Memory Transcription Subject: Chiri, Gojid Refugee

  Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136

  Brain, get over here! I need guidance!

  …You know I can’t leave, right? Besides, I distinctly recall you saying you didn’t need me today. Which. Ya know. Kinda on point for you.

  Less sass, more analysis! Is this a date?

  I don’t know.

  Is David into me?

  I don’t know.

  Am I into him?

  Kinda!

  What do I do?

  Have you tried not being a disaster and talking to him like a normal person?

  Impossible. Any second opinions in there?

  A quieter voice chimed in.

  Attraction is the domain of Physics. You need to check for Chemistry.

  My skin prickled. That made a strange kind of sense.

  That’s what I fucking said--no, screw it, I’m just turning on the spigots for the happy chemicals and the fear chemicals.

  Wait, why the fear chemicals?

  Because you’re gonna fuck this up.

  In a slightly rising panic, I took a long swig of wine. I meant to do it for courage, but the taste alone was so different that the unexpected sensation shocked me out of my spiral. It was far less sweet than the wines I was accustomed to, and very complex. Oddly complex. You make a wine from berries or stone fruit, it mostly just tastes like berries or stone fruit. This tasted like more things than I could count. This was…

  “What is this?” I asked.

  David blinked, taken aback. “Um, it’s wine,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know that, I grew up on a winery,” I said. My brow furrowed in concentration and irritation. I sniffed at it, and had to recoil in shock. It wasn’t bad at all--I loved it, frankly--but the scent was way more intense than I was expecting. The glass itself seemed like it was shaped on purpose to focus the aroma towards the sipper’s nose the way a satellite dish focused a signal towards the receiver in the center. “For starters, what fruit is this?”

  “Oh!” said David. “Okay, yeah, that’s a good starting point. Most Terran wines are going to be made from grapes, specifically, unless otherwise noted. That’d be this fruit right here?” He pointed at a little cluster of berries on a spindly vine. My paw shot out to grab a few, but I was interrupted.

  Okay, good job establishing a topic of conversation about a common interest, but maybe dial it back a bit? You’re starting to come off as rude.

  My paw hovered by the grapes, twisting as I turned it from a grab into a mere gesture. “May I?” I asked. My tone of voice softened as I wracked my brain to try and remember how to function in polite society. Wait, shit, were predators even supposed to be polite? No time, roll with it. “I’m very curious where this complexity is coming from.”

  David smiled, and nodded me onward. “Of course! That’s what it’s there for. The wine should pair nicely with the bread and cheese, too.” He helped himself to a bit of sticky pale goop with a white rind, spreading it across some bread. He tore into it with his predatory teeth, and I felt no fear. I wondered why I ever had. My claws were larger than his by far, and his fangs were a matter of millimeters at best. The whole predator-prey thing just seemed so… ridiculous now that I could look at it from the other side. David chased his bite with the wine, and seemed happy. “Mm. The Camembert’s still good,” he said. “It’s one of my favorites, but it can spoil faster than the others if you’re not careful.”

  The cheese looked tempting. That’s what I came here to try in the first place, but--

  Conversations happen on the outside of the head.

  “Looks tempting,” I said aloud. “I did come here to try that in the first place, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t finish making sense of the wine first.” I popped a grape into my mouth. Sweet, crisp and juicy, just a touch tart to balance the sweetness, and a prominent astringency around the edges from the rind. It was a fruit you could snack on for a while without getting tired of it. I could see--ahem. “I can see the connection, but there’s a lot more going on in the wine than just the grapes.”

  David shifted in his seat as he considered the topic. “Alright, well, to start, there are table grapes for eating, and then there are specific grape cultivars that are only grown for winemaking. This wine’s made mostly from Malbec grapes grown nearby in the Hudson River Valley, and blended into an homage to the lost Old Bordeaux style. It used to be too cold on the Hudson to grow Malbec grapes, but hey, you take the little perks of climate change where you can get them.” A quick little bittersweet smile crossed his face before he continued. “Much like with the cheeses, though, a lot of the flavors develop through aging. In the wine’s case, they’re typically aged in barrels made from oak wood.”

