Hands busy, mind adrift in the sub-aether of less-than-conscious thought, knife moving, hand curling and pushing like a well-timed machined clock.

I don’t know if it’s something that other people do. It’s just something I do. Something I’ve always done. There’s a zone of ...perhaps white noise, a susurration of endless radio static, or perhaps it’s a complete void; my mind slips into that space of comfortable nothingness while my body moves of its own accord. In a way I am aware beyond awareness, in another I am oblivious. I can’t explain it for the same reason you can’t explain why you’re left or right-handed. It just is.

In a way I was aware of her being there; in a way I was oblivious. My mind was elsewhere. In the zone, some of my friends from yesteryear might have said. Zoned out.

My hands moved, the knife flashed. The chicken breast under my right hand was sliced into centimeter-wide strips as my right hand shifted the meat towards my knuckles, the blade in my left hand sliced the meat without nicking them.

In this restaurant, as in everything else, I was an oddity. Every other “cook” simply took the bag of pre-sliced, pre-flavored chicken, dumped it onto a plate, heated it up, and served it. For me it was something more. I had to cut my own meat, season it, cook it, prepare it with my own two hands. I couldn’t be satisfied otherwise. If the customer complained, then it would legitimately be my fault and contrary-wise, if the food I prepared brought approval, well, that was nice, too.

I took a peek at who had come into the sanctity of my kitchen, and as with all the others, I had to do a triple-take.

You know what I’m talking about: The Lost Children, the Perfect Ladders. The first take, and you’re standing next to some impossibly gorgeous specimen of humanity.

The second take, and the realization that you’re really standing next to an impossible beauty. There’s just no other way to describe it. If the essence of human physical beauty could be distilled and coalesced, that would be it. It’s a thing of beauty that artists and sculptures have been trying to capture for millenia, the perfect symmetry, the correct eye-width, the elegant arch of an eyebrow, the curve of a collarbone, somehow immaculately, impossibly in front of you, and it’s so foreign, so impossible, so alien that despite that unrelenting picturesque perfection, it is so far removed from humanity it’s freakish, strange, alien, grotesque.

The third take, and you’re shoring up your mental defenses, you’re preparing to speak to them. How do you do that? They’re too strange. Too human to be human. Too perfect. You look into their eyes, and they look right back at you, but beyond the eye, are you staring into the nietzschean abyss that stares back?

Hand curling on the knife handle instinctively; first the hand, elbow to the face to send her backwards, let the handle drop and revolve to put the blade down, knife between the third and fourth ribs into the heart-

Can I help you with something? Who are you? What’re you doing in my kitchen? Fuck you doing here? Think you can come in here just like that?

Eyes. God, her eyes. Green. Green eyes. Black hair, to the waist. Green turtleneck to match her eyes, bluejeans. Figure to die for. To kill for. Tall. almost too tall. Perfectly tall.

Too much to think, all at once.

“What?” escaped my lips before I could put the question to words. There was an abyss behind those eyes, no doubt. Oh, everyone ‘liked’ the Perfect Ladders, but nobody made them anymore. Too alien, too strange. Carnival funhouse mirrors, seeing yourself reflected back at you, but warped, twisted, ugly, freakish. They were perfection made flesh, and you, well... you were just ordinary. You were obsolete. So the project was quietly, discreetly abandoned. Look upon my works ye Mighty and despair. No more Perfect Ladders, now just the Lost Children.

The perfection of gene science. Remove that hereditary trait for heart failure. Keep the eyes, that’s a family trait. Ah, I see you’re a carrier for the gene-set that’s tied to intelligence. Ah, yes. There we go, that’s what your child will look like. Perfect.

Her mouth moved. The abyss behind her impossibly gorgeous eyes heaved and shifted. Somewhere, beneath the placid surface of the impossibly deep lake, a monster shifted, turned over in its slumber.

“Mister Lannister sent me to you.” She replied. Her voice, like her beauty, was perfect. You loved and hated that voice; you wanted to smash every stradivarius and empty a shotgun into every Stienway fucking piano the world has ever known. Nails, screeching across a chalkboard would almost sound sweet. If her voice was somehow capable of being distilled into a liquid, you wanted to slather yourself in it, rub it into your skin, violate it with your essence.

Oh god, not today. Get it together.

“W-” I hadn’t even gotten the first syllable out before I got it. I knew it. I knew it all along. It’s happened so many times before, I should be used to it. The little knife. Betrayal. I was getting the boot. This... thing, with perfect body and perfect voice and strange, unknowable mind had been hired to replace me. Boss Danny and I had gotten along. Allowed me my little concessions. I could cook what they served here, my way, during my shift. All the other cooks on other shifts did what they liked, what they were used to. Drop the bag of food into the cooking vat or the microwave, ding-done-order up. After all, you didn’t need a genius to cook food. You just needed a well-trained ape, or at least a pseudo-AI with a functional operating set.

