“The Teacup” or "the art of broken pieces"

Summary:Thousands of years in the future, Competitive chef and ex antiquities dealer Gattias Oudar has inherited an antique teacup which lets the drinker hallucinate the memories of their ancestors while they eat. Will it help them win a hallucinogenic edible cook off/Hackathon and reconnect with their estranged daughter?(Hard sci fi/ follows the laws of physics)(8 pgs to read)possible aspects of the story I would like advice on:-i’m having trouble organizing this story. It still feels like a series of impressions and exposition rather than a carefully organized plotdo I need to add more personality to the characters?Is it clear what is happening in the story or are there aspects which need more clarity?-this doesn’t feel like a daughter? Maybe make the daughter into a close friend instead…-is there too much exposition?-it's supposed to happen in a transhuman future that follows all laws of physics, but the story does't really focus on that much. I'm pretty sure I didn't make any physics mistakes.**********“The teacup” / the art of broken pieces​​Whenever I could taste the memories from the first two hundred years of my life, I could not describe it without the flavor of the expanse. There is the smell of oxides and burnt breads which wafts into my nostrils whenever I return from floating in the void. The hum of the air cyclers as the new aromas of the station returned to me each time. It is a subtle flavor, that smell- a scent that tells me every time that I am still alive and breathing, that I could still taste the iron on my breath. This is the scent in your nose before you enter the kitchen for tea and dinner after a long time outside, in the void. The smell of history, and civilization, and of living beings.Was it this emotion for the scent that drove me to the cooking competition? Or something else?As I stand on the stage of the competition kitchen with ten other teams around us, that drive i feel to win begins to roar with hunger. Perhaps too much again. That feeling is back. I’ll need it now though, so I don't squash it.I calm myself and look up to the announcer.“Welcome, friends, to the six hundredth annual championship of the multi habitat culinary competition! Teams from all across the orbital have come together to compete!”I glance over at the other members of the team. Chesed and Nika are bionts like me and Joji’s a low gravity tweak from the Simon habitat who I haven't seen in person since an antiquities deal a decade ago. We’d all registered over the net a month ago and gotten together last night to drink and relive memories a bit before the competition . The cooking equipment we’ve rigged together in the last round sits in front of us. Beaters, frothers, diffusers, and memory trays assembled neatly before us, like chess pieces. Ready to play.The announcer's voice booms out from the stage.“Are you ready? Let’s introduce the judges!” The ancient-suited announcer swings their arm toward the tables on the stage.“This is a deeply emotionally charged competition due to the memories involved, so we’re going to keep most of their real identities secret from the competitors, except for a few key personality traits that they think will help you cook your dishes..”Teams will have one hour to hack together a full experience of a meal and a memory associated with the dish you have to prepare. All teams will have twenty minutes of research in the public sensorium experience libraries before beginning their cooking challenge. ““Are... you ...ready?”I think back to the last time i’d participated in a competition like this. Decades ago. Back before I’d calmed down and slowed my pace of life. I’d spent weeks focusing on practice though. Hard to re-integrate the skills quickly sometimes. I recall how my daughter Anastasia, sat in the garden 50 years ago soon after she began living on her own. I had ignored her too much for months at the time. Brushed her off in favor of my goals. The drive came first. Competitive running. Cooking. The Antiquities hunting. Anything to feed the drive. I wanted her to like me. To be like me- to want these parts of life and the rush of success, to maintain the place we held here in the city of the Yudkowsky orbital. To even change that drive in me would be to lose. She chose to turn it off.“This is too much, Mom.” she finally told me, in the garden.She showed me her arm.Scars on the wrist. Back from before she left the first time. She could have gotten rid of the scars, dealt with stress with help. Easily, with a thought to the docbots, or a message to the security and health network. To keep the breakage was a choice. To show that something broke between us. That I hadn’t repaired it properly.There was a way she once ran meetings with me. Closed deals on antiquities. Hunted together for the valuable collections from our ancestors down on the planet from a millenia before.And then all of a sudden she ended it. Left the trade.