruin the fun of another part of my fanbase who seem obsessed with tallying my purchases and organizing them by brand and location and duration to mathematically prove the algebraic variable that is my bank account number. Sick, twisted, brilliant individuals my fans. Saint’s bless ‘em, and goddamn all of you to hell.
And on a similar note, I also won’t be opening up a Northstar or Milano account so people can donate to me directly. Please stop asking me on Savage or through my business email. I don’t think I’m likely to change my mind on this, no matter how many times you ask. Instead, I think I’ll link some good charities in the description below, if you’re so eager to put your money towards a cause.
Where was I? Right. Hotels. After an uncomfortable hour of scrolling through listings, I trashed the entire idea of hotels. Instead I leaned on the convenience of port boardings, those little cozy rooms, not much more than a closet bedroom and bathroom, where individuals with certain Rail tickets can spend layovers. I heard Lea Te Suldan’s comfort industries fought for years to get boardings decommissioned, but their protests lost their bluster in the face of a simple issue of logistics: if those who can’t afford hotels have nowhere to sleep, they’ll sleep out in the concourse and the streets, no matter how uncomfortable the benches are. Lucky us. Most work travelers will see the boardings as an upgrade from labor lodgings. One family to a room, the privacy of walls, adaptive mattresses…
When my head struck that softener scented pillow, I didn’t return to my feet until 9 hours had passed.
Now listeners, you may be wondering where all the food is in this podcast about food. I understand that, and I’d like to apologize for burying the lead on this one. I just… had some stuff to cover first. But the subject hasn’t changed. With what I had left in pocket, I set out into Lea te Suldan, Gateway of Paradise, to find new and exciting restaurants to visit, dishes to wonder at, to eat, and to describe to all of you.
I did this, in part, with the hope that I might find my answer. To understand how Le Straud’s cuisine had radiated throughout the colonies and even swept the Sol System. And I was just above the surface of that distant and exotified world, right? Maybe I could just barely squeeze in under the deadline set by my finances. I wasn’t a stranger to last minute changes of plan, as you’ve probably noticed um… throughout the entirety of Gastronaut, I’m certain.
Building on a golden, slowly spinning ring means a certain linearity to design. Lea te Suldan’s commercial, tourist facing districts wind out like a shimmering thread. The Promenade, where businesses and services jockey for the attention of prospective customers, is one massive loop. Ride any metro, ascend the elevator spokes, hail a station directed autocab, even walk if you don’t mind a multi-kilometer hike and some foot blisters. You’ll always end up exactly where you started. Lea te Suldan’s investment in external architecture has lead to display panel ceiling tiling; you can see directly into space while you’re inside the station, the central spires and spokes, the massive gleaming statues. It isn’t the first station of its kind to do as much and that absolutely works in its favor. If there are this many screens running at once, then the station can just flex its wealth just by its energy bill alone.
I’m a sucker for the effect it gives while traveling to the station. If you crane your neck as go along, you can watch any point of origin, a hotel or restaurant or starport, climb up the interior of the ring until eventually it descends back down to approach you. It’s a big showy display for tourists too. Instead of consulting a map program, just incline your gaze, find a landmark up above you on that ring, and point. Cuts right through the cynicism, I felt like a kid the first time a colleague hit me with that trick back on Shingetsu Station.
But wonder doesn’t fill stomachs and deadlines and dawdlers are a toxic couple.
So then, listeners. Let’s talk about a realization I had while trying to find some food to eat on the breathtaking station of Lea te Suldan.
Windows are another kind of wall.
Obvious statement to anyone over the age of three or four maybe. Painfully obvious if you happen to be a migratory bird that listens to podcasts for some reason. Just bear with me on this one, okay?
