Eating Crow

[There are a few “thank you” messages at the start of this episode, which have been omitted.]

You don’t get to choose your meals in jail, but they come at regular intervals. Whether you’re hungry or full, exercising or napping, craving chocolate or pork, a steaming tray will slide out from a groove in the wall twice daily at 11 AM and 5 PM station time. You will not see a chef, a guard, or anyone besides the seven other prisoners allocated to your communal cell.

The first meal I ate in the Lea te Suldan Low-risk Offender’s Ward was a welcome respite from the hangover that scorched my tongue and struck my temples like hammers. The tray contained a Galaxy Gulp scale beverage, that shone a faint green under the light. There were two biscuits of mechanically regulated size, pale on the tops and bottoms but framed with a golden crispness on the sides. A tap with my finger gave a muffled thump without reverb. Not much in the way of air in these. There were flat pink gray slabs of what appeared to be skinned salmon, stacked in the same brick like arrangement, and shape as the biscuits. These main ingredients were served on a bed of jellied algal strips, with a displeasingly green color. The entire arrangement carried this lingering neutral “fresh” scent. A scent that filled the entire jail. Smell informs taste, so imagine a world where the air tastes the same as the food and the water and your pillow at night.

I hunched over my meal, keeping a watchful eye on my cellmates, but everyone assembled, men and women in the same gray sensor wired suit as me, were focused on filling their bellies instead of getting in buffervid brawls. With all the cameras in these cells, or motion wireframes, or scan readouts, it’s an easy source of internet content. A lot of them get sold by detention facilities to less reputable news sources, or posted to Vibe for easy views. People like people at their worst, as long as they can observe safely. Questionably legal, but there’s always a gray market for good video.

The biscuit was hard, as I expected, but I didn’t need to soften it with my beverage like some old-timey sailor. It was freshly baked by an automated machine, packed dense with carbs so as to hit my alcohol wracked stomach like a sponge. The salmon was rubbery. It obviously wasn’t real salmon, no shame there, but the cooking process was bizarre for artificial meat. As I chewed, I realized that it had been flash steamed as quickly as possible, no time for any char, no intention to even differentiate the faux-flesh. Fish is supposed to be flaky, to pull away from itself, to give the mouth time to savor firmness and oil. Nobody had bothered to season it either. No pepper, no salt. Not even the slightest misting of lemon or herb. Eating the first few mouthfuls was easy. Finishing the meal was, for me, impossible. I won’t give the algae the pleasure of a critical evaluation. It and I are, as of that breakfast, enemies for life. I respect and fear it.

The beverage was citrusy, mellow, sweet, but the flavors were so blended I couldn’t really put my finger on what I was intended to be drinking. Kiwi banana apple blueberry? Five different takes on a throwback to artificial lemon flavor? I found it fascinating, actually, I think my description here doesn’t do it justice; it was good! The best thing on my plate! Though beneath the sweetness I tasted a pharmacological bitterness. I worried for a moment that I was being drugged, but no, just some ibuprofen sprinkled into a massive burst of hydration and electrolytes. I did some research later, on the intention and organization of modern prisons, especially in quote/unquote more advanced cultures. I suppose that during my stay, some jail feed system identified my preexisting condition, that would be the hangover, and allocated carbohydrates, proteins, and medication as it saw fit. Thoughtfully prepared, if not empathetically. A healthier prisoner is a more compliant prisoner, so if every ward is reduced to the same blank state of well-being, the act of their imprisonment becomes much easier. I found myself craving a delicious cup of donut cake coffee, but they didn’t have any.

And that meal would be one of the three that I would eat during my relatively short stay in Lea te Suldan’s Low-risk Offenders Ward. And yes, despite how hungry I was, I pushed the half eaten tray away regardless.

So listeners. Something I’ve realized while traveling, riding the extrasolar rails from Earth to Le Straud: You can strap yourself to a rocket, slide that rocket till it thunders orthogonal to our existence, swimming and sparkling in the not-nothing some somewhere. Push out to the Between, where there aren’t limitations on speed and velocity. Where there aren’t any bad Carpaccios or twisted ankles. Or the lingering specter of microplastics.

Go that fast, put all things in the rearview mirror, and consequences will still catch you, listener. Faster than rain, faster than shame, faster than heartbreak. Quiet in the pursuit, loud as all hell when they inevitably reach you.

I’m thinking, that maybe we, well, I, should put less effort into running and dodging. I’m thinking I should heat the stovetop, put out the good china, and sit down with my consequences over dinner.

It’s been tough finding time and space to edit Gastronaut. In all likelihood you won’t be hearing from me for some time. But I didn’t want to leave you with my last message being, “I was locked in jail after attacking a Nostalgia Air Memory Lounge. My story ends with the mournful notes of a harmonica echoing from behind the proverbial bars.”

They don’t even have bars anymore. Those have gone the way of cinderblock cells and those old-timey bright orange pajamas. But even with everything having changed so much, we can’t envision a place to hold people without iron bars to grip with calloused hands, and shackles and… prison food. And the expectations we have of prison food.

But before I experienced any of that, I found myself lying, pinned, really, on a shattered tile floor in a bougie little nook where you could pay 105 Nu to huff air. It’s called a citizen’s arrest. From the light applause the bartender garnered when he compressed my head between his forearm and the ground, I guess it’s pretty entertaining to watch.

And uh, speaking of entertaining…

I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently a food journalist and extrasolar fugitive. You’re listening to Gastronaut.

Shock is a funny thing. Unlike what you’ve seen on the buffer, it doesn’t render you hysterical, and it doesn’t reveal “the animal everyone’s hiding,” whatever that means. Ugh. With the adrenaline and cortisol thumping through your body, some things get crystal bright, and other things dim way down. Memories most of all.

