The pot of barbeque sauce looked more like a witch’s cauldron than a cook’s pot, especially with Hex perched on Tami’s shoulder, something the health department never would have allowed. It was a good thing this was VR. Tami had hand-pressed the apples for cider, which she then turned into apple cider vinegar (ACV) and a batch of apple pie moonshine, which was what she considered the secret to her barbeque sauce. This had all been done months ago, according to Tami, so that the ACV and moonshine were at just the right levels of fermentation for this contest. The back of my mind was filtering over all those laws she’d broken by transporting said moonshine in the back of the Thunderbird over the past few months and over state lines. Since the actual plot of this episode had been conceived only the previous week, making all of this backstory made up, it was all moot, but my mind was poking holes in it anyway. The World AI and Producer AI had overruled my objections.
Our viewer count had gone up again. I didn’t see the draw of our show and I wasn’t sure why our viewer count had gone up so much so fast, but we were getting close to the 10,000 viewer mark. The World AI had said it happened, but none of their explanations had made any sense to me. Something about it being harder to get the first 100 than the second and that it exponentially rose from there. It was another one of those things, like instant apple cider vinegar that vexed my mind but didn’t seem to bother anyone else.
Viewers – 9989
This was all how we ended up in a tent surrounded by The Wildest Chili and BBQ Cookoff this side of the Mississippi. Which side? This side. It made me grateful for the smell-a-vision of VR, because it was all about slow-roasted meat, liquor, and aged tomatoes in all sorts of stages. Even the Dijon mustard came out of an unmarked jar from the Thunderbird’s miraculous trunk. Unlike books, VR videos on NOOB required the viewer to suspend disbelief enough that all this was just fine for the show. I supposed that when you could do a fast forward montage of a week’s travel across country, this time stuff was believable.
And why were we competing in the Wildest Chili and BBQ Cookoff this side of the Mississippi? We’d polled our viewers and they’d decided that our next case should be Ms. Toovers, the powerful café mogul who had just married wife number 14. The previous 10 were dead, with Penny being the fourth live one. Ms. Toovers was an equal opportunity one percenter. She had two husbands too. She’d even married one of her Pomeranians, though that one was to promote ads for Pet Ministers Inc., another of Ms. Toovers’ many companies. Polygamy was a new trend of the rich. Then again, maybe it was an old trend that had been brought back by the wedding wars, an advertising campaign that had sent the moo-verse to the polls in favor of saving wedding-related jobs. Their slogan was, “If one wedding can produce revenue to save one homeless person, then more can save more,” and they’d paired that with, “Don’t support divorce, just marry more!” The radical right wing supported the second slogan, and the radical left wing supported the first, thus causing one of the first ever bilateral campaigns that took spinning to a whole different dimension.
Ms. Toovers’ head chef had won this specific competition three years in a row. This year, Chef Coleon would lose to Tami and that would be our introduction to the vaunted Ms. Toovers who never missed the competition. That was why Tami had pulled out the custom ingredients. Hell, we’d even had to stop at an artisan show in the middle of Kansas for a perfectly blended wildflower and sweet corn honey. Tami had told me that there wasn’t any competition more fierce than a Chili or BBQ Cookoff and this was both, so she’d gotten serious.
“Janet, would you put another bundle of mesquite in the fire, please?” Tami pointed toward the stack of wooden stakes that made me think we were vampire hunting instead of cooking or black widow killing.
“Got it,” I told her, laying the hickory stakes out in a level layer of wood over the older coals at the bottom of the huge drum that served as everyone’s BBQ pit. The event coordinators had denied Tami’s demand for a buried pit, insisting that one of the few leveling factors of the contest was that everyone had to use one of these drums for actual meat cooking. Tami had said she’d use it if she could bury it. They’d denied her request. Jean had returned an hour later with a truckload of bricks that she’d proceeded to use to surround the bottom half of the metal drum so that, while the drum still existed, it was almost buried in mud-based bricks that made it look like a built-in. Those scenes had gotten some great reviews. We had a foodie following that appreciated things like this.
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Hex’s whiskers twitched over the fumes coming out of the pots on the kitchen of our portable, folding kitchen, a kitchen that looked better than my old apartment’s kitchen. One pot was chili. One pot was the pre-concoction of BBQ sauce. This kitchen is what took up most of the rest of our tent. At a chitter from one of the ferrets, Jean shot to her feet out of the camp chair where she’d been taking a nap.
“No you don’t,” she grit her teeth as she got into the face of yet another fellow contestant who had stuck their noses into our area. “No spoilers!”
“I was just passing by,” the terrified old man backed away from the snarling Jean, his hands up in the air to wave her off. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Save it,” Jean pushed up her sleeves and he nearly fell over himself running backward away from our tent. He wasn’t the first and he wouldn’t be the last.
“Why are they even trying?” I shook my head at Jean, who just shook her head back with a bit of a feral smile. “Tami’s ingredients are all secret, in unmarked jars, and made pre-made by her. It’s not like they’re going to get the secret recipe by sniffing the smoke.”
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“If we didn’t put up a fuss, they’d lose out on one of the best parts of these things,” Tami grinned over the pot of chili. “I’ll go make my rounds later and let them scare me off their secrets too, though honestly, I’ve gotten more than half of my secrets from them. I just combine it all better.”
“It’s amazing how many of them spill their secrets over moonshine after the judging is over,” Jean snickered, sitting back in her chair and tossing a treat to Podo and Kodo, who were back to their guard duties.
