Greetings! A bit of an experiment with this story. It was likely seeded by reading so many stories by Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl, but was in fact sparked while reading Substack’s own indie-author Ian Patterson’s novel, Transference (Book 1 of the Narrator Cycle), which I highly recommend. Something in teh early part of that novel about the city world he creates, and the idea of rich decadent people switching faces sparked this short story, which actually has nothing to do with his world, but it was the spark. So thank you and enjoy! - Owen
Just Not My Taste
It was date night and I hadn’t felt like myself for a while. Mina and I were eating dinner out, amongst the all the other phonies and fake faces of the city. Mina was devouring the drama of it all.
The woman at the next table was crying through tears that had become impolite. How gauche to sob and make a spectacle of oneself in public like this, I thought. Did no one care about manners anymore?
“Of course you’re beautiful,” the man across from her said. “It’s just… not my taste. I’m sorry.”
He had a Cary Grant face. In fact, he wore the Notorious Cary Grant ’46 model, with the winter revisions: gentler eyes with crow’s feet, slightly heavier eyelids, with a touch of weariness which had been added after focus groups complained the earlier versions felt too cold, even predatory. The classic faces had enjoyed a big resurgence two seasons ago. For a while last year, you could hardly ride a tram without seeing three or four Grants reading the news in perfect profile.
Now the fashion among the masses had shifted back toward something they called “unmodified authenticity.” You could purchase the authentic aesthetic package at most major outlets. The upper classes held on, perhaps ironically, to the classic faces. The perennial coolness of being out of the trend, that only they could afford anyway. This guy looked like he’s even practiced the stance, the lean, the smirk.
The crying woman touched her cheek as if checking that her face was still there, still what she’d bought. If the volume of her sobs was any indication, that face had probably cost her a month’s basic pension at least. It looked familiar but I couldn’t name it. One of the Hepburns, maybe.
“You said you liked classics,” she whined.
“I did then.” The man looked around the room, nodded apologetically to us.
“So what changed?” she asked.
The man hesitated. A flicker crossed the elegant Grant features, some tiny malfunction of confidence.
“It’s just not my taste,” he repeated softly. He was beginning to look bored.
The waiter arrived at our table carrying appetizers on an improbable number of white porcelain dishes. Steam curled upward in graceful white ribbons. Glazed rectangles of lamb substitute terrine gleamed under an elegant smear of sage-infused cranberry reduction. Printed spheres of sweet bread rolls crackled warmly in their basket. Greens beans lay in perfect parallel lines, each one identical in length and color, as though copied from a blueprint, which, I suppose, they were.
The woman whispered something sharp and wounded, and I could see Mina fight the urge to turn and gawk.
The Cary Grant man lowered his eyes, stood, and left her there among the polished glasses and OLED candlelight.
“I’m sorry,” he said again as he slinked away.
At our table, Mina watched him disappear into the rain beyond the window. A moment later, the woman stood uncertainly and then also left the restaurant.
Mina let out a little sigh now that the drama had apparently ended, and I smiled in renewed affection for her. Mina was all about the drama of it. For her, this must have been better than a streaming drama feed. She loved her video feeds, though for work she often favored the political feeds; all the scandals, the wild and outlandish characters, the preposterous plot twists and subplots, and the improbable public betrayals. Nothing got her more revved than watching some loyal lieutenant turn on their boss, even better if it was over a secret sex affair at the office. She would drop a couple dexies, fixate on the feeds, and consume all the gory details of these stories, gnawing them down to the bones, digesting them from every angle. Then she’d regurgitate it all for her own streaming content, flavoring it with her own sardonic analysis. She relished her work and was quite good at it.
“Honestly, he should’ve switched his own sooner, the hypocrite,” Mina said, turning back to me and to her tiny portions of flawless food. “Nobody wears Grant anymore.”
“You said you liked Grant,” I said with feigned shock.
“I did then,” she said mockingly.
I laughed and Mina smiled faintly, pleased at her own joke. Tonight she wore a narrow Scandinavian face with translucent skin like the finest marble and pale silver-blue lashes that caught the light when she blinked. The Hulda, I think it was called.
Last season she had favored something darker and aristocratic, all sharp cheekbones and old money glamour. Before that, a soft round-faced look designed to appear innocent and gentle, trustworthy. But her eyes had betrayed the truth and she had borne it like a bad haircut until she could afford to change.
Sometimes I missed her original face, though I could no longer remember it precisely without searching up an old photograph.
Outside, rain slid down the restaurant windows in luminous neon threads, distorting the light from advertisements across the wet street: NEW SEASONAL FEATURES AVAILABLE, glowing above the thin flows of pedestrians.