Pinned against the ground, I was crushed and bruised. The bartender was putting his anger into keeping me in place. Just a moment ago he was trying to save me from being smashed by a machine; the Scentsorium. I had pulled it down on myself, but now that he’d dealt with that issue I was a threat that had to be kept away from everyone else.

I don’t have any memories of the pain from his elbow in the back of my neck. Or from the cuts on my knuckles, my forearm, my cheek. Instead, I only remember how the sparks from the Scentsorium danced in blues and purples across the tile floor. I don’t remember exactly what the arresting officer said to me, only that he had this habit of popping his Ps when he spoke. POH-lice. POH-rabably. His badge was so perfectly shiny, that I could see my face in it. Maybe I remember it because I couldn’t meet his eyes.

Our conversation wasn’t very long. He checked my identity against the station’s systems, he read me my rights. I mumbled a bit, but mostly I just fought false gravity to remain standing.

I remember being brought to the edge of Lea te Suldan’s rings. You’re far from the commercial and service loop there, where the entirety of the last episode took place. The backs of the buildings and modules stand awkwardly, unpainted, undecorated, stark. Bare alloy, bolt and weld lines telling the story of years of construction. Tangles of cabling and piping, data and power and water in, trash and waste and transactions out. Like standing backstage, staring towards the audience, seeing all cardboard on the reverse side.

I will say that processing is exactly as they show in the movies, listeners. No changes, no surprises here. You walk into the LiDaR chamber, face forward, fingers splayed out on either side of you, as if you are threatening to hug the cameras. It’s such a silly posture to take, dynamic yet meek, aggrandizing yet exposing. A voice rang out over the loudspeakers, resonant and inhuman, “Match the pose displayed on the screen in front of you.”

The beams shine out, hair thin, tracking over every inch of your body. I hear that there was a time when an officer was needed to pat the suspect down, when there were concerns about incriminating materials appearing in pockets, lawsuits, mess, mess, mess.

“Turn. Turn. Turn” said the voice. And so you will, because you desperately want things to not get any worse.

It’s all over in seconds. Laser aerobics for the damned. In Ignition Star III: Durango, there is this fantastic scene where Satoshi Teller, the main character, does a flying jump kick right through the screen at the front, crashing through the booking process in a brilliant confluence of violent systemic resistance, practical choreography, and symbolism for the need to destroy the common world to achieve your dreams.

I did not jump kick the front display. I groped in a small bin for some dull gray overalls wired top to bottom with motion sensors, stripped down to nothing in front of an array of scanners, and deposited my possessions into a socket in the wall.

“One item remaining,” the voice intoned.

I held, in my hand, the growth chamber for Ernest the Savorflame Mushroom. He was now a brilliant, blazing orange. A smart little shroom that had grown beautifully from the powdery spore he began as, nestled among his soil and moss. A gift from Wendy Rammlin, Ernest was my little mute traveling companion. The inside of his plastic and metal egg was fogged with condensation, the displays on its circumference winked gently in my shadow.

“I need to monitor his moisture levels,” I murmured at the cameras, “he’s at a very sensitive stage in his development. I don’t… I don’t think it’s a good-” The voice cut me off.

“Suspect failure to comply may result in further charges leveled against their person.”

I stood there, holding the little pod. I pushed a few buttons, made some final corrections to his humidity levels, to the soil’s chemical composition. Enough to keep him comfortable if I was gone for a few days. Then I set him, gently as I could, into the slot in the wall. It retracted backwards and hissed shut.

I thought I would cry, but nothing happened. I just… stood there. Shivering in the cold of the processing chamber. Waiting for tears I didn’t have.

“You may advance to distribution,” the voice stated. And so I did, through corridors that rarely saw the feet of anyone but prisoners, following a floor that lit in intervals to guide my progress through the space.

How do I describe this kind of place? Functionally. Knowing a meal isn’t just about knowing what you have on your plate. It isn’t even judging its taste, though that is a feature that anyone should pay special attention to. If food is art, and it is, then to understand any work of art you have to appreciate its function.

Follow me here.

Jails and Prisons function to hold people in place. To keep something somewhere. Reductively, they’re a box for people, like a Railship or a Bus. I love my box metaphors! My cellmates mostly were here awaiting tele- sentencing, as was I, or simply were being held for transport and extradition to long or short sentence facilities.

But these are also places to punish. The average person only gets something like one hundred and ten years of lifespan, and if you’ve got the money, only eighty or ninety of those are really anything to be excited about. Spending even a year, or half a year in a blue-white box where you barely get to choose what to do is a pretty heavy punishment. But it’s been our go to for ages, only really evolving internally, the beatings and degradations getting quieter and quieter until one day it was the guards that just vanished as a profession. Not entirely, I suppose. But on Lea te Suldan, the guards have certainly gone the way of the whales.

Lea te Suldan’s Low-risk offender’s ward, which is the station’s clinical fancy term for a jail, is a vision of their interpretation of justice. No opulence, no grand comfort, everything padded and plated with memory foam or hardened plastic. Each of the large holding cells are sealed away from the outside world using electrically signaled variable opacity glass. By the way, that’s what Sighurn LLC manufactured before they expanded into the sunglasses market -- little corporate trivia for you there.

The smell is fresh. Not lemony sour or the powerful burn of a cleaning solution, just… fresh. It’s a light and airy smell that I’d nearly associate with clean linen, but so unlike anything that I’ve ever smelled that it just became “Jail Smell” inside of my mind. It’s the same smell that the clothing and the bedding has, that the padded fabric of the walls have, even the water from the faucets carry that exact scent. Shut your eyes for a moment and imagine that, actually. An entire world where every item, every person, every meal, every element of your environment smells almost exactly the same. It’s at first calming, but eventually it uh… becomes maddening.