On Lea te Suldan, everything is on display, and observation is always free of charge. From the street you can watch as nigiri is assembled, velvety smooth fish slid into position on pearly rice, with a thumb’s swipe of wasabi cushioned between. Great masses of transparent sheets, like twinkling pink slime, spinning hypnotically on rollers, smoothing and thinning out, soon to be cut, folded, and twined into Fairy Wraps. You have juicy fruits in reds and purples, sticky-spicy Pomperri and savory-sweet Soohochu from the surface of Le Straud, cradled in golden treacle and ringed by a crust studded with crushed almonds. You can see them poured into their molds and pie tins, dark golden, piling and piling atop themselves in warm sugary pools.
Starvation breeds hunger, but deprivation – deprivation foments dreams. In the Duke’s prison of comfort I dreamed of flight, as I’ve mentioned in Gastronaut’s fourth episode. On the Goodenough Kanemori I dreamed of food while chewing my pens. There were meal kits aplenty, sure, but in my dreams I was preparing food the food that I ate; chopping garlic, stirring stews.
But those are just dreams. Let me offer another perspective. With respect to famine, I think we cannot be hungrier than when something delicious is inches away from your nose. Enough delicious food to fill your belly and leave you deliciously drowsy.
All this to say: I’m sorry listeners. I didn’t have the wealth to enter any of the finest establishments on Lea te Suldan.
But I have eyes at least. And while I couldn’t reach through the glass to take fistfuls of what was displayed, I could at least wrangle the roar in my stomach just enough to turn my brain back on.
As I mentioned earlier, they serve Pop Dumplings and Fairy Wraps here. But even more than that, Lea te Suldan is on the cutting edge of cuisine. Pop Cakes and Fairy Noodles. Pop Helixes and Fairy Buns. These dishes are adapted, altered, and modified in countless eateries. It seems mandatory that every restaurant on Lea te Suldan caters to this appetite, this desire to see Le Straud’s cuisine in its natural state. For a moment I felt as if I could have it all ways, take the deal offered by Quinn and also conclusively determine the origin of Le Straud’s cuisine.
But what I learned on this big ol’ trip, at the very start of it actually, was that the cuisine of Le Straud is food of desperation. It’s closer to forbidden snacks than haute cuisine, when you take the explosive and toxic aspects of the dishes into account. The patrons inside each of these establishments, they were finely dressed and conversing lightly and happily. They were thrilled to eat what was served to them. I know because I spent hours trying my best to look inconspicuous as I stalked both customer and food from outside the window.
These dishes weren’t what I was looking for. They were probably excellent in their own right, maybe even better than anything that was currently served back home, but they weren’t the origin point I had spent months traveling to find. I’ve eaten the closest thing to the original version of pop dumplings that I could find. It’s not a very tasty meal. It’s not a meal that you can serve for twenty or thirty-five Nu a plate. Uh-uh, not at all. It’s bitter, a little caustic, smokey, and rubbery. I doubt they would serve that in a Lea te Suldan establishment. The realization was bittersweet. Of course it couldn’t be this simple, obviously. But to return home now would leave me empty handed.
I was relieved. Crazy, right?
Yeah. That’s as good of a segue as any for what happened that evening.
I followed the mouthwatering smell of grilled meat to a booth styled with the iconography of Damascus, and purchased a set of rather excellent kebabs, steaming from the grill, seasoned with turmeric, lemon, hot peppers, and cinnamon, beside a container of fluffy white rice and salt and vinegared potato wedges. After a day of roaming and pining at windows, this really hit the spot! The kebabs were overpriced, but I was ravenous. They tasted of flame and chili peppers. Every time the spice threatened to overwhelm, there the rice was to quell the heat with that simple starch flavor. I scrolled through my Twinnon Peregrine, trying to assemble some kind of coherent meal plan to present to my audience.
A tiny bit of motion caught my eye, just a shift of a few pixels, like a couple of grains of sand. I had stopped checking my emails shortly after my escape from the Duke’s care. My excuse being that I was too tired, too busy to look. The icon above my emails had broken one-hundred, something that hadn’t happened since I was sixteen. I have my tablet connected to my business address. I don’t believe anybody should link their personal address to their mobile devices for reasons of sanity. Some have said that my priorities are flipped but I’m not going to use my podcast as a platform to explain why I’m right. Wouldn’t be fair.
