Memory Transcription Subject: David Brenner, Human Restaurateur

Date [standardized human time]: October 18, 2136

Sifal was the first alien I’d ever encountered, and I’d spent the rest of that afternoon being reminded that her calm, detached curiosity was an anomaly in the universe. Everyone else had been beautifully unified across species and ideology in making me want to tear my fucking hair out.

I think I lost a half hour alone just wrangling a Zurulian medical team that kept trying to store blood transfusion bags in the vegetable fridge. No amount of explaining that blood does not go near the vegetables would get through to them, which is not a lesson I was expecting to have to convey to an herbivore.

“I literally have an entire fridge that is specifically designed to store blood and body parts. Please use it as such.”

“I’m not going in there! It’s full of blood and body parts!”

“Okay, I’m happy to carry it in and out for you if the fridge scares you.”

“No, you’ll drink all the spare blood!”

“My body already contains the appropriate amount of human blood. I neither need nor desire more. Either let me help you store it in the meat fridge, or else do it yourself.”

“No, you’ll lock me in with the other herbivores!”

This conversation only ended when a member of the Red Cross showed up and explained that Terran commercial fridges of any stripe were not actually maintained at the appropriate temperatures to store medical supplies, thus rendering the entire argument pointless. They set up a second generator and plugged in the portable med cooler that they’d had the whole damn time anyway.

As for the Peacekeepers, what you needed to understand was that most of them had signed up to fight the Arxur with a patriotic fervor unseen since the World Wars. We Americans, in particular, were notorious junkies for justified wars when we could find them; half a generation practically stormed the enlistment offices at the first whiff of “Cannibal Lizard Space Aliens”. But the military was having an off week, to put it mildly. Getting sucked into a defensive war against the people you signed up to help was bad enough. Fucking it up so badly that your sworn enemies needed to bail you out? Well, that’d put anyone on edge. And so, without the stunningly awkward incongruity of watching an all-consuming nightmare from beyond the stars sobbing next to them at the lunch table, the Peacekeepers reverted to the baseline behavior typical of twenty-somethings with guns, authority, and a chip in their shoulder: casual, petty dickishness.

I think I was arrested no less than three times for looting, because they’d shuffled me far enough out of their way that I was back to drinking at my own bar. Each time, I provided proof that I owned the place, and they glared at me as they uncuffed me, eyes full of betrayal. My innocence had, after all, robbed them of the chance to thwart an evildoer today. Even when they weren’t firing off half-cocked, the Peacekeepers didn’t want my help. I knew there wasn’t a ton I could do--it’s not like I had experience setting up field hospitals--but an extra set of hands was an extra set of hands, right? I think the Peacekeepers mostly just wanted to tell someone to fuck off, that they had things under control. It’s not like they could say it to FEMA, the Red Cross, or the Arxur Dominion.

As for the Arxur… yeah, I was starting to see how Sifal was one of a kind. She’d fuckin’ warned me that most of her people weren’t as open-minded or as nice as her, and on some level, I hadn’t really believed her. Then one tried to eat Toki. No, seriously. I was literally sitting next to a chafing dish full of delicious gourmet meatballs, free of charge, and this asshole decides he’d much rather eat my fucking dog. The Peacekeepers intervened, thankfully, and were thrilled to finally have an outlet for their pent-up noble aggression. We humans were, as a rule, very protective of dogs.

The meatballs went over great with the troops, at least, and so did the bao. Telling a bunch of glorified college students “free food” wasn’t a hard fucking sell. Keto meatballs? Sure, they were soldiers; half of them looked like they watched their carb-to-protein intake religiously. Vegan bao? Of course, good vegan cuisine was in vogue right now among Peacekeepers who spent a lot of time with the Venlil. Gotta look good for your fluffy little war buddies, and that meant no feasting on artisanally roasted carrion.

The aliens barely looked at what I’d made, though. I think that in my naive and optimistic fantasies… oh, who the fuck am I kidding, I was exactly full of myself enough to think my cooking was going to be the secret sauce that would finally bring everyone together. Carnivore, herbivore, and everyone in between, having a lovely shared meal and realizing we weren’t all that different. Sure, the centuries of constant atrocities would take a bit longer to heal, but if I could get them past the “depersonalization of enemies” stage, that would at least be a win, right?

Yeah, no such fucking luck. The Zurulians didn’t want to be in the same room as the Arxur, and frankly I don’t think they even wanted to be in the same room as me. Or Toki. Especially Toki. My little guy seemed to roughly figure that the Arxur were some kind of weirdly-dressed humans, but the Zurulians must have looked like some kind of new breed of dog. Toki did his little “let’s play!” song and dance for one of them--if you don’t own a dog, it’s the one where they do a quick little dippy push-up on their forepaws, twirl a bit, and bark happily--and the little fluffy doctor screamed until he passed out. I had to bring Toki upstairs after that, sadly. Frankly, though, the other doctors had seen my meat freezer, and it clearly did not stir the same feelings that it had in Sifal. The Zurulians wanted nothing to do with anything I’d cooked, especially not bao, or anything else opaque enough to hide secret meats or something. So that was a fucking oversight on my part.

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And the Arxur… two of them finally got hungry enough to each try a meatball. Or maybe it was a bet. I hadn’t overhead them, but the way they both tried one at the same time while making aggressive eye contact with each other? It had the cadence of a bet. Well, good news, it wasn’t gross or poisonous, it was fucking delicious. Bad news, this triggered a feeding frenzy. They each devoured half the chafing dish--sorry, half the contents of the chafing dish, and merely a quarter-ish of the solid metal chafing dish itself--and then started a fight over who got to lick what was left of the drippings off the bar. Again, the Peacekeepers broke it up, to middling success--I personally wouldn’t want to get between a frenzied Arxur and his food--but it bought enough time for the other Arxur to police their own.

