It was a short ride to the worker’s residential sector through the metro. When they emerged back up from the underground, it was a different world, one that Luo had never seen before. Unlike Luo’s part of the complex, with whitewashed concrete walls and harshly bright LED panels, here the illumination was a noticeably duller gray, coloring the entire environment like the filtered light of an overcast sky. Steel framed glass stretched overhead, enclosing the entire area in an artificial shell.

  “It’s not that much further. You want to visit my place first?” Le asked.

  Luo subconsciously blushed a bit. “Nah, it's not like that. My whole family’s there,” he replied, defusing her slight embarrassment. “I gotta get my card anyhow, for the real food.”

  She nodded. They walked through another maze of transporter belts, escalators and elevators to come across Le’s residence. Another vast maze of staircases and blank doors with “PRIVATE RESIDENCE” stamped on the exterior. However, this time, some doors were missing with a simple metal plate to replace them.

  >Location? Luo queried to her Neuronet implant.

  >Hab block 7, Sector 5A. Navigation available. Caution: increased risk of criminal activity and social unrest.

  They climbed a few stairs to a nondescript door, where Le suddenly stopped and placed his hand on the keypad.

  The outer door slid open. Instead of a neat entryway with an inner door, there was a ladder leading straight up, with the inner living quarters exposed. The only light was the artificial digital window set to an oceanic view, coloring the entire residence a dim blue. There was a faint smell of stale air and muddled sounds of talking.

  Luo wrinkled her nose a bit. She began to take off her shoes.

  “Don’t bother,” Le laughed. Luo followed him into the dark room. A chubby older man staring blankly into space with digital glasses on turned to look at them, but with an almost bored expression, turned to face the wall again.

  “Hey dad,” Le greeted. His father nodded without even looking back at them.

  What would have been the living quarters was subdivided into several cubicles along the wall opposite that of the digital window, each barely large enough to hold a single chair. In each slot was someone sitting down wearing glasses and staring forward into empty space.

  “Working from home,” Le stated. “You wait here, I’ll get something from upstairs.”

  Luo Xixi looked down at her feet with some distress. At least when she worked from home in her old job back home, she had a bed and desk instead of a chair and a closet.

  “Uh, upstairs?” Luo muttered quietly. “How do you have an upstairs?”

  “Oh, they allocate two stacked units for a household. Don’t they do that where you come from?”

  Luo was taken aback. “No, maximum occupancy is 4, beyond that another independent unit is allocated.”

  Le shrugged. “That’s how we do things around here.”

  He climbed up further on the ladder. There was an audible uneven thud of his boots stepping over objects, searching for something. He stopped and the steps reversed themselves.

  “Got it,” he said, card in hand.

  “You’re really going to use that? Neuronet is so much more convenient,” Luo said.

  “Where we’re going doesn’t take Neuronet,” Le grinned subversively.

  They walked deeper into the worker’s compound. This was one of the older hab blocks, a mountain of steel and gray concrete built into the side of the compound’s outer walls and extending over a large square filled with tables. A few parasols were extended over some tables as a facade of normalcy, despite the entire square being indoors. Harsh white lights emanated from the ceiling, making the square a small spot of brightness in the dim, gray landscape. People walked around, talking to each other in small groups, or rode in low scooters through the crowd.

  Le walked up to one of the doors in the wall inside the square’s distribution center. It slid open effortlessly just as he was about to knock. Luo Xixi cautiously followed him up to the door.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Hey hey,” a hearty voice called out. It was a thin man with a brown stained apron. Luo Xixi had never seen a human cook before. Back home, food would be conveniently delivered to her door by synth couriers, and here she ate at the standard cafeteria.

  “Hey brother,” Le said. “We’re just here for some, uh, real food.”

  The thin man shook his head. “You sure you have enough money?”

  Le took the credit card out from his pocket and tapped it into the air. There was no need for explanation. The man nodded.

  “I’ll be right back then,” the man said. “You two find a seat.”

  “What does he, uh, do?” Luo Xixi asked.

  Le looked at her like she was crazy.

  “He’s a cook. He cooks. Prepares food. For humans,” he said with a mix of incredulity and bewilderment. “You really have not met a cook before?”

