Memory Transcription Subject: Ensign Sifal, Arxur Dominion Fleet

Date [standardized human time]: October 18, 2136

The Terran chef made this odd clicking-slapping noise with his fingertips, which snapped me out of my food-induced reverie. “Hey, buddy, you still with me? Can you do a quick self-diagnostic? No dizziness, no itching, no swelling?”

I blinked, and stared at this David Brenner fellow. “Wait, are you trying to poison me, or are you not? I’m getting mixed messages here.”

David rubbed his eyes. “I just fed you about twelve different Earth-specific ingredients at once. I’m making sure nothing’s poisoned you by accident.” He shook his head. “Hell, if that’s really the first time you’ve ever eaten a plant, you’ve probably got a higher-than-average chance of a food allergy. Immune system doesn’t know if cell walls are a type of pathogen or something.”

“First time eating plants for food purposes,” I grumbled. “It’s not like we isolated painkillers from fish guts.” David looked off to the side, quizzically, likely scanning some mental roster of Terran sea life for a chance to contradict me.

The two U.N. scouts with me just scoffed. “I’m surprised you people even use painkillers,” said Charmaine, the shorter of the two.

I sneered in disgust at the humans’ lack of faith in my species. “Pain builds character. Going into shock during surgery does not.”

David shook his head clear. “Nevertheless, just let me know if you start reacting to something.” He walked over and pulled out a small first-aid kit from behind the bar. “This one’s just for food allergies,” he explained. “Epinephrine autoinjectors, histamine blockers, all that fun stuff.” David’s eyes flared with determination. “Nobody dies in my restaurant.”

The taller scout, William, narrowed his eyes in concern. “That… sounds like a lesson learned from loss.”

David shrugged as he started walking back towards the kitchen. “Ech, nothing too dramatic. One of my mentors liked to play fast and loose with food safety rules. Nobody died, thank God, but wealthy clientele can get litigious. He lost his business, and I lost my first job out of culinary school. Bit of a career setback for me.”

There was a lull in the conversation. The two scouts and I continued to enjoy the rest of our first course as David began to prepare the next one. He rubbed down a small-to-medium sized mammal’s rib rack with more powders, and popped it into a glowing boxy appliance, probably to warm it up further. He changed his thin gloves, the same kind the medics wore when treating open wounds, and began to assemble a few platters of thin slices of preserved meats.

I was still eager to learn something about the humans that no other Arxur knew, so I endeavored to keep the conversation going. Humans liked their companion animals, right? “Your dog seems small. Is it a juvenile?”

David looked up, briefly. “Hm? No, Toki’s all grown up.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Right, you’re probably used to the German Shepherds the Peacekeepers use. Those guys need a lot of space to roam to be happy. Tight-packed city, I went with a portable model. Toki’s a Welsh Corgi.”

Human companions have different purpose-made production models?! I would have just used selective breeding, personally, but maybe the humans had a talent for gene-editing work. “Does he help you hunt?” I asked.

David snorted. “No. Again, it’s a tight-packed city. Not exactly brimming with wild game, buddy.” He shrugged. “Decent fishing, I guess, but no. I mostly just keep him around for my own amusement, but I suppose Toki’s technically a herding dog.”

Yet another word that translated one-for-one to the Arxur language, but I’d never heard it spoken before. It sounded archaic. “Explain herding.”

David blinked. “Oh, uh, you just kind of let your cattle loose in an open field, and then you keep watch so they don’t wander off. The dog helps with that.”

I sat bolt upright. “Why would you let them loose?!”

David put his knife down. “Okay, not exactly my area of expertise, but you might have noticed how green this planet looked on the way down? There’s these crappy plants everywhere that humans can’t eat, but the cattle love ‘em. You just let the herd graze, keep like one guy and a dog on guard duty, and it’s basically just free meat for no maintenance.”

I stared, incredulous. “But what if they try to escape? A whole herd against… what, a guard and a half?” I wasn’t actually sure which one was the half.