Genius. That word used to mean something, before the Lost Children. They were geniuses, too.

Gene-cultivated to be perfect from birth, machine-taught to perfectly recall, analyze, and adapt; utterly useless in actual culture. We had made them too well. Our society wasn’t ready for the Perfect Ladders, but we made them anyway, and we paid the price.

She stood there, perfect body, perfect voice, perfect posture. Her arms were limp, hands loose and dangling. Machine learning could only take you so far. Things like body language, changing the tone or modulation of your voice to reflect emotion, all the subtle hints and cues that we learn as we grow up, the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the culture, the soul of society was absent from them.

In the scant second of contemplation and horror, my hands had completed their task; left hand sliding the knife under the sliced chicken, right to on top to steady the load, open the vat, slide it off into the marinade. There was nothing left but the knife.

“He sent you?” I heard myself ask. Brain was already shutting down, going into overdrive. Wipe the counters. Sterilize the knives. Put the knives on the rack. Take off the apron. Collect the last check from Boss Danny. Trudge out into the street and get in the car. Right hand twist the key in the ignition. Go home to the empty apartment. Mark time in a steadily aging body while the world moved on without me. Wait for my appointed time to die.

“He said he wanted to see you.” She paused. “When you had the chance.” Pause. Silence. It seemed like, for a moment, there was something else she wanted to say, but whatever abyss-brain lurked behind those too-pretty eyes had decided the effort expended wasn’t worth the reward gained.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Orders- no orders. No afternoon rush, not today. The rush would be small, manageable. It happened with regular familiarity. Today wasn’t special insofar as much as it was just another day, but yet the uniqueness of the day was punctuated by the fact that on this day there was never a mad rush of people scrambling for food and drink. Ordinary.

Do I take the apron off? Sanitary. Stand clean in front of the boss. Do I wear the apron so I can dramatically throw it in his face when he tells me that he can no longer afford to pay me, that this perfect thing, a mockery of human perfection made flesh could mechanically prepare and fix meals for customers?

What use was I? I wasn’t a Perfect Ladder. I came before the Lost Generation. Certifiable genius, rendered increasingly obsolete as automation and the perfection of the human genome rendered actual genius to back-shelf antiquities. How many degrees, in how many fields? How many industry-specific accreditations rendered meaningless through computational AI, predictive algorithms, the advancement of ... well, everything?

The entirety of my life was the inevitability of betrayal. Each job, each career ended meaninglessly, against the advancement of the future. Who needed a genius when a machine could do the work of a genius tirelessly? Who needed a genius when you could have them tailor-made from birth?

An aging man, in his middle ages with doctorates and degrees and accreditations working as a short-order cook in a hookah bar at the ass-end of nowhere for a pittance of what he was supposed to be worth.

Let it be done then, and swiftly. Resignation. Defeat. Again and again, the same song and dance. You’d think I’d be used to it, now. What hurts less each time hurts even more the next time. Paradoxical, but true.

While my brain churned through such things I’d already sterilized the knives, and instead of returning them to the magnetized strip over the counters, I had packed them away. They were mine; if I was to be a fucking cook I was going to have the best instruments of the trade. Useless fripperies, now. I’d stripped off my gloves for the last time and hung up my apron, and with a heavy heart, I headed towards the back, where Boss Danny Lannister tallied sales, managed orders, and kept his little shop open. How long before he was replaced with automation?

She was following me. The conscious awareness of it crawled along my spine and froze the hairs on the back of my neck. My stomach churned. Of course I would be terrified. Why wouldn’t I be? Everyone felt uneasy around the Perfect Ladders, to have one following you, face expressionless, walking without emotion or intent, simple locomotion, that unknowable mind behind those too-lovely eyes churning away alien thoughts right behind you would be enough to frighten the most seasoned of mercenaries.

I paused, hand on the latch. He didn’t stand on ceremony; I wouldn’t knock and he wouldn’t expect me to. She would, though. Somewhere in that brain the basic mannerisms and expected behaviors would be etched; knock and await permission before entering.

I turned and looked her in the eye. Bold move for someone so defeated. But if I was to go to the headsman, I would do what I did best, which coincidentally was everything.

“Do you have to come in with me?” I asked, hoping my voice sounded casual. I would go to the headsman with dignity if I could, and hearing that I’d been given the axe- even from some tobacco-chewing high school dropout like Boss Danny- I’d hope to avoid witnesses. Just Danny and I.