“It’s not about you. I’m leaving.”The antiquities trade and family are so integral and yet… not.And I watched her go the first time. She’d be back on the next visit. And she was.But less so.I bring myself back to the present...My teammate Nika starts researching through the judges’s experience libraries- one minute for each as we speed our mental clock rate up. We’ve collaborated for years, back when we did antiquities hunting, actually sold things on a marketplace, away from the reach of peaceful, civilized cyberdemocracy and the safety nets. She’s not quite as cutthroat anymore. We’re in a cooking competition again, of all things. Good to team up with her again for this.The spicy jelly from the hotmint powder sits in front of us, ready for transformation. Too little time. There are twenty chef master archetypes from around the planet, merged with over twenty volunteers waiting on us. Open libraries. Biases from each habitat’s cooking tradition, applied in an augmented reality over the natural experience of the volunteer. We know the judge’s masked personalities- but not the ones beneath- the quirks of embodiment and history which introduce that whirl of unpredictability. I check my 5 assigned judges, see if anything relevant might be useful-how we could personalize the dish and memories.Yara, the judge template from the ocean orbital hab. Modded for enjoying acidity. Likely to enjoy the feeling of water in their hair.The Toluca Template judge feels something else. The belter influence will be strong. More novelty than usual needed.Gastris enjoys the flavors of the woods.The forth and fifth ones like traditional Pamyat cooking, thank goodness.My teammate Chesed shuffles through the ingredients available to us. The food on the stage pantry will guide our cooking, and the libraries of experiences and stock images and records that we can load into our presentation will be adequate. An Experiential hackathon of hallucination. Chesed goes back 60 years with me. Colleagues. Collected ancient automated weapons parts and traded them. Tricky to acquire ones too. Still has a barfront made from part of a deactivated 24th century Thorium-class autowar in his apartment, and he’s gotten his cooking knife set made from the exotic hull of some military horror once capable of annihilating entire colonies.It’s funny to see him with an apron, now.The prompt for the cooking challenge appears in front of all of us.“First domesticated by colonizers to the planet Kintsugi some three thousand years ago, Hotmint has formed a staple crop for the subsequent Pamyat Collective orbital farms as a flavoring to their various dishes. Like most of the older hydroponic crop staples, every part of the plant is edible. Prized for its hallucinogenic properties when released as a stimulant neurotransmitter in neural interface systems, hotmint can be used as a garnish, a tea, and as an herbal medicine or augment to psychoactive meditation…Your challenge tonight is to use this as the centerpiece of your dish. Build a meal and a hallucination experience that the judges will love.This was tough, but almost perfect for a team of ex antiquities dealers.How to merge these? How to find some common ground. Agreement. Convince 20 judges that a single, shared dream experience is worth their time...How to cook this, with so few minutes available?I look at last over judge Naphteles- their personality as a judge was chosen for their love of fields. Very traditional. Chosen to enjoy regularity but with a hint of breakage, repaired. Like me.Some instinct tells me to dig further into the judge.Nika says their history’s locked down/classified to the public past thirty years ago. Just like Anastasia, after she left. The way she’s twirling a spoon… Lots of people twirl utensils, right?The judge was staring at me.The other teams jump around their own tables, dashing off to grab ingredients and dive into the system libraries for presentation materials.We’d been allowed to bring our own supplies of course. I’d chosen to bring my favorite tea set. I look down at the plates and cups we’ll use. Pastel, Biogrown shellwork, moulded like seashells from an ocean nobody I know has ever seen in person. BioCeramic, broken with a streak of gold glue to repair them each time. Memory ceramic processing chips are embedded within each of the cups and plates and bowls, so that the owner can store historical files to experience while they drink. At one point it had the capability to display images across the surface but i’d never restored it. Heirlooms, with their history written and added with each repair. Nothing too interactive of course- just long term file storage. A real antique, through some very basic set of protocols, I could interface with it through my Direct Neural Interface and read its history.I’d acquired this one in a particularly painful deal from a collector in the outer system orbitals. Had to do some back room deal to trade for it that angered Anastasia, though I don’t remember how.The history of the Pamyat collective is integral to memory tea sets. When the first orbitals had been recovered from a terrorist conflict, automated Farm-bots had managed to recover and transplant hotmint plants again. They became popular. Different strains local to the variant environments of the orbitals for tea and soup.They’re still useable, these memory tea sets, made during the 36th century, six hundred years ago. Older than the habitat we were living in, or me, for that matter. Broken and repaired so many times over the centuries they might be more memory adhesive than original. But still the lacework of processors remained in the handle and hairline golden cracks, holding its history and authentication.Like anything that remembered loss, memory ceramics became popular at the time as a way to preserve family history- a family portrait album of sorts. In case the family broke apart.Though some of us kept them to preserve history. Or out of nostalgia.But the oldest ones are rarest. Haunted with the most memories that most people have chosen to forget.I remember this