  “Aged in wooden barrels?” I repeated, a bit shocked. “That’s it? Not some kind of, like… space age flavor infuser device?” I sniffed at the wine again, and took a small sip. It was dry, it was juicy, it smelled of a dozen different fruits and flowers and loam and old seasoned wood. “You’re kidding me. You got all this just from packing this shit in lumber and waiting?”

  David shrugged. “Sure. I mean, it works, doesn’t it?”

  It boggled the mind. “I suppose it does,” I conceded. “I just assumed it had been tied to some wild new scientific development. But just the same old, eh?”

  David nodded. “Same old. Organic chemistry interactions are kind of wild like that. Frankly, that’s the really cool modern development, in my opinion: this way of making wine has worked for centuries, but we’re finally starting to understand why it works. The oxidation, the chemical interactions, the way the wood itself mellows and matures the flavor. Steel cask wines are a thing, for example, and they’re much harsher on the palate by comparison.”

  “Still,” I said, aware that my eyes were flitting back and forth between my glass and my gracious host, “you guys never tried to invent a better way to make wine?”

  “I mean, of course we’ve tried,” David chuckled. “We try new things all the time. Hell, if you want me to go grab a food chemist and have him go to town on some watered-down vodka, like, sure, you can just make artificially-flavored synthetic ‘wine’ that way. But at the end of the day, I think most wine-drinkers tend to prefer the authenticity and simplicity of the old ways.” He swirled his glass, and let the light hit it just so, illuminating the deep gemlike color. “Why, how do you guys do it?”

  I snorted at the question. “I mean, look, you gotta understand the Federation. There’s a huge stigma against anything perceived as ‘primitive’ or ‘precontact’. The poor Yotul are getting hit pretty hard by that one. Always sucks, being the new kid in the, uh… the pack?” I shook my head. “But yeah, I’m pretty sure anything involving something as utterly medieval as a wooden barrel would just get you laughed straight out of the market. I mean, at least until the holonet reviews started rolling in.”

  Did you seriously just say ‘holonet’? It’s holopad and internet. Holonet is slang from the sticks. Come on. I thought we were trying to adopt a more cosmopolitan persona.

  David didn’t know that, though, so I just waved the thought away. “My family’s operation was a lot of, uh… I dunno if you have these, but these huge steel fermenting vats? Fruit mash goes in one end, spigot pumps it out at the other, straight into the autocannery?”

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  David thought about it. “Sounds closer to our mass-market beer operations, actually. Wine on Earth still tends to be a more upmarket style of product. Even when it’s a cheap table wine, they still try to pretend.”

  I leaned forward, listening intently. “And this is a…?” If this was the Terran bottom shelf, a huge economic sector for my species was just straight-up fucked.

  “Carefully selected midrange bottle,” said David, smiling sharply. “I have a good eye for things that are a great deal more than they seem to be.”

  Why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was talking about us.

  I smiled around the lip of my glass, hoping to hide that I was turning a touch blue around the edges again.

  “Chiri, what exactly were you doing in the ocean at two in the morning in November?”

  This time, I choked on my drink.

  David’s face seemed to waver between heartfelt concern for my well-being, and a subtle note of… suspicion? “Nobody…” he hesitated, then leaned forward to study me. “Nobody told you to be here, right? Nobody forced you?”

  There is definitely something important that we’re missing here.

  What do I do, then? Am I in danger?

  Great Protector, she gets in THIS deep before she asks if it’s safe?

  Not helpful!

  Fine. He pretty clearly WANTS to think the best of you. Just be honest, even if you’re worried about it making you look weak. You’ve definitely overheard a lot of chatter about the “human nurturing instinct”. Either put your cards on the table and bet on that, or else get ready to fight.