I opened it up and I took a look. I did not like what I saw.
That’s a bit of an understatement, actually. Another arbitrary understatement would be to say something like, “what I saw made me unhappy” or, “what I saw convinced me to drink a little that night.”
Emails, obviously. Metaphorical piles of them. My business email is the most direct way to reach me, but I’ve subscribed to conventional filters and some moderately priced screening intelligences. That means that only emails I’d want to read are on my screen. Again, these are sources of sanity in the modern age.
Palladium had sent plenty of messages, probes really, asking if I had properly completed my sign out of company credentials. Those emails were much older, but the ones dated back as far as a month ago acquired a more menacing tone. They explained that my credentials were now, on their end, fully scrubbed and invalid. Connecting current journalist work, they probably meant Gastronaut here, to Palladium would be a violation of intellectual property rights. The company was prepared to take legal action if I continued posing as their journalist.
Noted. I couldn’t help but wonder what legal action they expected to take when I was in another star system. Maybe it was a threat against my person should I ever return.
But most of the emails were from Sad-Eyed Girl. Checking in, then checking in again, then checking in again. Sad-Eyed Girl’s emails numbered in the dozens, but could broadly be categorized into three distinct eras. For the purpose of completeness, I’ll roll through them. For the purposes of privacy, I won’t read them in their entirety.
Era One was defined by that same nervous affability. Sad-Eyed Girl, having managed to find employment at the rather choosy Palladium Brand, was clearly no stranger to follow up emails. If she felt like a fool, or frustrated, or scared, her emails didn’t ever show it. “Hey Oscar!” each of her emails read, marching in neat little rows, “just following up!”
The rest was the nervous dance of an individual aware of both decorum and seniority. Little peeks into her life, questions about how Gastronaut was going. She understood that I hadn’t read her manuscript yet, because she listened to the podcast. She tried to laugh along with my claims that Palladium was taking advantage of her with a temp position. She made a sheepish attempt to foster solidarity among the two of us. We were both a pair of creatives trying our very best to make a living on our work. She reminded me of her name.
Reading these emails, my blood ran cold. She had listened to the podcast. For some reason, I never believed such a thing would happen. You might think me an idiot, listeners, for making the same mistake twice. The Duke came after me for my writing, but… It’s been a recurring blindspot for me. Connecting my voice as a writer to my actions as a person.
Era Two was desperate. More direct, more fearful. Palladium had realized that one of their own had leaked information to an outside journalist. Whether or not they intended to run a story on Le Straud’s cuisine, someone in management had felt threatened. “Scooped,” is the word. There was an ongoing investigation and Sad-Eyed Girl was terrified. Her questions about her manuscript had disappeared and in their place was questions about if I had experienced anything like this. She had questions about what to do or say, where she could get resources to help her out. She reiterated that she didn’t want to lose this job, that she had hedged a rental agreement on the salary of her position. The position that I had privately – publicly – scoffed at months before.
Era Two’s last few emails were less queries about protocol and more just… she just wanted reassurance. She just wanted to be told that things were okay. She alternated between that and asking about the cold truth of her situation. If I couldn’t tell her that it wouldn’t hurt, then at least I could explain how badly it would.
For her efforts, Sad-Eyed Girl received silence.
Era Three was brief. A single email that married the professionalism of…
No. Fuck it.
They fired her. They figured out that I had contacted Sad-Eyed Girl. And that I had weaseled out the address of a private citizen from her. They burned her employment contract, gave her a black mark in her record, and threw her out of the building. Sad-Eyed Girl’s final email mentioned that whoever boxed her desk belongings did so carelessly. They shattered a potted cactus her father had given her to celebrate college graduation.
“I don’t even know where I’m going to find work again,” she had written to me, in that final email.
I didn’t know either. Palladium’s word was a powerful thing within the industry.