I arrived at my own holding cell. Eight bunks, eight prisoners, eight sets of identical gray jammies. Two small tables between them, lined with simple metal chairs, bolted onto tracks that allowed them to be slid in and out. No visible cameras, but as I learned later, the walls were so lined with hidden optics that everything might have been bedazzled with visual input.

My fellow prisoners were a quiet bunch. It was a jail after all, not a prison, so nobody intended to stay for very long. Everyone mostly kept to themselves, eyeing each other with quiet suspicion. The standoffish passengers on the Goodenough Kanemori were friendlier by far, but they, on some level, had chosen to be there. Here, behind the flat black wall that divided us from the passage to freedom, nobody had any interest in forming lasting relationships.

Which, I mean, fair. I wasn’t really eager to introduce myself to anyone else. I didn’t feel I had much in common with a jittery woman with a crewcut or a very sad looking man with a formerly proud, now mutilated handlebar mustache. A tall man who remained determinedly folded up in his bunk, a grinning woman who looked far too proud of herself to be in prison. There were powerful, howling retches coming from the integrated bathroom, accompanied by cooing affirmations between fountaining liquid spews. There was a serious looking man missing both ears and sporting a chrome jaw. And there was slender and tipsy me.

Everyone, except maybe the earless man with the chrome jaw, felt a little off in how they moved. In how they spoke, or even stood. There was always a bit of stammer, a bit of sway. A woman stubbed her toe against a table and sort of looked at it quizzically instead of making any exclamation. Shock was my working theory.

I found the bunk with my name and number already projected above it. I settled in on a bed chilled to discomfort by a nearby vent.

The second meal I ate in the Lea te Suldan Low-risk Offender’s Ward was a dinner. Breakfast and dinner, they feed you twice with perfect regularity. You can bring a digital clock up on any of the otherwise featureless displays that make up the walls and floors of the big adult daycare that is the holding facility, but even if you couldn’t do that, you could easily tell time by simply counting the meals slid through the feeding port.

Sliced, baked yams adorned the tray like poker chips. Or maybe they were sweet potatoes, I never really figured out which. Yams or sweet potatoes. They tasted like yams AND sweet potatoes, probably a… probably a problem with the extrusion array. Or maybe that was the point, for them to taste completely indistinct… Sweet potatoes are actually not potatoes. They’re a kind of yam, even though we call them sweet potatoes. This was actually a conversation I had… I had with Cali back on Mars. Before my escape from her employer, the Duke of New Caledonia, got her and everyone around her fired. I cut that conversation for time, even though I thought it was really, really funny. Sometimes we have to… Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for time.

Uh… khm.

The sweet potatoes were paired with a rectangular lump of ground meat, built up from cell strata to mimic charbroiled beef. It was served under a sloppy blort of light brown sauce that, when tasted on a finger, reminded me a bit of lightly fermented soy and fish. Artificial foodstock, fed into a machine designed to make the food appear “natural” then instructed to make that natural food look processed again. All of this might seem lavish for prison food, but the presentation: a scattering of baked yams spilling into the mystery sauce of a rectangular, naked hamburger patty, was very much like a lunchroom cafeteria. The beverage was that exact same sports drink, exact same vague fruit flavor, though the aftertaste wasn’t nearly as bitter. I suppose the mechanical provisioner inside my wall had reduced my ibuprofen dosage, though my head still ached terribly.

I picked over my meal with a small plastic fork, careful to keep it clear of my sleeve as I ate. I seemed to emit an invisible aura from my new clothing that would alter the stiff plastic into rubbery pliability whenever it got too close to my body. Probably to keep the utensils from being recruited into that noble, two hundred thousand year old proclivity we humans have of turning anything in our environment into something with a stabbing point.

Though this did have the consequence of requiring any hungry prisoner to eat away from themselves, elbows nearly locked, or else try to feed themselves with a limp rag of a fork. This, coupled with the sloppy and haphazard presentation of our trays, only further enhanced the image that we were all toddlers on high chairs, fumbling as we fed ourselves.

There came a knock behind me as I ate, then again, then again until I finally took notice. Well, I say took notice, but what I mean is that I began to choke on a powdery bit of sweet potato. Only after I recovered, wiping tears from the corners of my eyes, did I turn my attention to the grey-blue surface of my wall.

Tap tap tap tap tap…

Musical. A familiarly paced beat. It came again, after a short pause.

Tap tap tap tap tap…

I looked over my shoulder, at the other prisoners. They were mostly watching something projected on the walls and floors around me. My bunkmate had turned in early, his nearly gray chicken half eaten, fork discarded, unwanted, unneeded.

I leaned into the wall.

“Hey, Oscar,” the wall said. “Didn’t know my neighbor was a celebrity.”

I hiccuped in response. A light, gurgling noise that made my bunkmate grumble and roll from one shoulder to the other.

“Oh, um, ha, I just thought it was kind of funny. That you’re locked up in the cell next to mine. I can see you, by the way, hello.”

I stared very hard at the wall, and was rewarded with an image of my own reflection.

“No, um. Not the wall. The cameras. I can see you through your cameras. They’re actually sort of the only cameras I’m inside.”

“What?” I said. I wanted to know who the voice was, but more than that, if they had somehow breached the prison’s security... I knew they weren’t in the cameras, obviously

“I’m not in the cameras, obviously.” the voice said, confirming my then thoughts and present narration. “But I have taken care of the microphones. Those were easy. My own cell… not so much.”

“But you are in the ones in my cell, I’m following,” I replied. I didn’t know anything about data security, besides not to set your password to “password.”

“So… I’m not sure you’re comfortable with this sort of thing, but I actually need your help, Oscar.” The voice was filled with trepidation, “With escaping.”