  Wait, fight? Are you serious?!

  He’s been a predator for WAY longer than you. How should I know how he’s going to react if he starts seeing you as a threat?

  Yeah, I, uh… I don’t really have a lot of experience with fighting yet.

  Simplifies the fuckin’ decision tree, then, don’t it?

  “No, of course not!” I protested. “I’ve barely talked to anyone in weeks, and then all this Nikonus shit drops? I’ve been in bed in the shelter, tossing and turning for hours! I mean, fuck, how could I possibly sleep after finding out my entire life has been a lie? I went to the ocean, because…” My voice wavered. “Because that rubbery fucker said something about fish, and I thought maybe if I could catch one, then I’d be a real predator! Then maybe you guys would accept me, and I’d get to have a fucking home again!”

  Oh, by all the gods, she’s crying.

  Shut the fuck up!

  No, that’s good, that’s convincing. Keep doing it! It’s useful!

  “I don’t just do things because they’re useful!” I shouted. “I do things because they feel right to me!”

  David recoiled at my volume. I clamped both paws over my mouth in mortified horror and shuddered.

  Conversations happen on the outside of the head, the littler voice agreed.

  “How honest,” David said, smiling bittersweetly.

  “Honest?” I asked, surprised and confused.

  “Ay, sir,” said David, chuckling to himself. “To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”

  “Huh?” I said, my voice shaking a little. “I’m--I’m female, remember?”

  David smiled. “I know, I was referencing an old stage play. Hamlet. The Fishmonger scene, amusingly enough.”

  I sniffled a bit, but smiled through it. “First wooden barrels, and now you guys do stage plays, too?”

  “It’s nice to mix things up with a throwback,” he said, grinning. “Besides, it’s a good old predacious bout of survival of the fittest. The best plays were so good, we still remember them even after the medium of choice changed.”

  “Sounds nice, actually,” I said, still sniffling a bit. “Sorry about the outburst. It’s just been one fucking thing after another since the cradle fell.”

  “Yeah, the past few months have been pretty fucked up all around,” said David, sighing. Drinking in the bombed-out ruins of his hometown probably wasn’t the healthiest 2am activity, either. Less prone to hypothermia, at least. “I’m not gonna hold it against you if you’ve got some stuff you need to unpack.” He smiled abruptly. “Or stuff you need to treat with stress-eating! Try the cheese, if you’re still up for it.”

  “Happily,” I said, trying to wipe my tears away with the fur on the back of my paws. I sniffled, still, but I tried my best to mimic what David had done with the one he’d called Camembert. I used the small knife thing that looked like a gardening trowel to slice off a portion and spread the goopy filling across some Terran bread. The bread was a lot lighter and fluffier than the dense grain cakes I was used to. The cheese itself had a powerfully funky aroma to it.

  Are you sure you want to eat this? It looks and smells like the inside of an infected cyst. And I think one of the other cheeses might literally be rotting.

  I shoved a cheese-painted corner of the bread into my mouth and bit into it before I could talk myself out of it. It was, as promised, the most savory thing I’d ever tasted in my life. Salty, fatty, protein-rich goop alighted my taste buds, even as my sense of smell tried fruitlessly to resist the scent of it. Once I gave into the aroma, I felt the pungently savory scent wash over me, evoking simmered mushroom tea and malted grain barm. It melted in my mouth, coating it, lingering. I chased it with the wine, and the two played well together for a time, like old friends sharing a quick quip as they handed off the factory keys during a shift change. But then the cheese’s intensity flowed away, leaving the wine tasting all the sweeter for its passage.

  “Okay, that’s really good,” I said, a paw in front of my mouth for modesty as I finished swallowing.

