Memory Transcription Subject: Rosi, Yotul Housewife
Date [standardized human time]: November 19, 2136
“I'm sorry,” I said, the moment my voice box could make words again, “but did you just fffflipping say you were dating a predator?”
“You're allowed to swear in this restaurant, ma’am,” said the human, dryly. “Also please don't phrase it that way. ‘Dating a predator' makes it sound like I'm a sex offender.”
Humans habitually murder animals and desecrate their corpses, but sex crimes are where they draw the line!? I shook my head incredulously. Who sinks that far down into the depths of depravity and still holds any ethics at all?!
Still, I was getting side-tracked from the bigger bombshell they’d just dropped. A Gojid with a human, of all things? “How does it even work!?” I sputtered.
The human and the Gojid blinked and glanced at each other in unison. “The… the normal way?” said the human, confused.
“We're both bipedal mammals around the same size,” Chiri explained. She sounded unsure which part of the whole scandalous revelation I wasn’t getting, like it was me being a thick-headed uplift, and not her being some… some… heretical pervert! “Look, I knew a girl in college who was dating a Krakotl?” Chiri continued. “See, that took a bit of adjustment, from what she told me. Didn’t exactly have the right, uh, interface, you know? Plus the size difference and hollow bones required a lot of caution. But other mammals? No, that’s generally pretty straightforward.”
The human nodded along, taking that all in. “You’re my first nonhuman, but that sounds like it holds up.”
Chiri shrugged. “You’re my first non-Gojid, for that matter. I mean, I had a crush on this Fissan guy in college, but it never went anywhere. I really flubbed my attempts at flirting.”
The human squinted incredulously. “See, the quadrupeds seem weirder to me than dating a non-mammal. Fissans in particular just look like horses, but with a horn and those weird long fingers.”
“Humans have weird long fingers,” Chiri said, sticking her tongue out at him.
“I dunno, I guess I just don’t get the appeal,” the human said, shrugging.
“In a Fissan?” Chiri squeezed the human’s arm. “Shorter fur, lot of powerful musculature…”
The human tousled her fur. “I’m starting to suspect that you have a type,” he teased. Chiri snorted.
Why would anyone want shorter fur? I thought, scoffing, as I self-consciously rubbed my face, and with it, the shorter and coarser fur I had to live with. “And he… he hasn’t hurt you or anything?”
The human held up an arm, revealing an adhesive bandage stuck to the underside. “Honestly, kind of the opposite? The quills are tricky to get used to.”
This couldn’t be right. “Still, surely you--”
Chiri sighed, audibly. “Look, maybe you’re just acting judgmental because your blood sugar is low? Try the food. It’s delicious.”
I shifted my incredulity from the impossible couple to the modern art piece they claimed was food. “What am I even looking at?”
The human nodded excitedly. “Oh, so, bottom to top, we have a dark, dense bread in the Danish style made from a grain called rye.”
The Gojid butted in, trying to help. “So I’ve heard Yotuls are pretty big on grain, but do you--”
“I swear on Ralchi’s holy flames, I will burn this building to the fucking ground if you ask me if I know what bread is,” I growled. Chiri blinked in astonishment.
“Oh, she knows what swearing is!” said the human, a little too happily. “Splendid!”
I sighed. “What is the white stuff?” I asked. I was more curious about the toppings, but keeping things orderly was fine. It looked a bit like a paste made from seeds or nuts, but paler and smoother.
“Ah, that’s where, traditionally, we would serve cream cheese,” the human explained. “But we’ve been making a reasonable facsimile out of tofu, a soybean derivative, for over a century. I made this myself to ensure its quality and flavor. Store-bought tofu cream cheese always seems to lack the… compacted wetness and subtle acidic tang of the real thing. Too fluffy, too mellow.”
I flicked my ears in acknowledgement, but halfway ignored his rambling. Bean paste, then. Fine. I could wrap my head around bread and spread. “And the large topping? You said it was flipping fish flesh?”