As for Sifal herself… it killed me to watch her as she worked. She’d look up, make eye contact with me, and with her eyes alone, I’d see a huge smile. But then this shadow of shame and fear would wash over her and snuff it out, and she’d look around frantically to make sure no one had seen her daring to be happy. I don’t even remember the last thing I said to her that day. She was in and out and in and out all afternoon, until suddenly she wasn’t. Wherever she went, I hoped she found happiness. Somebody, somewhere, fucking ought to.

Night fell after that. There were a few patients left in makeshift cots still sleeping on the ground floor of my restaurant--it was warmer in my building than in a tent shelter in October--but the aliens had gone home, and even the human bustle had died down. I sat on the old building’s roof, six stories up, and stared at the horizon. Somewhere on the roof of a fallout shelter in the Bronx, there was a former employee of the puddle of melted slag that used to be the Hayden Planetarium who was beyond thrilled, in their own way, to finally see the night sky over New York City untainted by light pollution. You had to take your small victories where you could. For me, though, down here in Coney Island, I saw things differently. The stars brought me cold comfort. The lights of this city used to outshine every star in the sky.

I’d spent most of the day staring into space while drinking, contemplating if there had been something, anything, I could have done to prevent this. I’d been toying with the shape of an answer--still ephemeral, like a shadow afraid to reveal what was casting it--when my lunch guests arrived and cast the idea in steel.

The one Peacekeeper had raised an amateurish point late in our ongoing conversation: what could a chef do to change the world? The answer was simple: fucking nothing, obviously, but that was the wrong question. As I’d said earlier to Sifal, overspecialization is beneath the dignity of thinking people. There were other paths available to me.

You see, at the end of the day, this had all been a rather textbook Outside-Context Problem. Humanity had been trucking right along, fighting the same old petty national rivalries as always, hashing it all out at the negotiation table. The stock market was doing better this quarter than last quarter, the greatest threat to America was China cutting a better trade deal with the African Union than us, and the fact that the tropics were running out of drinking water was a topic of discussion relegated exclusively to election-year fear mongering over environmentally-displaced refugees, never to policy. It was the End of History all over again. The economy would grow, and nothing would fundamentally change, forever.

So yeah, that didn’t fucking happen, anymore than it had the last three times a global economic summit’s worth of policy wonks said it would. Life was always changing, and it was on us to adapt or die. This year, we’d reached out to the night sky looking for new friends to embrace, and we’d had our hands slapped away. And then gotten punched in the face. Humanity had faced this challenge disunified, and we had been woefully underprepared to prosecute a war among the stars.

And through it all, I could do nothing but watch as my city burned. My thoughts just raced in circles, endlessly taunting me, making me wonder if things might have gone differently if I’d made the effort to involve myself more. I certainly talked a big game--who didn’t enjoy the occasional bout of yelling like a smug idiot at the talking heads on the newsfeeds?--but it cost me nothing to be a critic. If a single word out of my armchair general mouth could have actually helped, why had I never stuck my neck out and put my ideas to a vote?

So I sat on the roof, and I knew what I needed to do. You see, the problem was, I became a chef in the first place because it made me happy. Rookie fucking mistake. People came to this city endlessly searching for happiness. The Pursuit of Happiness was a foundational value of ours, and immigrants the world over--my ancestors included--used to strap themselves to any barely seaworthy bit of driftwood just for a chance at a better life.

If there weren’t a small protective mountain of rubble in the way, I’d have been able to see them. All the people who’d chosen happiness. Their unmarked graves, at least. The artists, the musicians, the designers, the actors… any one of them would have made a passionate leader. Someone who’d shake things up and offer new ideas. But no, facing down a life of thankless public service? No thanks. Like me, they’d all chosen happiness instead. And now they were dead. And I was still here. Why?

My little six story walkup was now one of the tallest and oldest buildings in the city. Kinda like me, in my own way. Not the best, just one of the best left standing. It was something to work with, and so a plan took form.

The date, again, was October 18th, 2136. People forget, but the day after the world ended was about two weeks out from a U.S. Presidential election. It was far too late to toss my hat into that ring, legally, even if it weren’t helplessly quixotic to join the fray at all. And at thirty-three, I was a couple years too young for this round in any event. Not too young for Congress, though. Granted, two weeks was still far too short of a runway even for a madman, but…

The people in the federal government were probably in a secure bunker somewhere. The members of the New York City Council probably weren’t so lucky. There’d be a headcount in the coming weeks, and a special election by the summer to replace those who’d died. Even if for some reason there wasn’t, I was a business owner. I could make some calls to the Chamber of Commerce and force the issue. If I shook the right hands, really got my name out there, I could make city council by summer. If the city wanted me, at least. And if I helped oversee the rebuilding of the city, made sure it was done right, and maybe even made a name for myself in the news? A year and a half of good work like that, and maybe sending “that one chatty chef” to Congress wouldn’t even sound unreasonable.

I rose to my feet, and looked out over the edge of the roof, at the ruins that used to be my hometown. The rubble that made up the unmarked graves of my fellow citizens were starting to look a bit like tilled soil. Ripe for new ideas, and new growth.

One way or another, I had work to do.