Memory Transcription Subject: David, Human Restaurateur

  Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136

  There’s a well-documented tendency among humans to find attraction in the unfamiliar. Until recently, “the unfamiliar” was limited to “a human whose ancestors were indigenous to a different continent than yours were”, and this was, admittedly, what those instincts were for. Genetic diversity was a net-positive in evolutionary terms, so young men of marriageable age often found themselves drawn to women who looked as little like their own mothers as humanly possible. Suck it, Freud.

  But instincts often persisted past the point of evolutionary usefulness. Some humans still found themselves compelled to gorge on refined sugar like they were fattening themselves up for the next inevitable famine. Others would get tweaked out on adrenaline during difficult conversations at work like they were gearing up to flee from a lion over the open savannah.

  And others still, well…

  When the news of first contact was broadcast around the world, and humanity first found out that we weren’t alone in the universe anymore? And it turned out that, against all odds, the alien life we met weren’t some bizarrely-shaped creatures born of a wildly divergent evolutionary path? That, quite to the contrary, our new neighbors were cute and fluffy and big fans of hugs?

  There was a non-negligible segment of the human population whose ‘attraction to the unfamiliar’ drove them to take a good, long look at a few choice members of the Federation and think, “Huh. Yeah. I could work with that.”

  So anyway, this has all been a very roundabout way of attempting to ease myself into broaching the subject of the brown-furred alien woman in my apartment who currently had her arms wrapped around me.

  It was kind of astonishing, really, how someone born several star systems over managed to still seem so… familiar. She was about a head shorter than me, somewhere in the vicinity of plump to stocky, and she could have probably shopped for clothes at any department store in America without terribly much difficulty finding something in her size. The fur and quills were odd, but they’d probably grow on me. Hell, her fur's shade of brown wasn’t even outside the range of common human skin tones. There was probably a woman in the ruins of Queens right now selling Jamaican jerk chicken from a food truck who looked the same as Chiri from a block away.

  But Chiri wasn’t a block away, she was… very close. She was hugging me, and I was gingerly attempting to avoid pricking my hands on her quills as I hugged her back. If the dining room chair had been large enough to fit us both, she would have been practically on top of me. She looked up at me, her deep brown eyes full of anticipation and longing as she tried her hardest to focus her gaze into mine. Her fluffy snout inched closer towards my face, and I found myself closing my eyes and moving my face towards hers.

  It was at this point that Chiri bit me as hard as she could.

  “Ow! What the fuck!” I yelled.

  The Gojid woman scrambled back from me across the floor, just shy of knocking over my plants, her paws held over her mouth in shock. “Sorry! I’m sorry! I was trying to do the--that face-biting thing humans do! The one to show affection?” Her eyes were wide. “Shit! Did I do it wrong?!”

  I removed my glasses so I could rub my entire face. My lips to coax the pain out of them, and my eyes to coax the exasperation away. “Chiri. It’s called kissing. There are no teeth involved.” I put my glasses back on. “You just touch lips. Sometimes the tongue joins in if you’re being passionate. But the rest of the mouth mostly just watches from the sidelines.”

  I always expected a cute puppy-like head tilt, but that must have been a Venlil and Zurulian mannerism. Chiri just squinted at me in confusion from her seat on the floor. “...sidelines?”

  Oh great, I thought. Now I have to explain the entire concept of sports. Football’s going to be a fun one. At least she doesn’t ascribe everything we do to our predatory nature.

  I winced, knowing as soon as I thought of it that that was a lie.

  At least she seems… weirdly enthused by our predatory nature. Really whittles down the topics I have to massage the truth about.

  I sighed. “Okay. Humans tend to engage in forms of more-or-less nonviolent physical competition, frequently team-based."

  Chiri nodded, but stared at the floor, deep in thought.

  I took a shot in the dark at what was on her mind. "Yes, it’s honestly probably related to our old hunting pack instincts."

  Chiri jolted back to paying attention. Oversimplified, perhaps, but I guessed it in one, I thought.

  I smiled, and continued my explanation. "In some team sports with rigorous rulesets, there are clearly delineated rectangular play areas, goals of sorts near each end, and a maximum number of players allowed to participate at once.” I gestured sideways, neither towards myself nor towards her. “The playable area has sidelines demarcating out-of-bounds spaces, and that’s where the people who aren’t playing hang out. Backup players, support personnel, and ultimately people just watching the game.” I nodded, satisfied with my own explanation. “Thus, the idiom, ‘to watch from the sidelines’.”