The human snorted. “Oh dear, back to self-censorship. Right. So yes, typically this would be thin slices of fish that have been cold-smoked, which nicely concentrates the flavor.” Hungry or not, my stomach soured just contemplating the harborlike scent of the orange centerpiece. A human’s best attempt at mimicking sea carrion. Even if I trusted that it was made of plants alone, it stank like something had died. “In this iteration, though, I’ve taken golden beetroot and cured it in koji mold over the course of a few days. The koji eats through the sugars in the beets and replaces it with a certain… funky, savory flavor profile.”
Chiri's eyes widened. “Oh! That’s from that book you pulled out during our first date. After I said I liked the Roquefort?”
The human nodded excitedly. “Yeah, it sounded like your species’ scavenging background gave you an affinity for aged and fermented foods, so I wanted to explore non-dairy ways of playing those notes.”
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Non-dairy ways of…? “Hold on, what’s Roquefort?” I asked.
The human immediately and conspicuously stopped talking, only turning to Chiri. “Hm?” she said. “Oh, Roquefort is a type of cheese made with an edible mold that enhances its flavor.”
My eyes flicked down to the white bean paste made to impersonate cheese. “And that mold can also add those flavors to other substances? Like this one, in theory?” I said, pointing.
The human agreed immediately. “Correct. I was tinkering around with making a plant-based blue cheese, actually. It came out quite nicely, but one ingredient isn’t a meal. I need to figure out what dish it will go in. It would have overwhelmed this one.”
Chiri cleared her throat. “In this particular case, though, I wasn’t eating plant-based cheese. I was eating the real thing.”
My eyes went wide with horror. “That’s disgusting! I’m so sorry. See, this is why you can’t trust predators. They’ll trick you and feed you weird, disgusting predator food.”
“No, it wasn’t a trick,” said Chiri. “I requested cheese specifically.”
My jaw dropped. “Why?!”
“Because I can’t eat meat thanks to that weird retroviral allergy the Federation infected my people with,” she said. She sounded angry about it! She was supposed to sound thankful, or relieved, that the Federation had saved her from herself! …Right? “Dairy, at least in Gojids, seems to circumvent the allergy. David thinks it’s because mammals are supposed to drink milk during part of their lifecycle, so dairy got exempted when they were designing the retrovirus.”
The human nodded. “Also, I know for a fact that Arxur don’t generally do dairy,” he added. “I spoke with one right after the Battle of Earth? Cheese was the only animal product she thought sounded disgusting. The very idea of using milk as a food source probably never even came up before humans joined the galactic stage.”
I recoiled as far back on my barstool as I could without risking toppling over. “Right, but… but… you want to try meat?” I spluttered. “You’d be eating it right now if the Federation hadn’t actively stopped you?!”
“Yup,” said Chiri, and I could taste the conviction in her voice.
I turned towards the human in desperation. “Does she have Predator Disease?!”
The human squinted at me, incredulous. “You’re asking the Predator?”
Chiri thumped the bar decisively with her paw. “It’s not a disease, it’s a lifestyle.”
“It’s a perversion!” I shouted. “It’s a betrayal of everything the Federation ever taught you!”
“Fuck the Federation!” Chiri shouted back. “I’m sick of my entire species being told what they’re allowed to be by them! Who gave them the fucking right to erase our culture? Our heritage? They just stomped in with their fleet and made us all become someone else, or else! They lie and manipulate more than the fucking predators, and for what? Because they think they know better? They don’t know shit!”
I felt my mouth audibly click shut. There was a tiny ember of rage and rebellion deep inside my heart, and the Gojid was fanning it. Wasn’t that what the Federation was doing to us, too? I went to their schools, I learned their ways, I gave up all the little ‘primitive’ things that had served my parents and grandparents well… and for what? A few shiny space age trinkets, and a lecture about Yotuls being too dumb to make our own yet? “What… what don’t they know?” I said, barely listening.
