Coeus and I had come to the mall with a single goal: picking out some ingredients with which to make our supper. About one hour prior, after realizing my desire to show him what a proper meal looked like, he and I together came up with the idea to try our hands at cooking ourselves. We could have simply requested some ingredients be brought up to us from the food stores held on the cruiser vessel below, but decided to be a bit more adventurous and find some local ingredients for ourselves. That said, I’d hardly done any cooking in my entire life, so I couldn’t tell a flounder from a flatfish—I had no idea what I was even looking at.
“Hey, Coeus. Do you know what kinds of fish these are?” I asked him knowingly.
He nodded. Then, as if to prove it, he pointed at a nearby stack of fish, and gave me the name he found for it by cross-referencing with his databases.
That’s a Pacific halibut.
“Halibut? Never heard of it.”
It’s a species of righteye flounder.
“Does it taste good?”
It’s known for its white flesh and mild flavor. Can be eaten a number of ways: raw, grilled as a steak, deep-fried, or even baked into a gratin.
“Maybe we should just go with that, then… Sounds like it’d be pretty hard to mess up,” I said as I grabbed one of the shrink-wrapped packages from the pile. Each filet was pretty sizable, so we likely wouldn’t be able to eat it all, but perhaps the professor and Lei would want some. “Okay, we should get some vegetables too. Always important to keep a balanced diet, right?”
Right. I looked over at him, then belatedly realized that having a balanced diet probably didn’t mean much to a Titan, so he was only acknowledging my human concerns. Though normally, we didn’t think about diet either; proper nutrition was another thing for the network to worry about on our behalf. Titans did all the thinking, and we did all the eating. But today, we were going to challenge that dynamic.
“Boy. Lots of eye-opening stuff today,” I said.
Coeus looked a bit confused, as though he didn’t quite catch my meaning. On a large holofield in the center of the mall, a computer-generated product barker gave their spiel with a rousing weight to their words—none of which I could understand.
All of the ingredients were laid out neatly on the kitchen island. We’d brought home a lot—far more than we could ever get through ourselves. Well, better too much than not enough, I told myself. Coeus and I exchanged glances. Off to one side of him was a general-purpose phalange, equipped with six small manipulators for more fine-tuned work. These were not very powerful, but were indispensable for anything that otherwise required human hands and dexterity to do properly. And this way, Coeus could physically help me out with all sorts of traditional cooking tasks.
“You ready to do this?” I asked.
Yes!
And so we set about making our supper with the same level of determination with which one might greet the challenge of an entire day’s worth of hard labor. We were right to steel ourselves, too—cooking turned out to be no mean feat. I originally assumed it would be quite simple to follow a recipe, but reading instructions and successfully carrying them out were two entirely different things. It was not as though anyone could learn to fly simply by reading a biography of the Wright brothers, after all. As I struggled to split open the rock-hard pumpkin we’d brought home, I thanked my lucky stars that I’d been born in an age when humanity had already been freed from the shackles that once made these kinds of manual tasks a daily necessity. Meanwhile, Coeus grated the ginger root he was working on so finely and rapidly that it quite literally turned to dust and vanished.
About three hours later, and well past dinnertime, we’d finally laid out our meal on the living room table. We’d made several dishes, taking full advantage of local ingredients. We made a garden salad in a ginger dressing, pickled herring on rye, broiled Pacific halibut, and a slow-cooked cream of pumpkin soup. After it was all finally done and the table was set, I walked wearily over to one of the chairs and signaled to Coeus that it was time to dig in. He nodded and brought a new small phalange I’d never seen before into the room. It was a self-propelling cylindrical pod with an orb about the size of a handball on an adjustable stand affixed to the top.
“I take it this is that thing you were talking about?” I asked.
Yes, said Coeus, as the pod came to a halt at his feet. The sphere’s interior is lined with sensors that analyze and break down food matter in the manner of the human oral cavity.
The shutter on the upper half of the orb opened up with the same mechanical whirring sound as a camera shutter, revealing the mouth of a gustatory phalange complete with artificial taste buds. This had been the main sticking point when the idea of us cooking together first came up: how would Coeus partake in said meal?
Obviously, chucking a human-sized meal into the giant maw of his Titan body wouldn’t taste like much at all, and cooking a Titan-sized meal was simply out of the question. Coeus’s proposed solution was simple: create a device that could take in all of the same sensory information a human mouth could, and convey that to his Titan brain. Since the taste of a given food as we perceived it was already just an amalgamation of its flavors, texture, and smell converted into nervous impulses in our brains, there really shouldn’t have been too much of a difference with this methodology. And Coeus had managed to put this device together in only the amount of time it took us to go collect our ingredients and prepare them. Now, we were all set to eat. We took our respective seats at opposite ends of the table and put our hands together in traditional dining etiquette.
“Well, then, shall we?” I asked. Coeus nodded emphatically.
I decided to start with a bite of the broiled halibut; Coeus used his manipulators to grab one of the filets by the tail end and toss it into his artificial mouth. We both took the time to chew on the fish for a bit and get a good feel for its overall taste.
“Hrm… Well, that sure is a fish,” I said, opting to be the first to voice my impressions. “I mean, it’s not awful or anything, but I don’t know… What do you think?”
I think it’s very tasty, actually.
“Yeah, I guess it is pretty good for our first attempt…”
I appreciated Coeus’s praise, and it was hard to go wrong with just salted, broiled fish as long as one didn’t overdo it. And yet, there was something about it… It wasn’t nearly as good as the fish from a restaurant, or what Titan might prepare for you at home. The flavors just weren’t quite there—they lacked a certain oomph.
I mean it. It’s really good. Coeus smiled. This time, I was certain he was simply trying to be nice—but I did appreciate the kind sentiment.
“Okay, let’s try this salad,” I said, then scooped out some of the ginger-dressed garden salad and put it on my plate. Coeus had made this dish all by himself, so I was excited to see how he did. I brought a small bundle of coated lettuce up into my mouth. “Hey, this is really good!”
I wasn’t just being polite, either. At first, I figured it had to be because it was a member of the Titan network preparing it, but a closer examination of the flavors my mouth was experiencing suggested they were actually quite different from standard Titan-prepared fare from a restaurant or home kitchen. It was a bit plainer, just like my fish had been. but for whatever reason, I found this to be delicious and that not at all. Why is that? I wondered.
You mean it? asked Coeus.
“Yep,” I said. “Try some for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
Coeus put a forkful of salad into the maw of the gustatory phalange. But the only reaction he had to offer was a slight puzzled tilting of his head. Perhaps we were both experiencing the same feelings about our respective dishes, but in reverse.
“It really is good, I promise,” I assured him.
He smiled bashfully; it seemed we really were both unsure of our own offerings, but very pleased with one another’s. We continued eating, conversing sporadically in short bursts all throughout the meal.