I found myself grinning a bit, in spite of my awful meals and terrible situation.

“No, no, it’s okay,” I said, “This isn’t my first escape from being imprisoned.”

“Oh, oh! That’s really great actually. Because I’ve never been caught before, this is my first time? Normally, I can just tune in to transmissions and stay ahead of anyone trying to catch me, or I can disappear into a crowd, this is really sort of a first.”

“What do you need?” I asked, with some annoyance. Were they laughing at me?

“In a bit… well, I don’t know exactly when--I think I can open your cell door.”

I didn’t question. “Okay, good, that’s really good. Then what?”

“You’ll need to sneak out of your cell, then get down the hallway to evidence lockup. I can make it so the system doesn’t really “see” you, but only for a little while. The good news is that there isn’t anyone stationed here. I mean, they’re really understaffed tonight. Can’t figure out why.”

“That doesn’t sound suspicious to you?” I said, throwing a glance at the featureless wall that led to the rest of the facility, “What if it’s a trap?”

There came a light snort through the wall, and I found my jaw tightening.

“Oscar…” the voice composed itself. “Oscar. I’m sorry for laughing, really, I am. But why would resort cops lay a trap for random prisoners? You’re famous, but you’re also a food critic.”

“Food journalist” I corrected.

“Oh,” the voice said. “Um. Okay. You’re a food journalist, not… Satoshi Teller. And they don’t really know who I am, so there isn’t any worry there.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Polity Yellow,” the voice answered simply.

“The Performance artist, the intersolar vandal, the art activist and wanted criminal?” I shot back.

“Hey, I believe that you’re Oscar Yasui.”

“Bullshit. You aren’t Polity Yellow.”

A sigh, then a shuffle of motion. “Fine, I’m a…” a pause, as if the voice was wondering what exactly to say. “I guess you’d call me a confidence man. My name’s Sue Denim. They locked me up for counting cards with a cybernetic implant, which I can also use to hack into police security systems. ”

I accepted this immediately. It isn’t that I necessarily believed Mx. Denim, it was more that their explanation made a lot more sense then claiming to be Polity Yellow.

“Alright… Sue. So I just go down the hall to evidence lockup. Which is…” I paused.

“It’s to your right when you exit the door. You should have seen it just before they put you behind glass, it says ‘Evidence’ in baby blue on the sign? Can’t miss it.”

I could, in fact, miss it. I had missed it entirely while entering because I had mainly been following the arrows on the floor or looking at my shoes.

“Got it, I know exactly where that is,” I lied, trying to keep pace.

“Great. Your door will open this evening at around 3 AM. Get into evidence, look for a door with an electrical warning on it, go in there, open the wall panel, then flip breaker 3 and 5.”

I looked around for something to write with. A half serious complaint about the prison system; absolutely no craft supplies are made available to prisoners awaiting tele-sentencing. None at all. Certainly, I felt as if my potential for artistic expression was being stifled by an uncaring punitive mechanism.

“What if the door is locked?” I asked.

“The door in evidence? Um… those doors don’t really have locks, Oscar. It’s just a maintenance closet, and prisoners aren’t exactly walking around.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” I lied again. Sue was silent for a second, and I took the time to try to work some spit across my dry tongue. When the voice returned, there was a note I couldn’t place.

“That’s… great, glad you’re thinking ahead. I’m going to go do some… confidence man stuff, you try to get some rest, okay?” They began to retreat from the wall, but I had one more thing I needed to say.

“Wait, Sue? Sue!” I hissed, eyes darting to the other prisoners.

A pause. Then.

“What? What’s wrong?” a hint of irritation there.

“My things, I need everything they confiscated from me. I can’t… I can’t do this without my things.” I bit my lower lip. I had leverage, if Sue wanted to use me for this plan, they needed to build trust with me. I was ready to say as much if they refused. I really, really needed my things, listeners. This podcast wouldn’t exist without them. I needed Ernest! He was all alone in some storage locker somewhere.

“Okay. That won’t be a problem, I actually have access to the lockers in evidence, not that it’s doing much to help us here. It’ll take a sec once you get in, but I’ll get them for you.”

I was at a loss. I wasn’t expecting it to be this easy.

“Y-you promise?” I said.

A small laugh from the wall.

“I promise,” Sue said.

And then they really were gone. I brought my knees up to my chest and thought hard. Who could this person behind the wall be? How had they managed to get into the network of the station? These thoughts raced around the inside of my skull as I tried, and failed, to get some sleep. Eventually I fell into that… awful sort of telescoping stress torpor, lingering on the verge of unconsciousness, half-dreaming that I needed to get to sleep before the appointed hour.

I was roused by the sound of a few mechanical locks gliding, almost imperceptibly, from their locking position in their wall sockets. Then the wall sunk, vanishing into the floor. Sue had pulled it off. I lowered myself as gently as I could from my bunk to the padded, playground flooring beneath.

No other prisoner had moved from their beds. Some snored loudly, but others merely breathed gently under their thin sheets, bodies cradled in little nests of memory foam. Still, I could not shake the feeling that eyes were on me, and without any plan of what to say or do if confronted by a cellmate, I peeked out into the hallway.

Dimly lit, but completely empty of any officers or staff. As Sue had said, the word “Evidence” hung in mid air down the hallway, its bright blue surface occasionally rippling with strands of stray light. It shifted, always legible in that neat trick of perspective holograms rely on. My thoughts turned inward as I crossed past other cells, their interior fully visible from this side of the one way wall.

Anxious as I was, I couldn’t slow my brain. This “Sue Denim” had chosen me for this. Why? They had mentioned my celebrity, was their trust rooted wholly in my stardom? Do confidence men generally “go in” for food journalists? I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being used. The sensation clung to my shoulders like cold syrup. By the time I arrived at evidence, the air conditioning had found my sweat and chilled my skin.