“Pfft, I dunno, how about their fuckin’... puerile grasp of zoology?” Chiri growled. “They’ve got hundreds of planets’ worth of ecosystems to study, and they still think eye placement can reliably tell you an animal’s behavior and diet! It’s stupid! Some animals don’t even have eyes! What then?”
“I can think of a half-dozen Terran herbivores off the top of my head that would fearlessly stomp an Arxur to death for looking at them funny,” the human added, confirming to me where Chiri had gotten her peculiar ideas from, “and one of the nearest evolutionary relatives to humans, the gorilla? Forward-facing eyes, massive teeth, huge and muscular… and they’re about as close to chill frugivores as wild animals ever get.”
That… that had to be impossible. They taught us in school… My thoughts lingered on school, and the lessons I’d learned there, in the classroom and outside of it. “What? You want to know how a dishwasher works?” the teacher had scoffed. “No, no, you can’t learn about that. You’re not ready yet. You’re too primitive. You’re lucky we even let you people own those.”
“If I asked you how your dishwasher worked,” I said, staring suspiciously at the human, “what would you tell me?”
The human blinked, confused. “Huh? I mean, my whole kitchen’s got an automatic wash cycle. I only kinda know the broad strokes of how it works, but I think I’ve got the instruction manual around somewhere if you want to see it. There’s probably an educational video online that explains how it works better.”
I did a double-take. “Wait, you guys just have instructional videos for… what, all machines ever?”
The human shrugged. “I guess? Don’t think it even has to be a machine. Yeah, as long as it’s not something super illegal like hard drugs or weapons of mass destruction, you can pretty much find an expert with an online multimedia channel happily explaining how anything is made.”
I slumped down on my barstool, trying to wrap my head around that. A bigger library than the richest Yotul on Leirn had ever dreamed of, and it was just… open to whoever. No secrets too dark for us to know, no gated content kept away from the grimy little hands of foolish primitives… I still wasn’t sold on Earth, but at least I’d have a lot to read about while I was here.
“Look, I’m sorry, is it too much?” the human asked. I blinked, trying to figure out what he was talking about. The horrible eyes were a tipoff, though: he was staring at the food he’d served me. “I was trying to show off my art here, but if it’s too complicated for you, I can throw together a nice simple salad or something.”
A bead of anger brought me back to the present. “It’s food,” I growled. “It’s not ‘too complicated’ for me, it’s just weird and ornate.” I took a deep breath, steeling myself against the vile taste it surely had, and popped the whole thing in my mouth and chewed.
My worst fears were confirmed: it was delicious.
The dark bread was moist, with a lovely malted character, and whole bits of grain in the dense crumb. It was pleasantly rustic. I’d had more refined and processed breads before, but this was a deliberate choice to leave the grains whole, to let them stand on its own. If I hadn’t known that he’d clearly stolen the idea from Gojids, I might have taken this as a sign that humans had a proper appreciation for the qualities of good bread. The bean spread went in quite the opposite direction. It was impossibly smooth, and despite its alleged similarities to disgusting dairy products, it had a pleasantly thick and filling character, with a touch of some odd tanginess to keep it light. But those were both just supporting elements for the toppings.
As brightly flavored as they were brightly colored, the toppings exploded with flavor. Herbaceous sprouts clashed with sharply pickle-like dots of sauce and warming flecks of spices and pungent dried vegetables. It was a summer garden with the force of a grenade. And in the center, the fake fish flesh unveiled an impossibly decadent concentration of flavors. A light sweetness, fading, the salty funk of something aged, the lightest touch of smoke, and the whole thing dripping with fragrant oils that tasted of the sea.
I swallowed, and the tastes faded like they never were, a raucous parade that had just swept into town, thrown confetti and streamers everywhere, and then marched right on again afterwards, leaving me disoriented and reeling from the experience.
“What the fuck just happened?” I muttered, teetering on my seat.