  “I have yet to meet the woman who doesn’t get a little weak in the knees over some Camembert,” David said, grinning. He pulled out a pair of small pressed pills. He swallowed one, and slid the other over to me. “You’re gonna want that, though. Lactase enzyme supplements. Dairy can be a little rough to digest without it.”

  I eyed him up in confusion. “I thought you said dairy was safe?”

  “It is safe,” said David. “It’s not going to send you into anaphylactic shock or kill you. It is, however, going to give you a stomachache if you eat it without the proper digestive enzymes. Most mammals lose the ability to process lactose after they’re weaned. Couple human tribes picked up a handy little mutation that lets them do it anyway, but even for us, that’s the exception, not the rule.” He gestured towards the little pill. “You might already be feeling a little bloaty, but this should stop it from getting any worse.”

  You can’t read the label on that little pill pouch. Would you like me to start imagining the worst things it could secretly be?

  No thanks, I think I’d rather start to trust David.

  It’s gotta be something dangerously psychoactive--

  He took one himself.

  --that he’s built up an immunity to!

  Bet you it’s exactly what he said it was.

  Okay, yeah, but counterpoint: what if it’s NOT, hm?

  I swallowed the pill, and chased the stupid thoughts out with the rest of the wine. The vibe of the room was going sour for me. I wanted to feel warmer and fuzzier as quickly as possible.

  “You mentioned something earlier about mixed drinks?”

  “Sure. Is that another Terran oddity for you?” asked David. “What do you want to know?”

  He slid a glass of something clear and odorless served over ice towards me, and I took a sip.

  “Ah, I see,” I said, dryly. “You’ve mixed liquid water with frozen water.”

  David laughed. “You should hydrate when drinking alcohol, yes. Rough morning ahead of you, otherwise.” He rubbed the slight scruff at the base of his chin as he thought. “But yeah, I dunno what to tell you. A lot of spirits are just kind of intense or one-note on their own, so sometimes people mix things together to take the edge off, or to make new flavors. I mean, the basic mixed drink is just any spirit plus fruit juice and possibly extra sugar. You’re coming off of a glass of red wine, though, so let me keep you in the neighborhood. Literally.”

  David walked over to a corner of the kitchen, and pulled out four different dark bottles, a large metal canister, and a pair of odd-shaped stemmed glass. “Start with a nice loud whiskey, which is my typical drink of choice,” he narrated, pouring out a portion of the lightest-hued bottle into the metal canister. “Strong wood flavors from the barrel-aging process, bit of a peppery bite from picking the right grains. Good on its own. But tonight we’re mixing it with some dry red vermouth, which is a very particular sort of strong wine,” he said, pouring carefully measured splashes from one bottle after another, “and a sweet cherry liqueur, plus a small splash of bitters to round it out. Shake with ice.” He added ice and closed the canister, then began shaking it vigorously. It was louder than I was expecting, hearing the low roar of ice impacting metal. When he felt done, he poured and strained it out into the little wide-brimmed glasses, and added a single one of the brandied cherries he’d shown me earlier to each. It frothed ever so slightly for a moment before it settled back to gemlike transparency. It had a lovely ruddy amber color.

  “The old freewheeling cousin of the Manhattan cocktail,” he said, as he presented the drink. “Just how we like it. Welcome to Brooklyn.”

  I took a sip and almost immediately started tearing up again.

  There’s a particular moment in my part of the cradle in the late summer rains where all the trees in the orchard are perfectly ripe, and the fruit, swollen with juice, hangs heavy on the boughs. The sweet scent it gives off can be smelled for miles as the rainwater mixes with the wood and soil, adding their own elemental aroma to the bouquet. I’d go for long walks in that weather, defying the warm rains, just taking in the season, and when I grew tired and started walking back to the farmhouse, there’d be one last little scent: wafting out from mom’s kitchen, just the tiniest little hint of the peppery bite of the spiced cakes she’d bake around harvest time, calling me back.

  Back to where?

  “It tastes like home,” I said, sniffling and smiling.