David sighed. “Perks of non-sapient cattle, I suppose? They’re docile, trusting, and they don’t have the higher reasoning necessary to plan elaborate prison escapes. Seriously, predator or not, you can just walk right up to one and pat it. It won’t mind. They mostly just stand around eating grass, and occasionally wander off because the grass looks greener over yonder.” David gestured again towards his dog, Toki. “Little nip on the heels, and they wander back towards the rest of the herd.”

I sat back in my chair and tried to take in this alien cattle management methodology. Although… if the word translated, maybe it wasn’t that alien. It had been a few centuries since the Arxur had had access to fully non-sapient prey; maybe we used to do things differently back in the day. I wondered if we still had records of that somewhere, and if I had the clearance to read them. Yet.

I made a mental note to learn more, but the topic seemed to annoy David, so I tried to change it for now. “Alright, that explains some parts of your farming, but what about hunting? How do humans hunt?”

David looked at me like I’d gone daft, and went back to his slicing. “I don’t fuckin’ know, buddy, probably a gun?”

“Right,” I pressed, “but what about before projectile weapons?”

David’s hand snapped forward, and a small red disc with yellow flecks went flying directly at my face at high velocity. I snapped it out of the air with my maw. It was some kind of fatty, salt-cured meat. It was chewy, but not half bad.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Good boy,” David muttered under his breath by reflex. “But no. There is no before projectile weapons,” he said firmly. “We’re monkeys. We throw shit.” I was mostly certain the emphasis was on the verb. Mostly.

“And throwing things helps you hunt?” I asked.

David nodded. “If I’m not mistaken, the average human can, with a bit of practice, throw a rock with enough force to crush a rabbit’s skull at about ten paces.”

“I don’t know what a rabbit is.”

David rolled his eyes. “A… Dossur, then.”

I tilted my head. “Not much meat on a Dossur.”

“Doesn’t have to be. We eat plants, too, remember?” David painted a picture as he piled food high on the next course’s platters. “Wander into the woods, bag a rabbit, forage for roots and spring shoots on the way in and back, toss it all in a cookpot over the fire with some water and salt, and you’ve got food for your whole family with all the effort of an afternoon stroll. Easy and efficient.”

“What did you do before fire?” The emphasis the humans placed on cooking meat struck me as an odd affectation.

“There was no before fire either,” said David. “We figured out fire a full million years and two evolutionary stages ago. Modern humans, as a species, are younger than roasted meat.”

David balanced five plates as he carried them out to his three guests. “In any event, here’s the second course: a straightforward charcuterie board. The hope is to showcase some of the ways we’ve preserved foods without compromising on flavor.” He set two smaller platters apiece in front of the human scouts, and one larger platter in front of me. The humans each had a smaller mirror of my cured meat platter, but they also had some large slices of some dry foam confection that smelled like toasted grain. I’d obviously never tasted toasted grain before, but the fragrance reminded me of some raids early in my career. When an armed herbivore tried to hole up in a farmhouse, smoking them out was often wiser than charging in. Not really a delicious smell, but a nostalgic one.

The cured meats, on the other hand, looked and smelled interesting enough. There were more discs, which I now saw as small circular slices, in red and pink and even black, as well as some wafer-thin slivers he’d shaved off of a larger cured mammal leg. At the far side, there were brightly-colored orange-pink slices that made me think of some tender Venlil backstrap, but it smelled strongly of the sea instead. Considering its placement next to a trio of small smoked whole fish, the thin orange-pink filet was likely a piece of smoked fish as well. Finally, there were two tiny bowls of some sauces. One sauce was a yellow-beige paste that smelled acrid; the other looked and smelled like fragrant leaves shredded and suspended in oil. The humans had some extra small dishes of some equally acrid-smelling tiny fruits.

In spite of their small size, the whole fish tempted me the most, but I decided to try the morsels in order as David narrated.

“Alright, so, first we have a trio of pork sausages. From Italy, we have a mortadella and a soppressata,” he said, pointing to the pink and red circles, respectively. The mortadella, I found inoffensive, if uninteresting. It was mild and soft, to the point that it scarcely tasted like meat, and the texture came apart as though it were pre-chewed, as if for a hatchling. The soppressata, which I recognized from being launched at my head earlier, had a chewier texture like jerky, but still tasted more of the salt and the grease than the underlying meat.