The doorway was open, a little status light at the wall shone an inviting green. Inside the room was a series of chain driven lockers, each rotating around a fixed point, disappearing into the ceiling. I stepped in front of this… chain driven evidence carousel, hoping to get a glimpse of my things, but each locker was a mystery, marked with a serial number that probably meant something to someone who wasn’t me.

At the mouth of the evidence carousel, a locker hung in place. contents on full display. Inside was a wallet and watch I did not recognize and, honestly, did not want to put my touch DNA on. But there was also a sizable bar wrapped in brassy foil, reflecting the small light of the locker’s interior. A Mercury Mallow, listeners. I reached out without thought, driven by pure instinct.

You can get these anywhere, listener. As the jingle goes, “You don’t need to howl-lo for a Mercury Mal-low!”

I swear their marketing team made that rhyme as tortured as possible on purpose. For me, it swings all the way back into brilliance. Howl-lo, Mal-low. Howl-lo. Maaaaallll-looooow. Ugh, I love it!

They don’t put Mercury Mallows in meal kits, and they don’t put them in god-DAMN jailhouse food. You know how many times I’ve put “Mercury Mallows Near Me” into my search bar on the buffer, during this trip alone? My browser records it for some hellish metric reason; 158 times. Do you know how many times a Mercury Mallow has been within a 30 minute drive of my location? Five. Five times. They were on the Singular Devotion, but otherwise completely inaccessible. It’s some sort of twisted universal constant.

The third meal I ate in the Lea te Suldan Low-risk Offender’s Ward was, as you all can probably guess, a pilfered Mercury Mallow. It was mashed nearly across its length, so firmly that I could see a few letters from the brand name of an officer’s kneepad. But I didn’t let that deter me, and it shouldn’t deter you either, listener! I used to be a food critic--putting my nose up at food was something I never really loved, but it sure did form the core of clicks and engagement on any single post I put up on the buffer! And I wouldn’t turn my nose up at a Mercury Mallow if everyone on Earth would listen to my podcast.

That’s what we’re dealing with here. The moment I opened that wrapper up, the room filled with a low chocolatey sweetness, notes of honey, of vanilla, as the brassy gleam gave way to a chocolate so dark as to seemingly bend the cold light of the Evidence room. The splits and cracks in the bar yielded to marshmallow of the highest quality, soft and fluffy with a rich and syrupy bite. Laced with honey right in the mix, resting on a thin mattress of smooth butterscotch chew. The mouthfeel of a Mercury Mallow is so good, you can taste the bar with just your teeth alone. The give of high quality dark chocolate, the pliable resistance of the chew.

A bar so potent, they hit three times. The jolt on the tongue, the warmth in the gut, and finally, when the bar hits the liver and pancreas, the full body pupil contracting thrum of a spiking blood sugar. This is a grown adult’s candybar. Hand it to a child if you want a fast and portable way to create a screaming, flailing, nuclear device.

I’ll admit, the bars are better when they haven’t been flattened by an overenthusiastic patrolman, but when the Saints open a door, let it be said that Oscar Yasui leaps mouth first.

I licked my fingers when I finally ran out of Mercury Mallow, but I felt satisfied to my very soul. It was the boost to my spirits, the renewed sense of purpose, the… sizable load of sugar and caffeine in my brain. I was so wrapped up in my meal that I hadn’t noticed a light above me was flickering unnaturally. Sue was probably trying to get me back on track. I called it even.

The door was easy to find, white bodied with a silver handle. No markers beside the rounded black on yellow triangle of an electrical hazard. I didn’t see any sort of keypad beside it, no little indentations for cinematic laser tripwires. I pushed through.

*Click clack*

The door did not budge. I shook the handle, I put my shoulder against its surface as silently as I could and leaned my weight into it.

Locked. By what exactly? Could it perceive the sensors on my suit? Was it broken?

No. Just above the handle was a small metal groove, toothed malevolently on one side. I rubbed my eyes at the sight of it, realizing I was in the presence of some fearsome beast of the cretaceous. A mechanical lock.

I looked over my shoulder at a small camera nodule, hoping Sue could see me. See me and… what? Hack a series of cold metal gears? Is that what was inside a mechanical lock? Gears and pipes and coal and orphans?

The door did not move. The lock remained cold and implacable. If Sue screamed in frustration, I did not hear it. I considered battering the door down, even retreating a short distance away to build momentum, but I found myself approaching it at a walk. Resting my palm, then my cheek against it. Firm, cheap metal. The kind of door that yielded to torches, to explosives, to augmented superhumans, but not to men, but not to me.

I was not going through this door. I was going back to my cell. Then a tele-sentencing hearing would follow, then a prison ship, then back to Earth. I had ruined at least three lives, but certainly many, many more, and all for nothing. Not even for my pride.

Something felt deeply wrong, then. My heart was jackhammering, my eyes couldn’t focus, my palms began to sweat to the point of slickness. I struggled to stay standing. At the time, I felt a horrible panic warring with a kind of foreign tranquility, like someone was pressing a warm, thick blanket over my face. Smothering me. I collapsed to the ground, struggling to catch my breath. I thought it was as panic attack at first, but as I tried to breathe, as my lips trembled, as spittle sprayed with every breath, I felt as if it had to be the worst panic attack I’d ever had in memory.

I can’t imagine how Sue must have felt in that moment. Watching the man they had put their trust in suddenly collapse into what could have been a cardiac arrest for all they knew.

From where I hunched on the floor, I saw a light like the sun. Radiant in that closed space. Shining from the locker carousel that, probably thanks to Sue, had sprung into motion. It rotated, cycling locker after locker through the vending machine-like slot in its plastic siding.