“Don’t use my name,” she said, “Please, you don’t have to read my manuscript. I don’t want you to read it. Just don’t use my name in Gastronaut. I can’t be connected with you anymore than I already am. Keep calling me Sad-Eyed Girl, or whatever. Please.”
That final email was sent a month ago. Since then, there wasn’t anything from her in my inbox.
I was paralyzed by her emails. I felt like my ribs were caving inwards, scissoring into my heart. I didn’t think I deserved to feel pity for myself. Whatever pain I was experiencing couldn’t compare to the hurt my actions had put Sad-Eyed Girl in over the last few months. Didn’t do any good for her in the present. I spiraled inwards. Sorry for her, sorry for myself, enraged at being sorry for myself, depressed at the thought that I was chasing my own emotions around in circles. I couldn’t smell the kebabs I was eating. I pushed them away, though a bit of meat was still left on the skewer.
I hadn’t done right by her. Sad Eyed-Girl would never forgive me but maybe… Maybe the manuscript she had sent really was something incredible. Maybe she didn’t need Palladium to succeed, just like I didn’t need Palladium to succeed. Maybe this was just the push required to launch her own fantasy career. I mean, it was possible she would never take off as a famous writer, but fame isn’t success, right? She could find success as I had, as a micro-celebrity, or become a ghost writer or…
In the moment, the only person I was trying to convince was myself. Bargaining, listeners. But it felt better than caving in and doing nothing.
I scrolled through my messages as quickly as I could. I told myself I was checking in on Rufus and Cali. What I was really doing was self-validation. Convincing myself that a visit from Oscar Yasui wasn’t like a visit from some plague ridden wretch.
A glimmer of relief. Their last email was the only one they had ever sent, that enigmatically worded goodbye:
“Good luck, Critic. Hope you find whatever you’re looking for out there.” Signed, “your friends.”
Short and sweet, without even identifying themselves. I’d be cautious too if I had potentially angered someone like the Duke.
*inhale*
I didn’t leave it at that, listeners. I couldn’t just leave it at that. Some part of me… had to know.
Some part of me always has to know.
So I sat on a bench and, back aching, did some digging. A buffer search on the Duke’s little slice of Mars.
My hand, without any conscious thought, rose to cover my mouth and nose. The Duke was hiring. Not just technicians, but kitchen staff, security, maids, groundskeepers, winetasters, every single position in and around that mansion was available for application.
The forms boasted a, “relaxed and friendly atmosphere overlooking a scenic example of the successful Martian Colonial Venture. A place where virtue is held as an equal to professional ability, where each employee is to be treated as family.”
My vision narrowed and warped around the edges. I clutched at my tablet.
He didn’t know who, exactly, had betrayed him. I had changed the names of every person I had ever met. And how could the Duke even know that I told the truth about what happened in his villa?
So he sat and stewed, as he always does, and he decided the best way to catch a mouse was to take a proverbial flamethrower to the walls. He had fired everyone. Retaliation for betrayal. Retaliation for my choices to post podcasts describing how he imprisoned me.
If he could get to the people that helped me, it didn’t matter who else he hurt. Why did I expect any different?
My skin flashed in waves of hot and cold. Though I don’t usually drink in times of stress…
I needed a drink to calm down. So I went and I got a few. This isn’t something I normally do, but in this rare case, I had to stop thinking.
Preface, then, to this next part. I don’t get drunk very often. I don’t suffer from alcoholism, I believe. And since I don’t have much practice in getting drunk, I’m sure I’m not very good at it. What I’m saying is that I don’t recommend anyone imitating my actions here.
I have to make this very clear because… how exactly do I say this? For a long while my greatest fear was that no one would care about this podcast. That Gastronaut would be some stupid little vanity project that nobody would talk about. And y’know, that thought kept me awake at night. It kept me unhappy in the shower, kept me grounded any time I had a peaceful moment to myself.