  “I’m just more used to synth food,” she said, shaking her head. “They deliver to your table or door with a thought!”

  Le grinned. “This is real food. You can take a seat first, me and my friend have to talk for a bit.”

  Luo Xixi sat down underneath the useless parasol, looking around her. There were neat rows of small green vines and leaves in the hydroponics levels above the hab block, some rustling in the wind from the air exchangers built high into the wall. They were placed high in the wall in case of sabotage from Hyoron who were able to break over the fence.

  In the corner of Luo Xixi’s vision, she saw Le talking to the cook and handing him the card while laughing. The cook held it in his hand and stared at it for a fraction of a second before returning it to Le with both hands.

  She leaned back on her chair, pushed her glasses up on her nose and fidgeted with her shirt sleeves a bit before wandering off into a brief daydream. Beyond the glass was an eternal twilight sky with hints of reddish gray to one side and a stark black on the other. It was nothing like the brilliant sun and warm night skyglow of her homeworld.

  “Hey, I’m back!” Le called, snapping her back to reality. “The food will be out in just a bit.”

  Soon, the food was delivered to their table by a courier synth. I guess there were some things that humans just felt themselves above doing, Luo Xixi thought.

  It was two bowls of noodles, almost identical to the ones in the cafeteria, only with a slight, oily sheen on top. Luo Xixi sipped a bit of the soup.

  “This feels the same. It’s just got a bit more plant oil,” she said. “The kitchens are just charging for sentiment then?”

  “This tastes like just ramen with more plant oil to you?” Le asked, disappointed.

  “What else would it be?” she asked, confused.

  Le shook his head. “This is not just about the taste,” he said with a low voice. “It’s about what the taste represents. Freedom. Power. Risk.”

  She looked at him with a frightful expression in her eyes. Freedom. Power. Risk. Risk. Risk. The alarm bells were going off in her head. There was something wrong here.

  “I don’t like risk,” she said hesitantly. “Especially if it tastes almost the same as synth food.”

  Le sighed. “I will be back. This you won’t get at a synth cafeteria.”

  Within minutes, she heard a squeaking wheel roll across the slightly uneven concrete floor. The chef himself was back, wheeling a cart with a small stainless steel pot on it. Steam was rising from all sides of the lid. This must have been important for the cook to have delivered it personally, Luo thought to herself. How much was Le spending for this?

  The pot was set on their table. The cook personally lifted the lid before scurrying back into the kitchen as if fleeing a crime scene. It was an exotically different dish than the synth food she had all her life.

  She poked at it a bit with her utensils. It looked like thin slices of protein soaked in the broth. Yet this protein was nothing like the textured vegetable and fungal protein that she had eaten all her life. It was brown and oily, with a burnt crisp on one side.

  “Here, try it,” Le said, serving a slice to Luo Xixi’s noodle bowl.

  The taste was quite unusual. It was… crunchy. Stringy. It had a tough texture to it that was difficult to conceptually match with anything. It smelled faintly nitrogenous, perhaps some sort of amine, with an underlying richness. Fibers stubbornly resisted chewing in her mouth and releasing just a bit more oil than she expected, giving everything a slick feel.

  She knew this taste instinctively, but had no words or experiences with which to describe it. Her body rebelled, a primal rejection that her civilized mind couldn't explain. This wasn't the bland safety of synth-protein. It made her slightly nauseous, but she forced herself to swallow it anyway. A cold knot tightened in her stomach, a feeling entirely foreign to her life of artificial meals and predictable outcomes. This wasn't the calculated risk of a game or knowledge upload, this was something evil, something she couldn't name.

  “How is it?” Le inquired eagerly.

  “It’s… good. I’ve never had anything like it,” Luo Xixi replied carefully. She knew that the meal had become something else. A test? A warning? At the very least, at that moment she knew that Le could not be trusted.

  Le grinned. “Don’t have it too often. This taste can get addictive.”

  Luo Xixi shivered subconsciously despite the warmth wafting from the food. It wasn't a shiver of cold, but of a primal revulsion. She had never felt this before, but she knew that this was not what attraction felt like.