She stopped; a puppet with her wires cut. No expression. Neutral. Strange to see blankness in a face with such beauty. Strange to see such lifelessness in such a body. Did they feel anything? She could have been a limp and yet upright corpse. No poise.

“I can wait.” She replied in that beautiful voice, dead of emotion.

“Be right back.” I replied, again hoping that I was disguising the churning in my gut.

Stepping into Danny’s office was an experience. Piles of paper stacked haphazardly. Doodads and incomprehensible things scattered seemingly at random. A partially disassembled hookah.

“You wanted to see me, boss?” I asked, forcing myself to speak past the lump in my throat. Knives were in the case on the counter. Leave the office, retrieve the knives- they were a custom set, and expensive- and go out into the night through the back door. Into the car. Go home.

“You saw her, right?” Danny asked, and then paused. “God man, wipe that look off your face. You’re not getting canned.”

Was I really so transparent? Apparently so.

He gestured at the other chair in his office, and appeared to realize it was stacked with papers, and turned his gesture into an indifferent flap.

“You prolly don’t know, but you’re actually pretty popular.” He offered. “Frankly, we used ta not get a lunch rush until you showed up, so profits are up. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing good work.” He spread his hands expansively. “You’re still laying golden eggs.”

I jerked my thumb at the door and the thing waiting behind it. “Her?”

He paused, and folded his hands.

“How long we known each other? A year? Two?” He asked quietly, meditatively tapping his thumbs together.

“‘Bout that, I reckon.” I replied simply. “We don’t go way back, but we go back a ways.”

He chuckled at that, but lifelessly.

“I’m married.” He began somberly. “Ah, fuck it. I hate this shit.” He waved his hand. “I’m the black sheep. They humored me. Gave me money enough to open the shop. Make it work, and they forget about me. My wife thinks it’s a joke.” He shuddered. “The looks she gives me...”

I gave him a baffled look while shifting my feet for a better posture.

He rolled his eyes. “I married rich. I was the street tough that loved a woman with money. To keep me out of the way and out of sight, they gave me this shop and told me to kindly fuck off.”

He looked at his hands and let out a sigh and spread them out on the desk. “I was told yesterday to hire her.” He grimaced. “Creepy, isn’t she? How the fuck could I hire her? She’d scare away the customers.”

“So I’m training my replacement.” I replied in a dead voice. The inevitability of betrayal. The inevitability of repetition.

“Fuck no!” He replied, eyes wide with shock. He yanked a folder out of the pile on his desk and held it out. “Look at the numbers, slick. Look at them.”

I obliged him. The numbers were trending upward. He was gradually making more money each cycle than he was the previous.

“They set me up to fail, and then you come along. I said so, didn’t I? We didn’t have a lunch rush before. Now we do. Because of you. You’re making us money. That don’t sit right with those tightwad assholes of in-laws I got saddled with. Hell, even my wife looks at me like that, sometimes.”

“Angel’s my cousin. By marriage. Not like my family could afford a Designed Ladder.” He picked up a cup and spat brown juice into it indifferently. “You’re gonna train her, yeah. I don’t trust her out with the customers. Scare ‘em off. Figure you could teach her some of the simple shit. I don’t know what fuckall you do in that kitchen and I don’t care, because it’s making me money. Maybe you can teach her to do some of that shit- fuck, even just push a mop around, I don’t fucking care- but she’s working here, and you’re gonna be over her. That’s gotta be a thing, right? You gotta cook and an under-cook? Apprentice? Some shit like that?”

The words tumbled from my lips before I could stop them. “You’re shitting me.”

He shook his head. “Nope. You got yourself promoted. Shoulda done it earlier, anyway. You’ve got more between your ears than I’ve got.” He stood up, and paced a little.

“Teach her what you think she can learn. They think they’re foisting her off on us- on me- so that my business tanks. That ain’t gonna happen. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. You’re gonna teach her.”

“Fuck.” Again, the word dropped from my mouth before I thought.

He snorted and scratched his patchy beard. Two hundred years in the past with a gun on his hip he’d be a gunfighter with spurs, a leather hat and grit. He looked like I felt: out of place, out of time, lost in a world that was rapidly closing the doors on obsolescence.

“We make do with what we got.” He muttered, and faced me. “You teach her, slick. Teach her to cook. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to get a personality out of her- something that won’t make her look so...” He paused, picked up his cup and spat more brown juice into it. “Fuckin’ creepy.” He stared at his cup and looked at me.

“Shit. That was my coffee. Get the fuck out of here and go teach her some shit.” He gestured, and with that I was summarily dismissed.