And then it came to a stop. A silver locker identical to all the others save for a slight variation on serial number slid into place, its door swinging open to reveal its contents. I clawed at the walls and desks beside me, hauled myself back to my feet, staggered to the locker’s open mouth.

Inside was my confiscated possessions. My Twinnon All Black Peregrine, my baby blue Chorus 12S, my wallet, receipts for kebabs, and the growth pod of a certain little mushroom friend.

The light, those rays, had disappeared between one of my blinks. But the locker remained. I murmured something in appreciation of Sue. I reached out a hand towards the locker, fingers barely brushing against my Twinnon Peregrine.

“Oscar,” there was an unfamiliar voice.

“Sue?” It didn’t sound like them. What was happening?

“No Oscar, I’m not Sue. Reach a little deeper into the locker, alright? I want to get you out of here, but I don’t really have a concept of time, so sooner is better than later.”

I reached in deeper, fingers fumbling in the dim illumination of the locker’s interior. And I grasped something small and smooth.

Out came Ernest. Ernest the Savorflame Mushroom.

“Hey Oscar,” Ernest said, almost grimly. “Keep that breathing steady, big guy, I’m here to help.”

I shuddered, gagged in… sheer revulsive psychological shock. “Mushrooms can’t talk” was the consensus of most of the literature I had read to prepare myself for caring for a Savorflame.

“You’ve really screwed yourself up, Oscar. I’m sorry you did that. It wasn’t the right move, but I’m not here to linger on past decisions. Again, just breathe. You’re really gonna need some steel, and soon.”

Listeners, I… beg that you bear with me on this.

I was aghast. I could hardly understand what was happening. Inside the pod, Ernest was now four times the size he was when I was first gifted him.The color of a cartoon fireball, and little grooves of alarmingly swollen mushroom flesh. He glowed a faint yellow against the dim light of the evidence room. Ernest chirped up again, his high voice oddly clear through the plastic of his container.

“Work vessels. Drunken wanderings. Jail. We’ve come a long way from petting sweet potatoes, haven’t we?”

My temper flared and I bent towards my small and judgemental traveling companion.

“Listen here, first of all, why does everyone around me insist on taking that moment with the sweet potatoes out of context?”

“Nobody really does, Oscar. It was brought up once by Cali, but you include it in your scripts because you think it will boost engagement.”

I grunted at that startlingly accurate assessment. “And second, I do not need to justify myself to a mushroom.” I leaned in closer.

“You can’t talk.”

Ernest sat there in his moss. Completely still.

“Well, no. No, I can’t. I don’t have lungs or a tongue or a larynx. I’m mostly chitin and little fibrous threads of mushroom hyphae. And also enzymatic proteins that function as detonators for a reservoir of explosive chemical analogues.”

I sat speechless.

“What?” Ernest said. “You know a lot more about mushrooms than you realize. You probably would have hurt fewer people if you just embraced your true calling as a mushroom farmer.”

“I’m not a mushroom farmer, Ernest. I’m a food journalist.”

“It’s okay, Oscar. You don’t have to prove that to everyone. And you don’t need to destroy yourself to prove a point, either.”

“What point do you think I’m trying to prove?”

“That you aren’t a bystander with a pen and a camera. That you aren’t someone who lounges back and watches as good people suffer. That your existence means something, and that your work can do more than be something someone reads once and maybe changes what food they order online.”

“That’s...” I started, but Ernest continued:

“That’s okay. It’s okay to want to be a good person. It’s good to want to do good. You don’t have to pull your punches with that thought. You don’t have to cage it or shy away from it.”

What do you say, listeners. What possible words do you use in a conversation with an alien mushroom that has all the answers.

Lightning blue sparks crawled in my field of vision, and I found myself constantly working to blink them away, “I think that I’m having a mental breakdown.”

“It’s been a very hard couple of months, Oscar. You can have a little breakdown. As a treat. You can have a breakdown and still get out of jail, you can get Sue out. And all the other people in jail too, I guess.”

“Wait, is that good? Is it alright to let everyone out?” I said.

“Maybe? I’m not really sure exactly what the morality of this shakes out to. Though I am an alien I’m also a mushroom, which means I’m not equipped to be an arbiter of morality. I do know one thing,” Ernest said.

“That I can’t fix anything if I’m shipped back to Earth and imprisoned.”

“Yeah, Oscar. Exactly. You really do have what you need to help people.”

“But I have to take responsibility.”

“Yeah. Now let’s get you out of here.”

I looked to the door. Get out of here? I was feeling determined, sure, I had done some self exploration with the help of my small mushroom friend. But the door remained locked. Sue couldn’t hack it, and unless I learned the dying art of lock picking I couldn’t bust it open.

Except. Except I could.

“Oh no,” I said, heat rising into my face. “No, no, no.”

“Hey,” Ernest said. “It’s okay. Everything is going to be alright. One of us has to make it out of here, and we both know the depths of your soul, Oscar. You think it should be you.”

“But…” I stared at the pod. “I’ve carried you all this way. I wanted to plant you into the soil of Le Straud.”

“Then plant something else there, instead of me. Grow something else. Grow yourself, Oscar.”

I brought my fingers to the small pod and pressed a few colored buttons, each barely larger than the head of a pin. “Red, white, white.” The online manual had said.

There was a tiny hiss, barely more than a puff of air. The plastic cap came away easily. Ernest was bare to the world. A cloud of moisture rose as the lid came away, and finally, a smell of life that existed in stark contrast to the neutral freshness of the jail. Moss, dirt, humidity. Life. I lifted him free of his enclosure, cradling him.

“You’ve got really warm hands, Oscar,” Ernest said.