But imagine my surprise when I see my display lightning up with my followers, with tangible evidence of my success! I was overjoyed uh, until…
In my last episode I off-handedly mentioned that you can, politely, request to borrow a charger cable from a flight attendant and inspect it for teeth marks. I didn’t say you should demand them, nor did I say that you should snatch them from their hands, nor did I ask for you to send me pictures of the things on Savage.
Please stop doing this. I didn’t want people to get hurt from what was an aside in a larger story. And to all those spacers who have received inappropriate attention online.
I’m very sorry.
And to my apparently impressionable audience, get fucking drunk if you want, but know that if you repeat the actions that follow, you will be charged and you will go to jail.
Okay.
I was deep into victory cocktails and cheap shots, wandering in the perfect night air. The nights are always perfect here, on Lea te Suldan. I couldn’t really control my movements at this point, my stomach was filled with kebabs swimming in as much alcohol as I could pack in there. I scuffed every step I passed, clanged off every light fixture, drove my knees into the soil of every potted plant. I didn’t feel the bruises I dealt to myself, I just advanced. If I couldn’t go down to the surface of Le Straud, I guess… the next best thing would be to march in sloppy circles, stumbling along with the rotation of Lea te Suldan’s great astrolabe. Walking in circles, in a circle, itself spinning in a circle, rotating around a sphere, rotating around a star.
I came to the threshold of a building, low blue lights dazzling my eyes. I saw a close, intimate space with a counter at chest height. I saw barstools and neon signs. I was drawn in like a balloon on a string. I didn’t see the sign over the door, couldn’t make out the branding, I was just too drunk. A bar was a bar, and maybe I could chase my buzz here for an hour before the bartender came to the same realization as the others. The realization that I generally didn’t clear my tabs before departure.
“But Oscar,” you might ask, “how is it possible that you dined and dashed if every bar took your card to charge when you came in?”
Well, um, they don’t take your card if you introduce yourself as Oscar Yasui the food critic instead of the food journalist. If you sweet talk and bluster, make a show of tasting what they have on offer. And it wasn’t dining and dashing, by the way, it was tasting. The difference is that one is a misdemeanor and the other is a respected profession.
So I plopped down on the stool, my weight driving air from the cushion, and it gave off a gentle puff of air. Something about this bar didn’t quite fit with the others, though my brain was in no state to figure out exactly what it was. Even through the ethanol reek of my own breath, I could smell it. Pine and firewood. Cotton candy and popcorn. Peppermint canes and shoe polish.
The context was lost on me. I lifted my chin and slurred at the man behind the counter. I wanted another Bourbon. I don’t remember exactly what was said to me in reply, but I hit the bartender with my old song and dance all the same. He looked me up and down before speaking.
“Absolutely, sir, but I do need to have your card. Company policy.”
I let it slide. I hadn’t paid a dime since I started my little boozy bender. Even my funds could handle that. I scanned my card, and he accepted it with a nod and a dignified frown.
Even nova’d as I was, the place oozed class. The bar wasn’t stained at all, the patrons were all dressed up, eyeing me warily as I slumped in my seat, body braced against my stool like a witch’s broom, willing the world around me to stop spinning. Can’t really blame them for eyeing me. They probably thought I was trouble, and in their defense, they were absolutely right.
The bartender worked at a machine that hissed like an expresso maker, modulating this dial and that, moving with the precision of a chemist refining something very precious. Or perhaps explosive. I stared, eyes half seeing, as his hands flew over the controls, punctuated by little twirls of his body, by little jaunty taps of his heel against the tile floor. Was he dancing?
In time he finished and turned to face me, my order clasped between his hands. He stepped lightly to my front and gently placed it on the counter, before giving it a little push, sending it sliding up just beneath my nose where I lay slumped.
“Your bourbon, sir, just the way you’ve always loved it.”
“What a strange thing to hear,” I thought to myself, “I’ve never been to Lea te Suldan in my life. I’m not even a drinker, not particularly.”
