Memory Transcription Subject: Chiri, Gojid Refugee

  Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136

  It was just a shot of Baileys, but to me, as a “cured” omnivore, it was the first time my lips had touched upon the forbidden. The brown liquid tasted deep and rich and sweet, like I was drinking a cake. Chocolate had such a soothing bouquet to it, and there was nothing quite like it. In equal measures, it brought a bright floral aroma, an earthy depth of toasty nutty notes, and something else that was just entirely chocolate itself. Even beyond the flavor, the mouthfeel was unlike anything I’d ever encountered. The familiar light sting of ethanol fought with a viscous thickness that coated my tongue like an under filtered oilseed mash… or like the taste of blood in your mouth after a bad fall.

  …from grace?

  “That’s fucking delicious,” was all I could get out. I had chills.

  David looked more panicked than appreciative. “Jesus, I was going to walk you through a basic allergen testing procedure! Like touch a few drops to the inside of your mouth first to see if you had a reaction. But you just went for it! Hot damn.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, just… do a quick self-assessment. How are you feeling? Any warmth, itching, swelling?”

  Great question. Brain?

  All systems nominal. Base instincts are reacting positively to the fat and sugar content. You should definitely drink more, and then do something stupid that you’ll regret in the morning.

  I’ll take that under advisement.

  Oh, by the way, there’s a male in front of you who’s tall, thin, kind of exotically dangerous-looking? We could probably brainstorm some pretty great mistakes around that, if you’d like.

  We’re good, Brain, I’ll take it from here on my own, thanks!

  “Yeah, I think I’m fine,” I said aloud, trying pointedly to stare at something else aside from David’s face. My skin prickled like my fur wanted to stand on end.

  It’s the anticipation before a lightning strike. Humans are hurricanes. You’re getting drawn in.

  Looking away, the sheer variety of bottles lined up in neat little rows against the wall caught my gaze. The concept of “humans as omnivores”, rather than hunters, never really clicks until you spot how well-stocked they keep their bars. It’s a lot of effort for something so mundanely agricultural, and… I don’t know, bloodless. Did humans have bakeries, too?

  David tossed his hands in the air in celebration. “Alright! You can handle dairy! That’s… okay, I can work with that. I’ve got lots of great dishes I can whip up using things like butter and cheese. Any requests?”

  I had to wait for the translator to break down those words for me, but it also bought me a moment to think about what I wanted. Ideally, I’d wanted to try meat today, but if I was going to restrict myself to a safer in-between place like dairy, then I’d want something as close as possible.

  “Can you tell me what meat tastes like?” I asked.

  David leaned back as he thought about the question. He caught me staring at the bottles, poured me a small glass of a clear spirit that smelled strongly of evergreen trees, and slid it over. There were some small bits of fruit behind the bar, and he put a couple of them on a tiny plate for me.

  “Gin,” he explained, “and these are some of the garnishes we put in the mixed drinks.” Mixed drinks? I’d need to ask more. He pointed at the little bits of fruit in red, yellow, and green. “This is a cherry that’s been soaked in brandy and syrup. It’s extremely sweet. This is a slice of lemon. It’s extremely sour. And this last one is an olive. It’s extremely salty.” He rubbed his eyes. “We use these in cocktails because they’re some of the most intense representatives of their respective flavors. And in a broad sense, if you asked me to describe the flavor of meat, I’d put it in a similar category: it’s the most savory food there is.”

  I happily nibbled at my fruit--the lemon was particularly intense, but I’d eaten overly tart fruit before--chasing each in turn with sips of gin. The gin was just plain grain alcohol, albeit with some kind of an herbal infusion, but it paired nicely with each of the fruits. The sting on the palate said around 40% or so. It tasted like a cool forest.

  “Alright,” I said, grasping his meaning. “What’s the most savory dish you can make, then?”

  David nodded, and stood. “One order of pasta al tartufo e funghi, coming right up.” He held the concept in his mind as a proper noun, the same as a name, and so it translated oddly. All I got from the translator was “shaped boiled flour with fancy mushrooms and normal mushrooms”. The fancy mushrooms carried a vague sense of delicacy and forestry.

  I watched David head over to his open-concept kitchen and start fetching ingredients, which momentarily left me alone with my thoughts.

