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What I am, or at least what that primary subroutine of mine that defines me is, agran toque blanc master
in the art of food preparation. There is very little that I do not know about haute cuisine no, to be
truthful, there isnothing about haute cuisine that I do not know, and almost nothing about it that I can't
put into practice. (With the aid, of course, of my effectors. Most AIs don't have them. I do.) All this
requires, of course, that I have access to a competent Food Factory.
Most of my clients have no appreciation for the trouble I go to for them. Haute cuisine was all wasted
on, for instance, my friend Harry. Harry's palate had been spoiled by the forty-five human years he spent
marooned on the depopulated planet of Arabella. He had been hungry there, and he had been there for a
long time. Simple calories were what he struggled to find, not gourmet subtleties. Consequently, now he
doesn't care what he eats, as long as he's eating all he can possibly hold in the sense, that is, that he
eats at all.
When Harry entered my surround, he was wearing his usual silk polo shirt, cutoff shorts and sandals,
and he was munching on a Granny Smith apple I had simulated for him earlier. "Hey there, Markie," he
said. "You busy? How would you like to go for a ride?"
I wasn't actually any busier than usual. Besides the routine tasks of the kitchen, plus my side jobs of
keeping the books on the eleven Wheel restaurants I serve, observing the emanations from the Kugelblitz
and maintaining a state of military readiness, I was physically preparing some Hawaiian bread pudding
from scratch for the Lorenzini family. "What kind of a ride?" I asked.
He was craning his neck well, that isn't exactly what he did; more accurately, he was entering into my
operational surround to see what I was cooking up in my physical kitchen. "They want me to go back to
Arabella," he said, sniffing.
Well, he wasn't exactly smiling, either. Machine entities like Harry and me don't have physical noses, so
we can't react directly to airborne molecules. The instrumentation in the kitchen area can, though, and
I've taught Harry how to interpret the readouts as cooking aromas. It's what I do myself.
In Harry's case, it doesn't much matter what I am cooking, he always says the same thing: "Hey, that
smells good. What is it?" He said it this time, too.
It saves time to answer Harry's questions when he asks them, so I told him about the sweet Molokai
bread I had already baked, and what went into the sauce I was making for it a sort of sweet
Hollandaise, with a half-kilo of powdered sugar and a deciliter of melted butter introduced to the sauce, a
little bit at a time, as my effectors mixed it.
When I told him he said, "Hum. Hah. Hey, Markie, how come you do all that stuff? It's just all different
atoms, right? So why don't you just line up all the atoms where you want them instead of all that
cooking?"
Well, I don't actually "cook," but I didn't argue the point. "Do you know how many atoms are involved
in this one dish? About ten to the 24th that's a ten followed by 24 zeroes after it. I can do a lot, but I
can't keep track of ten to the 24th atoms at once."
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
"Yeah?" He began to display the smirk that means he is about to start teasing me. "You say you can do a
lot? How much is that, exactly, Markie?"
Now, how do you answer a question like that? My primary program alone is pretty large. I never know
when I'm going to be asked for something like Vietnamese fish sauce, or haggis, or baby back ribs, New
Orleans style, so I have to keep an accessible store of nearly thirty thousand specific recipes, from the
cuisines of nearly five hundred nations, regions and ethnicities. That's plus the chemical and
physicochemical formulae for all the ingredients. (You have to have both, especially for the
polysaccharides, where cellulose and starch are basically the same compound; the only difference is the
way the glucose rings that make them up are joined. If I got the geometry wrong, my clients would be
getting cellulose to eat and then they'd all starve to death well, unless they were termites, they would.)
There are over twelve thousand standard ingredients, from pears and pearl onions to beets (five varieties)
and radicchio and you name it, because you'd be surprised what some people will eat. Plus programs for
the instant retrieval of any of them, in any combination. How much does that come to? About enough, I
would say, to run four or five major manufacturies at once, or to fight a medium-sized war. Actually I'm
one of the most powerful programs on the Wheel.
However, I gave Harry a short answer. "It comes to plenty," I said. "Eat your apple. And listen, you
didn't tell me why you were going to Arabella."
"Oh, it's just one of those research projects," he said, shrugging as though research projects happened to
him all the time. (I knew they didn't, though. After Harry was rescued, he had very few usable skills. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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