He was cool to the touch. I brought him to the lock. He was sticky, emitting an acidic smelling compound that weeped from gaps in his flesh. I stuck him against the bare metal, pushing him gently against the keyhole. He fixed there, firmly. From my reading I had learned that Savorflames have a two part reproduction strategy. Spores settle and grow into new mushrooms as expected, but the little chunks, the mushroom shrapnel propelled by the explosive death of the progenitor, they stick in all directions. Many become clones of their parent, growing into identical savor flames, building larger and larger colonies.

But in the evidence room, cold and dead, there is nowhere the spores can germinate. Any fragments stick to the walls would simply wither and die, unable to gain any nutrients from the cold metal and plastic. I couldn’t even gather the mushroom shrapnel to grow a clone in the pod. Ernest’s microbiome, cultivated so precisely inside his greenhouse pod, had already been disturbed by my hands. He was doomed the moment I exposed his pod to open air.

I stood there, just staring. Then I leaned forward… and put the ragged edge of my thumbnail against the peak of his domed head.

“Last one, okay? Last person you use to keep moving forward.”

“I promise,” I said, fighting back tears.

“I believe you, Oscar. Just believe yourself.”

I struck my finger across the top, leaving a rent where scorching air pushed out, wailing like a tea kettle. I could barely hear myself over its high pitched whine.

“Goodbye, Oscar.” The mushroom said as I backed away. Ernest’s head was swelling now, almost twice its original size. A bright yellow light was blooming from his skin. A few tears escaped down my cheeks.

“Goodbye, Ernest,” I replied.

Ernest burst. There was the sound like a gunshot, ringing through the hallway, and a bright green-yellow flash. With a creak of little used hinges, the door swung inward on the force of the explosion, a little concentrated blast the size of a grapefruit.

I leapt forward, eyes pinched nearly shut, stinging from the acrid fumes and what must have been millions of little spores that burned at my cheeks, my earlobes, and my eyes. What remained of my friend now scorched me.

Inside the room was the circuit breaker that Sue had described. I yanked it open, found switches 3 and 5, and slid them from the ON position to the OFF. They had almost never been used, and I wrenched my fingers yanking them into place.

There came a bass note, something I felt rather than heard. It echoed through the ward’s walls. What few lights that were on in the empty facility switched off, replaced by the low orange gold of emergency lightning.

“Thank you,” I breathed, to no one. “I swear I’ll do better.”

I coughed on spores as I exited, grabbed my possessions, and nova’d the ground with my feet, all the way back to the cellblocks.

A slender young person with bleach blonde hair and a jumpsuit that matched mine came rushing out to meet me, a worried look emblazoned across their freckled face.

“Hey… Oscar.” Sue said. “You okay? You sort of… flipped out in there. Spoke to a mushroom? Did that candybar you ate have caffeine in it? And how did you know that Savorflames exploded?”

Like an idiot, I stopped in front of them, arm twitching, undecided whether to hold out a hand for them to shake. For a moment Sue’s eyes darted from my face to over my shoulder.

“Okay,” they said, “come to think of it, that’s all actually not really important. We need to go, right now.”

And then they were running past me, racing down the hallway, silent except for the paff of their feet on metal.

“Come on! Let’s jet before anyone figures out what’s happening!”

A few prisoners were beginning to peek out of their cells, eyes hazy, seeming to struggle with the idea that the door was open to the hallway. A few spoke among themselves, but their conversations were slow and rambling. Everyone wanted to know if something was wrong, if there was something they needed to do. In an instant, they were scattered with yelps and gasps as that one prisoner, the one with the serious face and the chrome jaw, came barreling down the hallway at a speed that certainly exceeded human limits. The ground shook with each whirling impact of his feet. Even with Sue’s significant headstart, he blew straight past them and vanished through a doorway.

That shook me free of my reverie. I ran for it. I ran for freedom, trailing behind Sue, through door after door until we hit the back rows of Lea te Suldan, then the alleyways, then the crowded streets, where one face was as good as any other.

Ten minutes later, Sue and I sat panting on a speedrail, drawing disinterested looks from the dozens of passengers that were squeezed in beside us. My nose was full of the reek of sweat, perfume, and expensive leather. Both our jumpsuits were dark and damp at the pits, but we had thrown on some jackets to hide the jail emblems emblazoned on the back and front.

“How… how is nobody finding us?” I panted.

“Because… I was busy… disabling their trackers while you were eating candy and talking to a mushroom,” they retorted.

“How is that possible? How are you able to do that?” I asked.

“Because, as I tried to tell you the first time you asked, I’m Polity Yellow.”

“Oh,” I said, a realization dawning. “Fuck.”

“Sue Denim?” They said, “Like… pseudonym? I kind of thought you were screwing with me back in the cell so I…”

“You’re Polity Yellow,” I responded, in shock.

The speedrail shifted tracks and the two of us swung a bit, in time with a wave of other passengers.

“Don’t make a big deal about it,” they said, grimacing, “it was my backup career.”

“What in all Sol was your first pick?”

They grinned and looked off to the side, out the window at Lea te Suldan.

“We’re almost there,” they said. And I never got my answer.

The station was a blur of wealth as we bulleted past it all, but the stars were too far to wipe away with mere motion.

Polity Yellow brought me to their ship, waiting unimpounded at one of Lea te Suldan’s countless shuttle docks.

“Pinhead’s is its name,” they had told me as I stared at its elongated needle nose, painted a reflective black with a great bushel of clematis stenciled on the side.

“Because of how it looks like a pin?” I had asked as they started up the boarding ramp.

They stopped, turned, and gave a sheepish smile and a shrug.

“Yup.”

And then they ducked their head and entered and I hurried to keep pace.