  Chiri perked up excitedly. “Can I see some examples of human sports like that?”

  Tch. Guess the moment's gone. I sighed. Ah, well. If I'd expected kissing tonight, I would have shaved.

  I shrugged. “Uh, sure. If we keep the volume down, I can throw something on. Don't want to wake Toki.” From his bed on the upstairs landing, my corgi’s eyes perked open briefly at the sound of his name, but quickly fell back asleep. I flicked on the television and browsed back to the last sporting event I’d bothered to watch, which was this year’s Summer Olympics in Mombasa, now several months old. I threw on the Women's Soccer semifinals since it was near the top.

  “Here, this one’s simple. Soccer. Two teams, one ball, you score a point by getting the ball into the other side’s goal. No violence allowed, and no using your hands, except the two goalkeepers can use their hands when they’re near their goal. There’s extra rules to resolve rulebreaking, tiebreaking, and the ball going out of bounds, but that covers the basics.”

  “Okay, I think I got it.” Chiri slowly got back into her chair without taking her eyes off the screen. “Hey, the team logos are country flags,” she said by observation. “That’s France and… Brazil?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, surprised you know those.”

  Chiri smirked. “I made sure to remember most of the big and important countries. I keep getting the flags of Ireland and Italy mixed up, though?”

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  I chuckled. “Yeah, that's normal. Want me to get started on dinner while you watch, or…?”

  Chiri nodded. “Yeah, that'd be nice, thanks!”

  I nodded to her near-empty glass. “Another cider, or…?”

  Chiri finished the last mouthful. “It’s good, but it’s a night of new experiences. I’d hate to try the same thing twice, you know?”

  I smiled warmly. “I know the feeling.” I skimmed the fridge for ideas. “How about a beer, then? Similar, but grain-based.”

  “Sure, that sounds great!”

  I poured for her. “Mermaid Pilsner. They used to brew this down the street,” I said, pointing south towards the beachfront, where the ruins of the Coney Island Brewery stood. “Light grains, touch of hops.” She wouldn't know what hops were. “Little bitter flower buds for seasoning.”

  “Oh! I like flower buds,” she said. “We make some nice teas from them.”

  I nodded. “We do, too,” I said, thinking of lavender and chamomile. “I’ll make you a cup later if you need any.”

  I went about my business as Chiri watched me and the game at the same time. Unadvertised perks of a wide field of vision, I supposed. She peppered me with questions as I worked, and about both subjects.

  “What’s that dough you’re rolling out?”

  “Semolina wheat flour, water, and salt,” I explained. “I’m making some long, flat noodles. We sometimes add eggs to the mix to help the dough stick together, and I can’t be sure my pasta maker isn’t contaminated, so I’m rolling and cutting them by hand.”

  Chiri's attention immediately shifted closer to me. “Whoa! You grind up baby birds to make your dough? That's some freaky faerie tale shit!” I was mostly sure the translator was taking liberties with comparative mythology and folklore. Little worried that Chiri was this blasé about animal massacre, though.

  “Yes, that’s why the pasta maker has a metal crank,” I said, dryly. “It’s for grinding birds.”

  Chiri squinted at me suspiciously. “No no, hang on, I think I’m starting to get the hang of your poker face.”

  I laughed. “Yep. You caught me. Nah, the eggs are unfertilized,” I said. “I’m sure it sounds weird, but it’s just another cheap source of animal protein that specifically doesn't harm any birds, baby or otherwise.” At least not since we finished engineering around all the casual little cruelties of factory farming. “Same as milk, except…” I sighed. “The Arxur seem to love eggs, so that’s almost certainly a banned food for you.”

  “Yeah, probably,” she said, sighing. Chiri seemed to wilt slightly, but kept to her own thoughts for a bit as I got the noodles rolled, sliced, and ready to boil.

  I juggled the old familiar math in my head. Fresh noodles cooked more quickly than mushrooms, so with the difficult prep work done, I shifted to getting the sauce going. Garlic shimmered in butter with black pepper as I rapidly chopped a good mix of some of the nicest mushrooms I had left. No common Champignons today. I had Hens of the Woods and Trumpets and even a couple Chanterelles. Into the pan with a bit of fresh herbs from my indoor garden. Rosemary to evoke the forest, thyme for brightness, and a bit of oregano for home. Basil was the herb of choice in most of Italy, but oregano was traditional in New York. I held off on the salt until the mushrooms started to color. Salt would expel the mushroom broth early. This was still the dry phase for the sauce.

  “Say, why are the two teams named after countries?” Chiri asked.

