“How did you know to do this?”
He slides a tablet across to me. There’s a book on it with a title page that says:How to Cook for Humans.
“I’ve been reading this since last night. Then I went to the market. There’s a lot of human food in at the moment because of the auction.”
I eat my breakfast. It’s absolutely delicious. The chicken seems extra chicken-y. There’s a good bet it doesn’t come from a bird. Chicken in the floating cities does not come from chickenseither. It comes from the chicken factory where it is assembled from pressed insect parts and plant protein—just like real chickens used to be, allegedly.
“Thank you for making this for me. It’s so good. It’s been so long since I had food made. Like, forever.”
“You didn’t have a mate on Earth?”
I snort into the remnants of my rice. “I didn’t have a mate, no. It’s not really like that down there now. People don’t really mate. They fuck, sometimes, but they don’t live together and have families. It’s not really legal anymore.”
“It’s not legal?”
“Kids are lab grown,” I explain. “You didn’t know this?”
“I have never interacted with human pets before.”
“People used to just breed normally, I guess?” I say. “But it was really inefficient and it was down to people to somehow pick good partners, and then often their partners weren’t good. So now, making your own kid is considered irresponsible. Because, you know, when you can create a person with perfectly healthy genetics, it’s pretty irresponsible to make a whole human with just whatever you happen to have. People used to breed however they wanted, and a lot of them had undesirable traits.”
I’m parroting the party line, but that’s how it is on Earth now, and it’s the easiest way to explain it.
“What are desirable traits?” Kronos asks the question.
“Compliant, agreeable people for working the jobs that involve being compliant and agreeable, and aggressive, vicious people for military applications. There’re others too. They breed peoplewho work in codes and stuff. And there’s a special strain for people who go on reality TV programs.”
“So they’re breeding for temperament.”
“What else could they be breeding for?”
“Appearance?” Kronos suggests.
“Oh, no. That’s really frowned upon. That would be wrong. They breed to make healthy happy people who function correctly in the world.”
“And is everyone happy and healthy?”
“No. But it functions the way the people in charge like it to.”
I finish my chicken fried rice, and the third of my alien owners appears.
“What she wears will reflect on us.” Sharp has appeared suddenly. He is holding a garment in his hands, a sort of short sparkling nebula tunic. It looks pretty. Not my usual style, but my usual style is nothing more than the most practical attire I can find. Wasn’t a lot of call for pretty dresses in my previous life.
“Come,” he says. “I need to clean you.”
“What?”
Sharp already has me by the back of the neck, and he is directing me out of the galley and to some other part of the ship. I think it’s his room, because it’s much like the other spaces I’ve been in, but somehow even more sparse. I don’t know how he’s managed to make a plain wall even more plain, but he has. He slides open a partition revealing a small pool of steaming water.
“What’s this?”
“Humans like to wash in copious amounts of water. It reminds them of being in the womb. So I’m going to give you a bath.”
“They do? We’re not allowed to consume more than four gallons of water per day on the sky islands. I usually wash myself with a wipe and a sterilizer lamp.”
“Get in the bath,” he says.
When I don’t immediately get in, he picks me up and puts me in it. These aliens keep having a distinct physical advantage over me. Who knows how I’m going to overcome that when I break free and return to the overarching task of forging my own destiny in an uncaring universe.
