"The Zogreion" isn't, of course, what its builders call their city. Since humans have only one pair of jaws, they can't use the Quotidian name, and instead depended on translations. In East Asia, the city is one pronunciation or another of 裕池市.1 The Arab world uses "Hayr al-Baraka" and India "Sarasvas." For most of the rest of the world, the translation was into Ancient Greek. Nobody was prepared to use a modern language and call the Convention's capital "The Fish Pond."

Which isn't quite fair. There are indeed many ponds in the Zogreion, but almost nothing that can technically be called a fish.2 Canals are more common, a leftover from the city's pre-technological past, but most people use omnivators now-a-days.

These, Koen could see crawling like giant, determined larvae among the city's most basic architectural feature, the truss-rack.

Imagine a coat-rack, scaled up to something larger than a sky-scraper and wrapped in mucus-excreting protective foam. Great trusses anchor it to the ground, and serve as their own anchors for variously shaped containers. Decorative netting fills out the shape, and a canopy at the top serves as a landing pad for small aircraft.

Koen hadn't seen much of the Zogreion during his arrival on the previous day, because he'd been looking at Laura. Now, he was reminded of those cartoons that showed a city as a single organism. Rounded buildings pulsing and bobbing to the music of the soundtrack.

The city was there. It would still be there in two weeks, when he'd be allowed to explore it. In the mean time, there was work to do.

Koen's pushed off the wall and turned back to the bland interior of his room. Should he decorate it? How? With what? Never mind. First things first. Pancakes.

"Translator," he said, "call Yoshida."

The old man answered, apparently happy to be interrupted and quizzed about food again. Koen tried at least save him from future calls, and ordered several packets of ramen and coffee grounds. Creamer? Yes, they had it. Haha! And raisins. Yes. Lots of raisins.

"Would you like to put in your order to Earth now?" asked Yoshida. "Flour and milk? I'll make inquiries about eggs…"

"Not yet," said Koen. "I want to find out more before I make my order." And it would be a hell of a lot bigger than three items. "When's the deadline? Wednesday? I'll have a list ready by tomorrow."

He also ought to figure out how to pay for this stuff.

The dumbwaiter dinged. The food, or the objects that might be reconstituted into food, arrived.

Koen turned away from the cupboards over his hot-plate, where he had found plates, bowls, glasses, coffee cups, one frying pan, one sauce pan, a paring knife, and absolutely nothing else. This would be harder than he'd thought.

But when had that stopped him? Koen had spent hours beating wet dough to extract the gluten from it, and if you added up all the time he'd spent stirring things…it might make two weeks.

Koen slapped his hand to his pocket and extracted his phone. He opened a note-keeping app and a list: "shopping."

"Flour," he wrote, "milk, something like eggs. Mortar, pestle."

"There!" He set the phone down. Picked it back up again. "Paper notebook, pencils, sharpeners." That would be a bit of tactile pleasure, and thinking of which…

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The bowls were plastic, and should be strong enough. Upon further searching, Koen found utensils and, oddly, cloth napkins. No hammers or other tools that could be repurposed as mortars though.

His eyes fell on the room's single chair.

Okay.

When Koen had decided to take cooking seriously, he spent some time thinking about his philosophy.

He knew he must have one, even if he hadn't caught or and classified it yet.

So, one rainy Saturday in Brasília, Koen had sat in his little room and wrote a list of all the meals he'd made that he'd considered a success. Then there were all the ones had failed. Above the notebook was an official-looking letter, offering him a job as the live-in chef for the household of Li Xuanlian.

Rain trickled down the frame of the window and his glasses steamed as Koen wrote and remembered. It wasn't the exhaustion that made the bad cooking experiences bad. Nor even whether the food turned out good. At that point, he'd been cooking long enough that the food was always good. It just wasn't always…right.

What made food right?

Back in Brasília, Koen had thought about that question. Making noodles with his English students. Giving pea soup to another forlorn Dutch expatriate. His neighbor from somewhere in Amazonas who spoke something absolutely incomprehensible, but who knew how to grill a heavenly fish. That food was right. It connected people. It made them feel like they were doing good work, and would be missed when they were gone. It felt like coming home.

Half an hour later, Koen considered the powder he had made of the ramen. The finer grained the better, but how honest was he being with this food? He wasn't making pancakes out of wheat flour, he was making them out of pulverized...what was actually in these things?

Koen picked up a discarded wrapper, read "sodium hexametaphosphate" and sighed.

He would have to do something about their food suppliers. Obviously the UN had just sent them military rations, which was ridiculous. This was the embassy to the Convention of Sophonts! Organic food suppliers should be hammering on their door, screaming to be allowed to please donate their goods to humanity's most important current endeavor.

Mark made another note to himself: "contact organic farmers."

But in the mean time, honesty compelled. Another few noodles, crumbled by hand, would remind the diner of what he was eating. Koen would add them on top right at the end, so they wouldn't get soggy. Coffee creamer and a careful amount of water turned the ramen powder into a substance not entirely unlike batter.

The raisins had been cooking down in the saucepan, and from the smell they had re-hydrated and begun to caramelize. He took the saucepan off the hot-plate and replaced it with the frying pan. In went the oil that came with the ramen, then a spoonful of batter. Another spoonful because these spoons were smaller than they should be.

He sluiced this all around in the pan, watching legs of the batter run down the Teflon, hit the lip, pool, widen, and join into a solid sheet. The sheet was too pale, but at least not lumpy. Koen watched it, inhaling, and flipped the pancake over.

Nelly would be very impressed when she watched that video later.

Koen made one ramen-packet's-worth of pancakes, switched the frying pan and the sauce-pan to reheat his raisin syrup, and added one to the other on a plate. He carried the plate to his little table and pulled up his single chair. One of its legs left a powdery smudge on the floor, which he would later have to wipe up.

Facing the window and the city beyond, Koen took a bite.

Well.

It wasn't exactly like coming home. But it was something. An attempt. Something valiant, he decided. It made him feel better, anyway.

Next, to call Yoshida. But first, Koen would enjoy his breakfast, and the sunlight on the swaying green city.

1"Yúchí Shì," in Mandarin, not to be confused with the township 魚池in Taiwan, with the same pronunciation.

2Except for some tourists.