“I had to go a bit afield for the third,” David continued. “It’s not technically charcuterie, but I wanted to add a blood sausage to mix things up, but in the west, we always tend to cut ours with grain.” Blood and grain? That sounded vile. “Fortunately, the Philippines came through for America as always.” Charmaine’s back stiffened, like she knew where this was going and did not care for it. “A little delicacy from northern Luzon: pinuneg, a pork blood sausage mixed solely with aromatics like onion and ginger.”

I popped the dark morsel into my mouth and felt… frankly, confused. My instincts identified the pinuneg as food, and informed me that it met all the nutritional criteria to be classified as “pretty tasty”, but everything else about it made no sense at all. The texture was neither as chewy as soppressata nor as loose as mortadella; rather, it had a strange bounce to it, but still came apart easily when bitten. The underlying bloody flavor was altered by the act of cooking it: it tasted closer to stewed offal than fresh blood. And the aromatic plants twisted the whole dish around in a direction that felt almost medicinal. In my imagination, this was something served in a hospital to bolster one’s stamina and help speed recovery. I felt like I was getting healthier just by eating it. It was certainly a new experience, and I didn’t mind it at all.

The same couldn’t be said for the two human scouts in my company. William tried one out of politeness, but seemed discomfited by the experience. Charmaine refused to even look at hers. “If I wanted to eat this shit, I’d visit my cousins in Manila more often,” she muttered.

“I wasn’t even aware they served delicacies like this as far south as Manila,” said David, a look of amusement blossoming on his face.

“Why do you even have pork blood on the premises?!” Charmaine complained. “There was a kosher certification by the entrance!”

David swirled a finger around in the air to gesture vaguely at everything. “Glass-equivalent nonpermeable metamaterials, a kitchen cleaning cycle powerful enough to obliterate prions, and about five weeks straight of bickering with the local rabbinical council.” David refocused his eyes on me, briefly, and deigned to grace me with context. “Sorry, there’s a… that’s regarding one of several locally popular religious groups with some pointed opinions on which specific types and preparations of meat are healthsome rather than despoiling of the spirit.”

Weird, but plausible, I thought. Betterment had subsumed any other semblance of an Arxur religion, but if I had to try to imagine another predator religion, proscriptions against eating certain ‘unclean’ meats sounded about right.

“Moving right along,” said David, “we have two types of ham, which is a salted or smoked hindleg of that pig animal I showed you earlier. Both of these, in particular, are salt-cured but technically raw.” I perked up at that. The humans’ love of fire was a curious novelty, but raw meat was what tasted like home. “First, from Italy, the pinker slices are a Prosciutto San Daniele. Prosciutto di Parma tends to be more internationally famous, but I find the San Daniele to be a more mellow and well-rounded flavor, personally.” The soft shaving draped over my claw like fine cloth as I lifted it to my mouth. Now this was getting somewhere! The cold salt-curing process left the prosciutto tasting pleasantly raw, which suited my tastes better. And the razor-thin slicing technique, carefully made against the grain of the muscle fibers, made the whole texture velvety soft and tender.

“As for the second,” David trailed off. He’d had a slightly dazed look to himself throughout our entire interaction, like he was half-asleep or mildly poisoned, but now his eyes refocused, and he had a look of sudden concern on his face. “Shit, I probably shouldn’t even be showing this one to you.” He looked to the two U.N. Peacekeepers for advice, but they were clueless. “It’s Jamon Iberico,” he said, as if that explained everything, but the scouts still didn’t seem to follow. Ham from Iberia? My translator offered, but that didn’t tell me much, either. “The flavor is, uh… very heavily impacted by the pigs’ feed?” he tried. Still nothing from the scouts. “The living conditions in which the pigs are kept?” More shrugs. “Oh for fuck’s sake--it can’t be lab-grown!” David whisper-growled in frustration.

The scouts eyes went wide immediately, and looked at me in a panic. Why were they looking at me? Was this a touchy subject for the humans? We were just talking about herding. Prophet’s mercy, did William have his hand on his fucking sidearm? That was a bit of a bold plan for a man in biting range!