Memory Transcription Subject: Chiri, Gojid Refugee

Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136

“I should probably go let Toki out,” said David, gesturing upwards. “Did you wanna come with, or would you rather wait here?”

I shook my head. I’d resigned myself to sleeping on the top floor as David’s guest, but I wouldn’t be caught dead taking that staircase more than once per day. “Let me catch my breath. I wanna play around with my new holopad anyway.”

“Fair. Be right back,” said David, as he trotted off towards the stairs.

The little device was a bit awkward in my paws, but it would do what it needed to do. Well, mostly. I turned it on, awkwardly trying to avoid scratching the screen with my claws. Humans didn’t really have claws, so their touchscreens revolved around mashing their squishy paw pad analogues into things.

You know, it’s kind of funny that you’d probably have a better time with an Arxur-built model, the odd voice pointed out.

I sighed. Don’t remind me.

“Greetings!” the holopad said in a cheerful female human voice.

“Eat my ass,” I said cheerfully back to the device.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I quite understood that,” said the voice. “Would you like me to switch languages to Gojidi Union Standard?”

“Yes.”

The voice abruptly sounded more metallic, but it no longer required translation. “The applicable fontpack for that language is not yet available. May I recommend enabling text-to-speech and defaulting to voice commands?”

“Sounds good,” I told the device. A thought occurred. “Wait, you can make recommendations?” This thing wasn’t sapient, right?

“Yes, I’m happy to make recommendations,” the holopad said. “It’s near dinnertime. Would you like to hear about restaurants in your area?”

My eyes narrowed. “Sure. What’s the best vegan restaurant within ten miles that is currently open for business?”

There was a long pause as it, I presumed, took extra time to filter through which restaurants nearby weren’t permanently closed on account of antimatter bombardment. “There is a vegan food truck eight miles northeast of here that is well-regarded. Would you like a menu, or directions?”

Competition for my new home? “No, that won’t be necessary. Just send an airstrike at their current location, please.”

“I’m sorry, that is not within my capabilities,” it chirped. “May I help you with something else?”

My eyes drifted around the empty room. There were tables everywhere in a varying mix of worn wood and futuristic composites, paired erratically with old vintage lounge chairs and avant-garde ergonomics. It was aesthetic chaos. The accommodations sprawled across the ground floor, with an upper mezzanine full of more seating besides. This place would be exciting when it reopened. I looked at the bar full of bottles whose labels I couldn’t yet read, and wondered if I had what it took to be a skilled bartender like David thought.

I examined what Charmaine had left behind on the table. The bottle of brown liquor with a side of lime wedges. “Hey, can you identify objects visually?” I asked the holopad.

“Of course. Point me at the desired object, and I’ll do my best.” I indulged her--the voice was female, and so was the device now in my mind--and pointed the camera lens towards the bottle. “This is a Tequila Añejo. Tequila is a distilled spirit made from the fermented sap of a desert succulent plant, and the term Añejo implies that it has been barrel-aged at length to enhance its flavor. This particular bottle is from a popular brand called Don Julio.”

I opened the bottle and sniffed at it. It had a sharp, peppery scent, some woodsy notes from the barrel, and a peculiar funk that I’d never encountered before. I wasn’t familiar enough with tequila yet to know if that was unique to the brand, or just the baseline flavor. I’d mostly been trying David’s fruity and grain-heavy spirits, and this certainly smelled distinctly different.

“Is this a good Tequila?” I asked.

“It is a popular brand of Tequila,” the holopad repeated.

“Right, but is it good?” I asked insistently.

The holopad went silent for a moment. “A meta-analysis of popular reviewers provides the following consensus: it is an excellent quality Tequila, but it may be overpriced. Don Julio is a large, old, and prestigious distiller, and, after numerous mergers and acquisitions by its parent companies, they’ve leveraged their branding and pedigree to become a household name. Some smaller independent distillers are known to offer a product of comparable quality for a much lower price.”

Most of that tracked with what I knew about my family’s beverage business. There were perks to being an interplanetary cider heiress, even with the abrupt loss of the “something to inherit” part. Still, if this bottle was expensive, I wasn’t mucking about with it without asking. I picked the bottle back up, and put it back in the open spot on the shelf behind the bar. I nodded, satisfied, at the colorful display of glass and liquids. “Say, if I wanted to make a good tequila-based cocktail, where should I start?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“The most iconic tequila-based cocktail is called a margarita. It has many variants, but the classic version is made from tequila, lime juice, and a sweet orange liqueur.”

I nodded. Made sense. A lot of Terran cocktails seemed to start with citrus fruits for their pleasant aroma, and to mix sour and sweet flavors. “What’s a good aged tequila to use in a cocktail without getting too expensive?” I held the holopad up towards the bar. “Please select the best choice from visual.”

The device considered the request, then highlighted a simple-looking bottle with a picture of a horned Venlil on it. “Cabra Furiosa,” it said. “There is some online debate over whether or not the company should rebrand. There is concern that the logo looks too much like a Venlil.”

I stared at the label in confusion. I mean, sure, the horns were wrong, and the eyes were weird, but come on, Venlil were one of the closest species to the Cradle. I’d recognize that wooly snout anywhere. “But that is a Venlil. Isn’t it?”