  Hey, this is your anxiety speaking again. You look like you’re starting to have fun, so it’s pretty important that I recontextualize this situation in the most unsettling way possible. You ready?

  I really wish you wouldn’t!

  Ahem. “You just walked into a predator’s lair after pre-seasoning yourself with sea salt.” There you go, have fun with that!

  Ugh, whatever! I’m a predator, too, now!

  A milk-drinking baby predator, maybe.

  Shut up! I hate you!

  I am you. Also, thanks for reminding me: your self-loathing is in here, too! Should I put her on?

  Don’t you dare!

  Okay, well, she wants me to let you know that you’ve put on weight recently, and you’re getting too old to ever find true love.

  If I wanted body image issues, I’d talk to my mother more!

  You have no idea if she’s alive or dead, and you probably never will.

  I shuddered slightly, and put my newly-emptied glass down. “Hey David, can I use your restroom or something? Just want to try to wash up a bit.”

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  David stuck his head back out of the kitchen and rapidly looked me over. My fur was visibly matted and salt-caked from the waist down. “Oh, I mean, you can use my shower if you like.”

  I blinked. “You have a shower in your restaurant?”

  “Maybe I should, this close to the beach? But no, I have a shower in my apartment. The building’s zoned for mixed-use. I live upstairs.”

  I nodded. “Sounds convenient.”

  David shrugged. “The five flights of stairs, less so. Here, I’ll walk you up.”

  It was around the third flight that I started finding the experience unpleasant. “I thought you guys were cool about taking care of people with health problems,” I huffed, panting heavily. “What if my legs didn’t work?”

  David grinned from a few steps ahead of me, dancing up near effortlessly. “You’re right, we’ve mandated that all buildings be wheelchair-accessible for around 150 years. But this building is 200 years old, and so it’s exempt so long as the owner only renovates.”

  I forced myself up another few steps. “What asshole owns this building?” I groaned.

  “Oh, as of yesterday, I do,” said David, grinning wider.

  “Oh good,” I said, panting, still slowly making my way upstairs. “So you’ll be installing an elevator soon?”

  “Ooh, sorry, I’ll have to check with my lawyer,” said David. “This is one of the oldest buildings in the city now, a living example of pre-war New York architecture. I might not be allowed to modify it.”

  I made a noise in my throat that might, charitably, have been interpretable as a proper growl. David just chuckled.

  The door on the top floor--did I lose count, or was that only four?--opened up into a strange doppelganger of the restaurant. It was a huge open space sprawling across the top two floors, the same way the restaurant took up the bottom two. There were no interior walls, but furniture had been arranged to suggest distinct areas without enforcing them, much like the tables in the restaurant established clusters of diners. Low bookshelves around some comfy chairs suggested a reading nook, a long sectioned couch wrapped around to face a television set in one corner, and a small kitchen was blocked off from a dining area by a gateway of LED grow lights hanging over shelves of aromatic plants growing Terran culinary herbs. The decor style overall was a chaotically rebellious mix of rustic and hypermodern, like he’d stuck starship parts haphazardly into a forest cottage. A full bathroom was notably missing from the floor plan, but a second-story loft taunted me with one last flight of stairs.

  I stalled, if only to catch my breath. I could walk pretty well over flatland--it’s how I got here from further down the island, after all--but inclines were the absolute worst. Stubby legs like the dog, who at least was small enough to be carried. Must be nice.

  “Nice place you got here,” I said, only wheezing a little.

  “Thanks, I stole it,” said David.

  I nodded politely. That was probably how predators resolved real estate issues. “Makes sense,” I said. “Good job!”

  David cracked up. “Nah, I’m joking, of course. There were some legal shenanigans involved, but I bought the place using money like a normal member of society.”

  “I see. Tell me more,” I said, moderately curious, but still mostly stalling for time.

  “Eugh, where to even start?” David said, gearing up for a nice long bit of pontification. That would give me more time to catch my breath. He considered his words carefully. “Alright, look, the short version is--”

  Fuck! No, my poor burning lungs crave the long version!

  “--the real estate market in the city is in chaos. Every major real estate firm with heavy investments in New York and LA is currently cashing out to cut their losses, or else they’re doubling down by suing their insurance companies to force them to cover the damages. Except skyscrapers are extremely expensive, let alone dozens of them per firm, so no insurers want to pay, and any insurer who loses in court is on the hook for enough losses to go completely bankrupt. Litigation like that can take years, though, and in the meantime, you’ve got speculators trying to buy in who are betting on juicy reconstruction contracts, and every level of government is desperately trying to intervene to prevent this from catastrophically damaging what’s about to become a wartime economy.”