lesson from searching through antiques to find their provenance, down in the ancient broken warrens under the surface of Kintsugi, with Anasasia. The first imagos of the Pamyat collective were used as assistants- a method of passing on knowledge during the comparatively resource-poor journey between the stars. We’d need to talk to these imagos when researching the provenance of each antique. They acted as Memory chips where aspects of our history and personalities could be backed up in case of loss. In case a war broke out and bombs fell and broke the surface of a planet, or shattered the orbitals out of the sky. As they did, once. And so the haunting memories bled into our houses and our dining wear as well. A full aesthetic of nostalgia and souvenirs bleeding into even our dishware; Repair and maintenance made beautiful, so that each time we ate, when everything could be a copy of a copy of a copy, the cracks would remind us that not everything -should be- completely replaceable.I remembered sitting in that broken warren in an air-inflated tent. crouching in the now packed-away dining room with Anasasia and the team of warehouse drones, sipping tea from a new-fabbed memory tea set. She liked the tea more savory, with a dash of salt for some reason.With each sip of tea, the memories and simulacra of the first Pamyat recovery, 500 years before, would bloom into our minds. Images and text of families, friends, and co-op members from across the intervening years will play into my head, or the head of anyone else who might have interfaced in.We sat there in the dust, drinking in the memories and the impressions of the house we’d searched. We’d stripped it of its antiquities before the local AIs converted the land into some factory. Gone now. Not even a scar as a souvenir.I remembered how much she enjoyed recreating the house once back in orbit for an exhibition. Recreating what was broken. She was smiling anyway.Every time a memory tea set broke, the owner could repair it, adding the glue and a little more geotagged history- a collective agreement by each owner to maintain it. The brief memory of my daughter Anastasia smashing the cups in anger came back to me, the last time we talked in person. She’d broken the chain of ownership, smashed the cups and plates, when she’d left. My mother’s dishes, and grandparents’. Months later I’d glued the pieces back together, reinstalled the memories from the backups in the rest of the set, and added some recordings of Anastasia, and other pieces from my life.The sets themselves were just things. Replaceable matter, however valuable and unique they might be, because of history. But memories are hard to replace, even if they were removed to heal. Relationships, even harder. Though I could rekindle this, a whole language between us died- shared memories and agreements, when I ground away the bonds between us.I grind the hotmint root into powder for the soup with the cooking drone, now, in the present.How could I go about rekindling this, if we met up again?I’d left those records behind, somewhere in the back of my memory..In my memory tea set...Why do I not want to focus on the present?I’m torn about using something so personal, and yet...This memory tea set would be perfect for this challenge. I’d brought it as a possibility. The other competitors would be using new-fabbed memory tea sets as well with some memories patched in from public libraries- but a true antique with real history installed? Risky if the old memories in the hallucination contrasted with a novel dish- but this hotmint called for deep history and layered flavors.Something personal.The minutes to the cooking competition tick away while I think and chop.Thirty minutes left.You really have to put your soul into an experience and dish like this.Chesed, trained in northern Pamyat cooking with the culinary skill modules over the past year, ran off to grab the taro root, potatoes, dried seaweed, and mushrooms from the hydroponic garden on the stage while Nika searched through the stock libraries of sounds and smells. They’d generate a few sketches with the platform assistant then pick the restaurant decor to serve it in during the hallucination.“Old bowls like that? Why can’t we use a fresh one? Load the memories straight into some tea set not so busted up? They’ll dock us points for serving in an antique set“I gripped his arm- put on my most charismatic face. Lied to him, perhaps. “Trust me on this, Chesed. This challenge is all about old history. Using my antique set’s going to give us that extra edge” I almost felt guilty. The other judges might not like it. Almost certainly. But if I was right, that one judge would see who I was. If she was who I thought. Even if grand gestures were silly and awkward. That was all that mattered.