Then my teeth parted, my jaw slackened. There was no glass before me, no sphere of ice dropped gently into a pool of sweet bourbon oblivion. Instead, there was a small metal object, wide on the top and tapering in an organic flow to a narrow base. It bore a little bifurcated nozzle on the top, with a small lever between either aperture. A wrapper was wound round the exterior, transparent in places so as to reveal its reflective surface. The wrapper depicted a finger pressed to a pair of lips, a setting sun, and was evocative of a woman’s sandal. It all felt very familiar.
The label read… ah… “Stealthy Summer Sips.” Freshly printed by the bartender’s mysterious machine.
I just stared, for awhile, at my own face, reflected back, stretched and warped like a funhouse mirror. Red with alcohol, eyes barely making contact.
“Is it not to your liking, sir?” the bartender inquired.
I extended my index finger and gently depressed the lever. There was a cheerful little spurt of air from either nozzle, and the air turned. Turned to the smell of bourbon, but beneath it: cut grass, hot asphalt. Colored chapstick.
Smell reaches deep into the mind, listeners. Puts fingertips on those ridges and valleys of pudding soft fat that we lock up all our memories inside.
“Sir…” The bartender inhaled a bit of air, bracing, perhaps reappraising my state.
“It is not a perfume bottle. If I may recommend… putting the nozzles to your nostrils?”
I nodded, or made a rough approximation of a nod. The bartender stood for a moment, sighed, and returned the gesture.
“Very good, sir.”
And he left me to stare at my order, disappearing into the back room, leaving a set of double doors swinging in his wake. Almost on cue, a soft bloop sounded from my All-black Twinnon Peregrine. I drew it from my tote bag, and stared at the screen.
Nostalgia Air. Nostalgia. Air. Thanked me for my patronage, and wanted to know if I’d like to open a tab at their Lea te Suldan “Memory Craftshop.”
I attempted to open my current charge and only missed the icon three times with my fingers. It expanded to fit my display and read:
“Stealthy Summer Sips: 105 Nu.”
For a moment, I sat without expression, though I felt particularly aware of the beat of my heart between my lungs. Whump whump, whump whump. Then a high sound, a ringing like tinnitus, slid like a phantom against my eardrums.
I stood up from the stool. I don’t know what I was thinking. No… no I do know what I was thinking, I know exactly.
I had to know how the machine worked, the machine that produced smells valued at over one hundred Nu. I had been to places like this in the past, but I’d never been so… uninhibited, as to take a hard look at the machinery behind the counter.
But now? I was floating. I was a fish in a liquor sea, an organism of pure and perfect alcohol. Creatures like this didn’t have any use for thoughts of ramifications or the shackles named “dignity.” With the macabre fascination of a child turning over a rock to see what was crawling and scuttling beneath, I approached the machine, silver and wrought like some art deco sculpture. There was disgust of course, but I just had to SEE.
I flopped forward, rolling over the bar and shuffled limply across until I toppled over, swaying back up to my feet. The patrons, a few baffled young men in terrible sweaters and an absolutely delighted older couple of gentlemen, did not shout for the bartender to stop me. I shushed them finger to my lips, spraying the bar with spit.
I slapped displays, fiddled with dials, struck the side of the machine until my knuckles stung. I changed every setting I possibly could, did everything I was able, short of trying to gnaw the casing off the scentsorium. That’s what it was called, the names written in fluid, cotton candy pink cursive on the flank of the machine, Nostalgia Air Scentsorium. Even drunk I hated it.
The machine spun to life, hissing and burbling happily, as if I had not bludgeoned it like a curious chimpanzee. The bartender, or whatever his absurd job title was, came running in from the backroom, eyes ablaze with fury.
“What the fuck, man?” he shouted, sounding suddenly like a very different person, “You’re going to get me up to my neck in shit!”
I explained to him that I was a food journalist extraordinaire. That I was Oscar Yasui, and I was here to reveal the culinary hoax that was one hundred Nu for a noseful of air.