The ship took off shortly afterwards, lurching up and then out into space, putting Le Straud’s golden blue haze of a horizon in view as Polity Yellow angled for entry into the atmosphere. We had changed out of our jumpsuits. I was back in my blue slacks and gray jacket, they were wearing a plasticky looking auto-frame hoody with rumpled wader like structures around their biceps. They were strapped into the recessed cockpit, a steel bathtub recessed into the bottom deck, I floated in a tubelike passageway above them.

“We’ll be landing at Pau Pau, you can find your way wherever you need to go after we touch down. I can’t really make any other stops for you, so sorry for that,” they did not look up from their console.

“I don’t really have anywhere I need to be, it’s fine,” I said, fingers curled around a cold metal rung, legs behind and above me, laces twirling of their own volition.

“Oh. I sort of thought you had some food journalist stuff to do.”

“I just want to see Le Straud,” I said in reply.

“That so?” They craned their head upwards with a small frown. “It’s marshy and hot, all the cities are perpetually under construction, and people are killing each other.”

“I know,” I replied.

“Well, to give you a tip? Don’t call it Le Straud while you’re there.”

That piqued my interest. “Well, what should I call it?”

“Therevatti. That’s it’s real name. The name the people who landed there gave it. Not that polished up crap that Brightsail Colonial pushed to everyone after the fact. It’ll get you a lot farther calling it Therevatti than Le Straud. I’m serious, Oscar. Le Straud’s not the safest choice of words in some neighborhoods.”

“Therevatti,” I tried out the word. “Okay.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Why did you pick me, back in the cell?” I had to know.

“Oh? Uh… well, I just knew your name and face from Palladium. I read some of your articles. Sort of made me gravitate more towards you then the others. Kind of was a shot in the dark.” They punched a few keys on the console and slowly clicked a knob into place to focus a camera image.

“Also,” they spoke without looking, but I could see a smile creep across their features, “you’re a super picky eater. All that jail food probably looked like total crap to you, so you didn’t get all the hormone suppressants and tranquilizers they load into it.”

“What?” I said, startled. “So they were drugging the food?”

“Yeah? Oh wow, Oscar. You really need to get your news somewhere else. This isn’t exactly new. You were just taking a lower dosage with all those nibbles, but eventually it would all even out between the drugs in your system and your hunger. It gets everyone eventually, I just got to you fast enough. And y’know, by then it was either you or that guy with the chrome jaw, and I thought we’d get along better.”

It hit me. The dazed looks from the other prisoners, the muted smell of everything. The fact that of all the prisoners, only myself and the augmented man were able to muster up the will to run from the jail. He hadn’t finished his chicken just as I hadn’t finished my hamburger steak. And the caffeine from the Mercury Mallow. Nobody was served caffeine in their meals. I did a little research into this later, partly out of shame for looking like a rube in front of Polity Yellow. Some brands of hormone suppressants really do cause a host of side effects when taken alongside caffeine. That explained what I experienced with Ernest.

But that left one question unanswered.

“So you didn’t hear about me from Gastronaut?” I asked.

“What?” They craned their head. “What’s Gastronaut?”

I floated there looking into the gold flecked brown of their eyes. My chest ached.

“Nevermind,” I made an appearance of inspecting the wiring in the walls. “I’m really tired, actually, is there somewhere I can-”

“The back of the ship has some bunks. You can rest there if you want.”

“Great,” I replied. “See you later tonight then.

They called out after me. “Hey Oscar, before you go.”

“Yes?” I turned back to look at them.

They threw me a small satchel containing a plastic bag with a bright tomato on it, and a grid of four soft, interconnected lumps under foil. I caught it as it sailed past me, twisting in microgravity to track it with an outstretched hand. New Tastee #14 Slim. Tomato Soup De-lite. Just like what they served on the Goodenough Kanemori.

“Here’s your in-flight meal, Oscar. And uh… smart thinking back there with the mushroom.”

“Yeah. Yeah. His name was Ernest. Thank you.”

I floated my way to a cramped bunk in Pinhead’s rear compartment, leaving Polity Yellow in the cockpit looking a bit perplexed. They adjusted our multi-day long flight path so as to safely land us on target on Le Straud. Or, as they had called it: “Therevatti.”

Le Straud or… Therevatti listeners. After all these months of traveling. After two independent imprisonments, after hundreds of meals, the joy of a new place, the crushing monotony of a place I’d already been, Therevatti turned slowly beneath us. Purple and gold and green. The entire viewport was my destination, with just a ribbon of vacuum and atmosphere between.

And I would never have made it without Ms. Quach-Theodore, the chef at Cloudberry. Without Wendy Rammilin, her cooking and her gift of Ernest. Without the Railships Singular Devotion and Goodenough Kanemori and all those people aboard. Without… Rufus, Cali, and Sad-Eyed Girl.

I haven’t been a good person. Meaning well hasn’t produced any benefit to the people around me. But I don’t want to stop trying. I don’t want to… I want Gastronaut to make things easier for people, not harder.

I have to do better. I will.

In that bunk in the rear compartment of the Pinhead, I had my fourth and final meal of that eventful twenty-four hours. And the last meal of my journey from Earth to Therevatti. It was a bag of microgravity ready tomato soup, served in a hardflex plastic container. Alongside it were low crumb biscuits, baked especially to avoid floating remnants of an evening meal.

The tomato soup was salty, its synthetic herb base slightly spicy with false paprika. The biscuits had the high note of parmesan, and were almost a bit doughy, with an unexpected chew to them.

It was the best of the four meals I had eaten that day.

Listeners, I want to thank you. For sticking with me, for following me on this journey. Gastronaut has been… a nightmare to put together. Between the kidnapping, the work, the endless struggle to find quiet places to record lines… There was a lot of times I didn’t think I could get an episode out.

Thank you for sticking with the show. Thank you for your support. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do better.

I’m Oscar Yasui, for Gastronaut. Signing off from low orbit around Therevatti.