Wet Fry Pork

Posted on Mon Jul 20th, 2020 @ 6:29pm by Lieutenant JG Lilith Surana

Mission: Mission 4: Strange Happenings
Location: Lilith's quarters
Timeline: 2389 216 at 0720

Lilith regarded the sonic shower in her quarters thoughtfully. She still lacked enough data, running ship-wide diagnostics every two hours, to resolve a pattern or make any conclusions. And yet it did seem the random malfunctions had disproportionately impacted personal devices like sonic showers and replicators.

She paced her quarters. A fascinating theoretical problem, but from a practical standpoint… it would be nice to be able to replicate one of her maternal grandmother's recipes, and she wanted to get clean without risk of injury.

Lilith knelt next to a large wooden case that held a prominent position next to the sofa and opened the heavy lid. Inside was the collection of small porcelain figures that had once belonged to her biological mother, Talia. Terran speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century had been her mother's passion, and each sculpted icon represented her favorite stories. Lilith examined the ones on top.

First was the strange character Nikanj, the Ooloi Oankali from Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, extra special to Lilith because Talia had named her after the main character in the first book. She unwrapped the World Tree from Nora Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy, and the obelisk from Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. One of Lilith's favorites, Mouse's Sensory Syrynx from Samuel Delany’s book Nova, always made her wonder if such a compelling musical instrument was scientifically possible. Intriguing in its Q-like potential, Lilith was glad the Chaos Stick from Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo was only a Senegalese myth. There were many more figures, but Lilith carefully replaced them in the case and closed the lid.

She had an idea for testing the sonic shower.

She went to the replicator and ordered a four-kilogram haunch of raw pork. That appeared to work. She scanned it with a tricorder, just to be sure. Then she put it in the sonic shower, ran it for five minutes, and scanned again. No change.

The pork went back in the replicator for recycling. She thought of her grandmother's recipe for Wet Fry Pork. She could replicate onions, tomatoes, and kale, but royco spices would be tricky, and she'd need a sufuria to cook it in.

Lilith prepared for the shower by undressing then putting on the head covering she wore in the sonic shower, that looked like a twentieth-century shower cap but prevented the removal of both natural and carefully applied oils from her hair, then stepped into the shower stall.