“Fine. You know the history of this recipe better than any of us” Chesed was in too much of a hurry with the other ingredients anyway to deal. If he, or any mood applications he was running, thought otherwise, he didn’t mention it.I hadn’t interfaced with the teacup for a decade at least. Forgot for a while in the intervening years of travelling though fogs of memories in virtual spaces what it meant to have those attachments. Why was she angry at me again? I’d opened up the files in the tea cup- read them. Journal text entries. Copied from a conversation I’d had with her before I left.And I’d remembered.The pressure. Ambition.Why had I thrown away that relationship in pursuit of some ambition that barely mattered any more? Altered my mind to reprioritize some other goal?How could I go back up in time? Go back to the person that I was back then? Reconnect?The hot capsaicin and cold menthol burns my mouth while I taste test the soup to ready it for the teacup. I added a pinch of salt. The flavors contrast like the light and shadow of the airless, habitat-encrusted surface of the planet Kintsugi below. I think back through the colony’s earliest records, like the ones now stored in the tea set. Automated Habitat construction swarms metastasized into craters, pockmarks, and the old scars of lava tubes across the dead surface. Repairing it into civilization after that old war. The broken surface, filled with golden lights of new-built habitats. Like my memory ceramic. Repaired with golden cracks. The art of broken pieces.The minutes stretched onward as we minced the fruits of the hotmint, blended the leaves with the vat grown burger. Chopped the stems and threw them in the boiling oil.The roots though...they were often composted into scraps. The components of who I was, even when reassembled and repaired, remained valuable. We’d use them as garnish.Five minutesOur drone’s arms pour the hot and cold soup into twenty bowls and garnish with a leaf on each plate. Like a seed growing in the ground of my neighbor, Father uzu’s farms.Twenty seconds.A swab of color from a daikon juiced with lemon. Hiding the meaty dumpling below the surface of the soup, like we say the first farmers ate after the landing of the first colony on planet Kintsugi.Ten seconds.A dust of coriander and a sprinkling of dried pepper shards like the pieces of broken ceramics that my daughter threw before she left.Plated. Placed, and rearranged. A garden in a bowl.completed..“...And stop! “We move our arms away from our memory ceramic bowls, which are now filled with soup, and bring them to the judges. The memory of Anastasia tugs at me.“I hope that no regret about the past made it into the hallucination file.” I mutter.“It didn’t” reassures yani. “I made sure of it.”The announcer voice booms out, interrupting my reverie.“Judges, are you ready to link your neural interfaces up with these dishes?”They nod, and take their places in front of the display.“Nika’s team! What have you prepared for us tonight?”I smile and speak.“We went for an old concept. Inspired by family. Something to give you the ambience of history of our Yudkowsky habitat..We’ve made a hotmint purée in the old style, served over hotmint and meatshroom dumplings with lemon and menthol dusting to evoke the recovery and repair. When you break the crust of the soup, you’ll get a taste of the primary records from these ancestors' teacups before the hallucination begins. We believe our experience in antiquities has guided us here, so when you see the hint of images of our family relationships, and how they’ve grown, you’ll see how we can share in that.”The judges look intrigued. Or perhaps they acted for the cameras. Except one. She recognizes what I cooked, surely. And possibly the memory tea set it’s served in as well.I can’t read her face.The Judge takes a bite and began the experience and her eyes widened. She looks straight at me as she touches the antique, repeatedly-repaired bowl, laced her neural interface with it, and lets the memories flood into her neural lace with every burning bite of food. We’re all linked up in a neural net to watch what she experiences.And she tasted it.The art of broken pieces, put together. My long lost daughter, Anastasia.I could see the widening in her eyes as she realized who had cooked it. I imagined that she opened up her memories. I could see how She thought about her parent cooking her soup, as the hotmint taste and memory flooded her system.She saw the history of the planet and the history of the landing and the families and their food. She saw their farms and tasted them. She saw the ancient politics and the antique history and she smelled their flavor. And hidden in these layers and subtle tastes she found a question- the first question, I hoped, in the re-start of something old, and new at the same time.Perhaps we’d win the competition. Perhaps we wouldn’t. For now, I didn’t care.She tasted and saw the question, hopeful, hidden in the dish we’d served the other judges, even as I hoped she would be the only one to understand its true meaning.The meaning that I wished I could have said, when i drove her away.“Do you want to repair this, between you and me?”______​"Encyclopedia Galactica" entry:Memory Ceramic dinnerware are plates, cups, and bowls that traditionally interface with a DNI to often tell the full story of the dish, its provenance, and the origin and process and story of the food on the plate. Often the chef can take surveillance footage/sound/ smell/ touch of the food production and automatically add it into the data storage of the plate, which then plays as a memory using the DNI, like a drug trip or a dream, as one eats the dish.More advanced dishes are able to temporarily (or permanently) but appropriately alter the eater’s personality by downloading an app in the DNI.Also used for cognitive behavioral therapy in relation to food.‘Spices’/ drugs that let you “see the future”. Installed with Incredibly specific senses of taste and smell.NotesKintsukuroi- the practice of Japanese pottery repaired with gold.Kintsugi- the art of broken pieces.Память -”pamyet” (russian) ‘paamyeet’ = memory, storage, recollection.Anastasia- means resurrection in russian via /r/scifiwriting https://ift.tt/3nvPZKf