“That is a goat.”

I sighed. Another Terran wildlife lookalike. An enterprising human could probably hunt his way through the entire Federation without leaving home. Maybe that’s why they were so chill with us? Nothing they hadn’t already eaten before?

I picked the bottle up and set it aside. “Alright, point out the orange liqueurs that are good choices for a margarita?”

Four bottles were highlighted in succession, indicating an order. “Cointreau, a type of liqueur known as a triple sec, is the traditional option. Gran Marnier, which is a triple sec blended with brandy for subtlety and depth, is a popular alternative. If those are unavailable, any more generic varieties of triple sec should work. Lastly, Blue Curaçao would be an unconventional but technically valid choice.”

I stared at the bright blue liquid. “Why would Blue Curaçao be unconventional?”

“The flavor profile is somewhat divergent from the other liqueurs previously mentioned,” the holopad said, “but mostly because it would turn the drink blue.”

Alright. Little bit obvious, but fair. It wasn’t even a fun blue color like a berry, or a dangerous shade of blue like blood. Well, my blood.

In any event, I had some background at this point in brandy, so I pulled down the Gran Marnier, set it next to the tequila, grabbed a handful of lime wedges, and asked the holopad to walk me through how to make a margarita. I fiddled with the proportions for a while--and even added a teensy touch of some other “cocktail seasonings” like bitters and syrups--until I liked the scent and taste of it, before I shook it with ice. I heard a dog barking happily, and the sound of small paws scrabbling along the floor, before I spotted David, who arrived just as I was pouring.

David smiled. It was a spooky expression, flashing his teeth at me, but it was growing on me. “Oh, hey, whatcha making?”

I slid one of the two glasses towards him. “Margaritas.”

David’s eyes went wide, briefly, and flicked towards the table in a panic, then back to the bar’s shelves behind me. “With the…?! Oh! Okay.” The look of relief on his face when he realized I’d picked a cheaper bottle was palpable. “Cabra Furiosa. Great choice, actually.” He nodded towards the glass. “May I?”

“I can’t slide it towards you any harder without it falling off the bar,” I pointed out.

David snorted. He picked it up, sniffed at it, and took a sip. He blinked. “Yeah, shit, that’s actually really good. Do you have any idea how many bartenders manage to fuck up the sugar to acidity ratio? Because it’s most of them. This is a boozy limeade with depth. Well done!”

I blushed a little at the praise, but I was still incredulous that I was somehow intrinsically talented at a skill that I hadn’t even known existed at this time yesterday. “Really? How… how do they fuck this up? It’s mostly three ingredients!”

“I mean…” David began. “Our planned lunch service notwithstanding, we do haute cuisine at the Cropsey Carnival. We try to elevate flavors, dishes, and cocktails. But fucking up the ratios aside, if I’m being aggressively honest? Most bartenders fuck up a margarita by only using two ingredients: tequila and sour mix. And a ‘good’ margarita is when the bartender slips you extra tequila.” He shook his head. “Quantity is not quality.”

I nodded and took a sip of the other glass, the one I’d poured out for myself. He wasn’t wrong. It was difficult and pretentious for an artist to objectively declare their own work as “good”, but subjectively? I truly enjoyed what I had made. It made me happy, and it made me even happier to see that someone else had enjoyed it as well.

As for the drink itself, it blended into a more beautiful harmony than I ever could have dreamed of before I’d come to Earth. All these good but rough components rounding each other out. The twin scents of the fragrant oils from the lime and orange rinds, the zesty sour notes of fresh lime juice, the rich depth and sweetness of the orange liqueur, and through it all, the aged tequila sat, unphased, a deep and primal drumbeat that would keep playing for its own sake, no matter who showed up to jam with it.

“Let’s leave them for a bit, though,” said David. “We’ve got some groceries to unload, and I don’t know about you, but I hate exercising while drunk.”

“Fair,” I said. As we walked outside together, one of the deeper thoughts I’d been mulling over bubbled up. If the Arxur were singular monsters, and the Humans were this… intricate and advanced civilization of social monsters, well, the latter didn’t exactly sound unappealing to me at this point. I wanted to know more about how David had fought the former Peacekeeper with words alone. “Hey,” I said, as we approached the boat, “can you break down your debate with Charmaine a bit for me? I want to understand human dominance rituals a bit more.”

David choked on his own spit. “Whoa. Hang on. Don’t use the word ‘debate’ for that. That was an argument, and even calling it that is being charitable. I’d be fully thrown out of my high school Debate Club for half of the bullshit I said just then.” He shook his head. “Calling that conversation ‘a debate’ is like comparing an Olympic fencing match to a back alley knife fight.”

We were hitting a concentration of topics where my Federation-built translator chip was just saying “Oh absolutely fuck no,” and bailing out on me.

“David,” I said slowly, “I’m really gonna need you to break this down for me, because none of those events you’re using as similes have an uncensored translation in my language. Please tell me more about this Terran tradition of a Back Alley Knife Fight.”

David blanched, and did not immediately respond.