“Cheers to that,” I saluted Jean with a bit of mesquite. Even though I couldn’t enjoy the buzz from the alcohol, I could certainly enjoy the break from the pressure. “Any news on the judges?”
“They still haven’t announced their last one, but the first four are enough to make sure we win,” Tami assured me. It wasn’t that we’d bribed them. They were mostly fans of Tami and elitist foodies. Since Tami didn’t run any restaurants, no one knew when they could get a taste of her food. For that reason, one percenter foodies scrambled over themselves to get a chance at her food. “I think they’re holding an auction on the last judge position.”
“Are we getting a cut of it?” Jean poked one eye open to ask.
“No, but even so, if it doesn’t peak over a million, I’ll be insulted,” Tami waved a wooden spoon.
All this to get an introduction to a one percenter? Yep. This was show biz. Convoluted exercises in suspending disbelief. I didn’t mind because the viewers kept coming in. At this rate, I’d get out of all this before my two years were up and I had started thinking about what next? I didn’t think it too loud because I couldn’t really enlist the AIs in my plans. I plunked a few stat points into Emotional Resonance and Trend Adhesion. With all those viewers had come a bunch of levels.
Viewers – 10,092
“The judging is in 10 minutes,” I protested. “How can they not have chosen someone yet?”
“They’ve chosen someone,” Jean assured me, lowering the rim of her brown cowboy hat over her eyes. “They’re just trying to keep the tension up by not telling us who it is.”
“Try this,” Tami stuck a mouthful of magic in my mouth, and I groaned aloud. I swished it around in my mouth like a taste of fine wine, letting it hit every taste center before finally letting it slide down my throat. My flavor-analysis skill went up by two points. The flavors were layered with complexities that took a good minute to wade through. I only knew the disparate flavors because I’d been sampling them as she put them into the pots. The way they blended was food porn.
“How did you make chili taste better than melting chocolate?” I asked her.
“Balance,” she replied, satisfied with my response, but only because it was almost immediately picked up by a spider as a one-liner.
Exp +100 (Click-bait pick-up!)
“Did you infuse the chili with the hickory smoke from the BBQ pit?” I asked, watching her give me a sly smile as she scooped it into a competition bowl.
“Liquid smoke has a terrible aftertaste,” Tami lectured, setting the bowl on the counter to turn to the BBQ barrel that hadn’t opened since she’d slathered on the BBQ sauce. “Infusing it is the only way to do it properly.”
“That’s properly all right,” I nearly swooned as the bite from the spices flared to life in a sparkling set of aftereffects to the spoonful hitting my stomach.
“Now this,” she said, placing a sliver of meat on my extended tongue.
I spent a minute providing foodie porn moans and explanations of the flavors. This was my job. I’d had a lot worse. I couldn’t think of much better. The flavor-analysis skill had enhanced my taste buds to the point of expertise that would qualify me as all the judges combined. Grinding this skill was a true joy and only one of the reasons I was working to get totally onboard. There just had to be a way to keep this life outside of prison. I’d have never considered myself a NOOB star, but now that I knew I had the skills and knack for it, I wasn’t about to let it go.
“And there’s the building burn of the secondary flavors finally blowing up my palate,” I concluded. The slather of smoked beef that Tami fanned out on the plate was caked with bits of cooked BBQ sauce and yes, a few small flecks of the hickory ash.
“In a good way, right?” Tami narrowed her eyes at the plate, filching just a tiny bit of beef to taste for herself.
“Hell, yes,” I moaned out, sidling over to the barrel so that I could snag another chunk of meat before she snapped it closed on my hands.
“It’s so tricky to give enough heat to those with tolerance and still not burn out a softer palate,” Tami fussed, adding a ramekin of fresh BBQ sauce to the plate.
“That’s what the cornbread is for,” Jean said, finishing the plate with a mini-bundt-shaped cornbread bun, fluffy and slathered in a smear of honeyed-butter.
“Shall we?” Tami balanced the plate of perfection in both hands with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes.
We joined the parade of chefs, cooks, and spectators who were all making their way to the judging booth. We passed smells that hinted at goodness and ones that had missed the mark entirely. It made me reconsider a future as a food judge, as we were assaulted with smells of the spiciest peppers at a booth that didn’t have Tami’s concerns for balance. Some contestants hid their ineptitude behind an insistence that more fire was the only solution to chili.
As we neared the stage, Tami went toward the line of contestants, and Jean and I went to find our seats in the audience. Hex accompanied Tami, well hidden in her hair. Hex might still sleep next to me, but she and Tami were inseparable during the day. Even the ferrets were more cuddled up to Jean during the day, leaving me to my own devices. I found I didn’t mind. There was something about the fact that no matter who they preferred during the day, they always came back to me at night. Podo, the lazier of the ferrets, liked to hide as a hat accessory for Jean’s cowboy hat with her tail hanging down behind to blend in with Jean’s ponytail. Kodo was always sneaking off somewhere and, considering how much food was around, was likely taste-testing everything. Kodo was the only one with a flavor-analysis skill higher than mine and he was always working on it. Only VR magic made it so that he wasn’t as fat as a house.
“No way,” Jean breathed out toward my ear, and I was bumped out of my search for a sign of Kodo’s tail.
“What?” I followed Jean’s stare and found my own mouth popping open. I’d found Kodo too. He was perched on the shoulder of our old friend Glenda, who was seated with the other four judges. “Oh. Is this good or bad?” Glenda was feeding Kodo a bit of the light lemon sorbet that had been provided to the judges as a palate cleanser.
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“Good?” Jean answered, but I could tell that she wasn’t sure.