  David shrugged. “So against that backdrop, I filed a quick lawsuit alleging that my landlord had variously violated my tenant rights--kind of frivolous, frankly, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it--and they basically paid me to fuck off. Or rather, sold me the building on the cheap to settle. Nobody sitting at the big kids’ table really cares about old walkups like this.”

  I nodded, and rallied myself to tackle the final stairs. “Nevertheless,” I said. “Nice place, and good job stealing it.”

  David chuckled, and showed me to the upstairs bathroom, which actually had a shower in it. He quickly ran through the contents. “Hot water, cold water, this is the body wash I use, but this one here is the closest I’ve got to a fur shampoo. I’ll get you some towels, and this pistol-shaped thing blows hot air if that’s easier for you to dry off with.” David blinked. “This is where I’d normally say something like ‘Let me give you some privacy’, but, uhh… I guess you’re technically already naked?” His eyes flicked down briefly, and he seemed to smile ever so slightly. Wait, was he admiring me? “I’ll be down on the couch. Yell if you need something.”

  Fiddling with the controls took a moment, but the warm water reinvigorated me. The slight buzz from my two shots downstairs made it even more relaxing. I was direly tempted to sit down and just soak it all in. My thoughts drifted, but thankfully my mood was floating too high to go anywhere dark this time.

  Instead, I wondered idly why David owned fur shampoo. Was he being optimistic about having some off-world guests in his apartment? Maybe even eager? The thought of being invited into his lair suddenly made me feel a little giddy.

  I couldn’t read the labels on the various soft plastic squeeze bottles, but now that I looked it over, the one he’d pointed out had a picture of a dog on it. Aw. Maybe I was reading too much into things, then. Still, for fur shampoo fit for a predator, I suppose I could do worse than humanity’s original packmates. My arms didn’t really have the reach to wash my back properly on my own, but due to my foray into the sea, the worst of the grime was lower down. I scrubbed my hips and legs thoroughly, and after scrubbing my head and face, I just let the suds dribble down between my quills.

  Once I finished rinsing and stepped out, I discovered fairly quickly that the towels were woefully inadequate to deal with the sheer amount of water my fur could soak up. I took my time with the blow dryer, and dithered on borrowing a brush--the sudden desire to look my best bubbled up in my chest--before settling on simply trying to tousle my fur back into place with my claws. I confess, once I was satisfied with how I looked, I may have spent a few minutes hyping myself up while posing in front of the mirror.

  “You’re adorable!” I said, pointing to my reflection.

  You’re a dork, it said back.

  By the time I got out, David had moved over to the smaller apartment kitchen, and was rolling wet flour out into a sticky sheet of putty. There were two glasses of some dark red wine on the table, some bread and fruit and nuts, and a bunch of little shapes of some unidentifiable substance in white and yellow.

  How long was I in the shower?!

  “Hey, welcome back!” said David. He perked up happily at the sight of me, and gave the dough one last firm knead before brushing himself off. “Joking aside, you looked like the stairs didn’t agree with you, so I ducked out for a minute and brought the food up. Have a seat!”

  I sat on the far side of the table, with the kitchen in the corner of the room, off to my right. Seemed polite, if he was cooking, to leave him the chair that was easier to get into and out of the kitchen from. With my back to the wall, I had a nice clear view of the whole apartment, too. I still wasn’t sure where I was sleeping tonight, but if David didn’t mind me crashing here, this was the nicest option I could think of.

  David sat across from me and smiled warmly. He was about to describe the food, I think, when a subconscious observation I’d had percolating finally finished burbling all the way up to my surface thoughts.

  You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say this is starting to look an awful lot like a courtship ritual.

  David’s mouth clicked shut, and a look of concern came over his face. “Are you alright? You’re shivering, and you’re turning kinda blue.”

  “Yeahthat’snormalformyspeciespleasecontinue,” I said, putting on my best facsimile of a human smile. Little overeager, maybe, but still a good save. I still had the upper hand! He didn’t know that my blood was blue. He didn’t know I was blushing.