My logic, listener, was that there wasn’t any way he could possibly have known about the first time I tried bourbon during my youth. His counterargument was much more succinct. He slapped me, open hand, straight across the mouth.
“You slapped me,” I said, staggering from an unexpectedly forceful blow from someone so wiry.
“Yes,” he replied. And then he slapped me a second time, opposite side, sending me falling through the bar flap and to my knees.
“Now kindly remove yourself from my establishment before I find reason to report your assault to the authorities. I don’t have the time or patience to deal with your antics.”
I stared, dumbfounded, my hand held to my stinging cheek. It seemed he had recovered his original persona.
But then.
Behind the counter the machine completed its order. Depositing its absurdly valued air into yet another ostentatious little vial. And again, my Twinnon Peregrine chimed.
The slap had sobered me some, locating the icon wasn’t nearly as hard this time. The words flashed clearly on the screen, and I found myself unable to suppress my laughter. After all the dials and settings I had changed, after all the havoc I had wrecked on the controls, the words on the screen said, clear as day:
“Stealthy Summer Sips: 105 Nu.”
The machine’s controls were fake.
Hey. Coming back to edit this part of the script during the recording process. I ended up not liking “fake” here. Fake implies forgery and potemkin, wet glue and painted on dials. I did some research on this device, this “scentsorium” and I found it to be something of a black box. The employee behind the counter, they just spin and twist and move how their heart tells them. The control panel – it doesn’t lead anywhere. I can only guess at the man behind the curtain, but smart money’s on a scanning system at the doorway that trawls through a customer’s presence on the buffer and outputs those terabytes of data direct to the scentsorium’s smell array.
If I was sober I could have brought all this to the inhabitants of the bar. I mean, if I’m correct it’s a massive invasion of privacy at best. I would have made myself seem very intelligent, yeah, if I had done that. Maybe in my wildest dreams received some light applause and a viral video on the buffer. But had I been sober, I would never have entered this bougie bunghole in the first place. Instead, uh, well you’ll see. Back to the podcast.
I clutched one of the red-cushioned stools that grew like gaudy mushrooms before the bar, made to hurl it through the glass display at the front.
Something in my back twinged, stung like my spine had discovered a new and exciting direction to bend. The stools were bolted down, married to the tile beneath them and probably the space-grade steel even further below.
A light laughter tinkled from the patrons at the bar. I responded by leaping over the counter and wrapping my arms around the scentsorium, digging my heels into the flooring with a squenk, and pulling backwards with all my might.
The employee who had struck me earlier returned just in time, to watch as I, straining and spitting, bringing the full force of a career writer’s musculature to bear, dragging the scentsorium seven inches from where it rested.
He dove for me, both arms outstretched, palms catching me just beside my sternum and sending me sprawling to the floor. Whether he was trying to prevent me from being crushed by the weight of that machine or whether he was trying to stop me from damaging company property, the end result was the same. Seven inches was enough to upset the scentsorium. It hung on the counter’s edge, its potential energy courted by gravity, and like a catholic gangster in a five star steakhouse, it tipped.
It smashed against the tile floor, its weight sending ceramic shards the size of my thumbnail flying like malevolently intentioned teeth. Its display exploded into a sparking gap, its body slumped and slouched under its own impact, an impact that sent a wall of shelves and artwork tumbling down around us. We both sat, the machine’s wreck between us, fuming and steaming, a smell like everything that ever was wafting up from it. Like every color forming white, it smelled present, bright, and blank.
We bled from shrapnel, the two of us, myself from a wound across the knuckle of my left hand’s ring finger. Him from a nasty cut to his lower lip. I didn’t feel any pain. I was too drunk. I think he didn’t feel any pain either, as he was intoxicated by hot and liquid rage.
And that, listeners, is how I learned the flavor of the food they serve in jail.
I’m Oscar Yasui, former licensed food critic for Palladium, fugitive from Martian captivity, garbage sorter, pen chewer, and drunken vandal of high concept, low class establishments.
Thank you very much for listening.