  I had a few minutes before I needed to do anything, so I opened some white wine while I answered. “It’s the Olympic games. Every two years, we do a big sports competition between the nations. It alternates between Summer sports and Winter sports. This was a Summer year, hence all the running around in a sunny field.” The wine was dry without being too tart or too bland, so I kept it at the ready. “It’s an old tradition. It’s supposed to sow camaraderie and peaceful competition between nations. In theory, you’re not supposed to go to war during it, but I can’t recall if that’s ever actually happened.”

  Chiri nodded, and pondered quietly. I could swear her mouth was moving slightly, but I couldn’t read lips in English, let alone in whatever language was common on her little slice of her homeworld. “So it’s like a… peaceful, civilized version of showing off who has the strongest population? That way, when a war’s about to break out, one side might go ‘Hm, I dunno, those French guys can kick a ball thirty meters, let’s not mess with them’, right?”

  I chuckled. “Okay, first off, a thirty meter kick isn’t that impressive at the professional level. Secondly, even though they haven’t left the top ten in like a thousand years, nobody’s taken the French military seriously since their underperformance during the Second World War.”

  Chiri’s head swiveled to face me. “Whoa, wait, Second World War? How many have you had?!”

  I shrugged. “Half as many as the Arxur.”

  Chiri stared at me. “I mean, it makes sense when you put it that way…”

  She turned back towards the TV, and my mind started to wander as well. I sincerely hoped Chiri was doing alright. Must have been a rough evening for her. I tried to imagine. “Breaking News: Satan objectively real, and your entire species is descended from him. Later this evening: Bible tampered with by space aliens. God still unavailable for comment.” It sounded insane. Most of the other Gojids were probably catatonic, or just in complete denial. Flipping herself around like this, throwing herself headlong into the antithesis of her beliefs… it didn’t seem healthy, but Chiri would probably be better for it in the long run. Clinging to false beliefs was a form of self-harm.

  Still, underneath it all, Chiri seemed… fun. Curious and expressive and contemplative. She was ravenous for new knowledge, and every time I thought I had her on the back foot in the conversation, she’d hit me with a haymaker of a counterpoint. Caring, too. She’d hugged me when I was upset, a “bloodthirsty murderous predator” who was worried he couldn’t do enough to help an Arxur. To think, only yesterday, she probably would’ve hated or feared me too much to even speak with me, and now she was just… casually hanging out in my apartment, having a great time.

  These are the things we miss out on when we let our biases blind us.

  I smiled a bit at the woman watching sports and drinking a beer while I cooked her dinner. That was another bias I was glad we’d ditched.

  Still, if she and I become anything, that closes a few doors, I thought. I’m still plotting to get into politics. The political landscape is already in chaos after the Battle of Earth. I have no idea what it’s going to look like in a few months. But you can always bet on Reaction, and if this Humanity First proto-fascist bullshit ends up defining the battlefronts at the polls, openly dating a Gojid cuts me off from even limp-wristed pandering to anti-alien sentiment. I chuckled to myself. Guess I’ll just have to do things honestly.

  The mushrooms were starting to darken, so I salted them and deglazed the pan with the white wine. The sauce moved quickly after that, so I started boiling the water to get it ready for the noodles.

  The soccer game cut to commercial--an inescapable plague in every generation--but because it was my television, the algorithm started hawking wares it thought I wanted. And gee, wouldn’t you know it, the professional chef had an interest in food, and the slimy bastards in the advertising sector didn’t necessarily share my progressive views on gender roles if there was still a buck to be made on pandering to “tradition”.

  “Tired of paying top dollar for limp, gray steaks? Try the new and improved, fusion-powered SteakForge 9000! Grow your own premium steaks at home, and then grill them up using Starship Thrusters! And with its new fusion fuel cells, the SteakForge 9000 doesn’t know when to quit. Just like you! SteakForge 9000: host the family barbecue forever!”

  I didn’t even need to turn around to know there was a graying white guy in a too-tight polo shirt and khaki shorts on screen who was beefier than the goddamn steaks. The idealized self-image of the target demographic. Buy our product, and you can be just like this guy! He has infinite grilled meat, just like his caveman ancestors always dreamed of! His dick still works, and his wife and kids still talk to him!

  It was a stupid fucking ad campaign for a stupid fucking product. Still, I probably needed to take a moment to break that down for Chiri. Not sure if she found it confusing, or if the sight of humans celebrating sizzling flesh was finally one step too far for her.

  I turned to her, and she had stars in her eyes. Full-blown kid in a candy store.

  Shit.