The restaurant itself glowed with a carefully crafted warmth and a curated deep forest theme. Artificial cedar scent drifted through vents hidden behind recreated foliage at the tops of tall pillars textured to look like great trees. The tables were stained to resemble old polished walnut, complete with tiny manufactured imperfections where imaginary hands might have marked them or worn them smooth at the edges. The place was swinging and it had just opened last month.
“Did you see the news?” I asked. “France has got food problems again.”
Mina snorted through her nose.
“Well, serves them right,” she said around a dainty mouthful.
“For what?”
“Still insisting on real vegetables. Soil-grown produce. Farms.” She tore apart one of the immaculate rolls. “As if synth protein isn’t available. It’s such a decadent waste of space. Honestly, the nerve of them.”
I looked around the restaurant.
Every table was occupied. Men and women in purchased faces leaned toward one another beneath soft lighting. A young couple near the bar wore matching modifications; slightly enlarged eyes, softened jawlines, identical lips, as if they had emerged from the same childish dream. Getting matching faces was classless, cutesy stuff. At least pick a real face, not some cartoonish abominatuion.
I looked out the window again, and sipped the mid-range reproduction cabernet. Something was bothering me but I couldn’t define it, a shadow at the edge of my mind. The city outside rose impossibly dense beyond the rain-streaked glass. Towers crowded close together, windows glowing layer upon layer into the mist. Thirty million people in the corridor district alone.
All of them needing to be fed somehow. Maybe Mina was right. You couldn’t just waste hectares of land on the gamble of growing something edible down the road a few weeks or months.
Our entrées arrived.
Mine was lab-cultivated lamb with marrow foam and charred onions printed cell by cell from archived tissue profiles. Mina ordered bluefin tuna, though no true tuna had crossed an ocean in nearly three decades.
The flesh was a glorious glowing ruby beneath the lights and was garnished with a sparse and sparkling sprinkle of fool’s gold flakes.
It was too beautiful to be real, like we were prisoners in someone else’s dream. Inside me, a pressure begin to form, like an ocean storm or a tea kettle. I wondered if maybe I was ill and could I make to the restroom in time, if the need should arise.
“You know what I read?” Mina said, snapping me back into myself. “Nearly a full ninety percent of corridor protein stock is reclaimed biomass now.”
I stirred my wine. Synthetic tannins. Synthetic oak. Synthetic age.
“Reclaimed from what?” I said, trying to focus, trying to stay here.
She looked at me oddly.
“Everything,” she said.
The word lingered and became a fog between us. What did that even mean? Everything? I tried not to think about, but my stomach churned.
At the next table, a service unit appeared to clear the table, silent as a priest, and opened its maw.
The untouched kabocha and duck pinchos disappeared first.
Then the silky white vichyssoise.
Then the billiard ball spheres of bread.
Nothing was wasted. Nothing remained.
The machine’s black compartments sealed shut beneath its polished exterior.. The display screen on its top showed a face that appeared to bow to us, even as the unit itself did not change posture. A gaunt and grey-skinned busboy followed the robot and took the dishes manually in a plastic tub and the pair returned noiselessly toward the kitchen. Something tightened unpleasantly in my chest.
Mina cut another piece of tuna. It jiggled slightly on her fork and she closed her mouth around it sensuously, pulling the naked fork back out.
“Do you ever think about where it all goes?” she asked casually as she chewed.
“What?” I muttered, forcing myself to breathe.
“The excess.” She gestured with her fork to the people around us in the crowded restaurant. Despite the crowd, panels and noise-cancelling emitters in the ceiling and tree-pillars dampened the noise to the artificial quiet of a library or a surgical theatre. A recording of birdsong warbled gently.
“Old tissue,” she continued. “Cosmetic discard. Surgical waste. Printed organs. Wasted food. Livestock cultures. Bodies.” She smiled mischievously. “There’s so much of it.”
I stared down at my lamb.
“It gets recycled,” I said quietly.
“Obviously.”
“No, I mean… processed. Cleaned.”
“That is the processing, silly.” Her face glowed as she held up her fork with another glistening chunk of fake flesh on it. “Protein’s protein, right?”
Nausea undulated through me then like a seismic tsunami up from the depths and I clamped my mouth shut and felt sweat break out on my forehead and cheeks. The perfect circulation. The closed loop of it. Nothing wasted, nothing escaping the system.
Outside, an ambulance veered flashing and wailing through the rain, toward another body somewhere.
Over at the bar, a man wearing a Paul Newman variant laughed too loudly while his date stroked the edge of his jaw admiringly. Mina touched her own cheek absently, perhaps already imagining another face for autumn. You are what you you eat, I thought ruefully. Eat or be eaten. I looked around the room at the many people enjoying their meals.
Everyone so beautiful, so unreal. All of it so consumable, so recycled.
Mina leaned back in her chair, watching me.
“You know what your problem is?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You still think authenticity means original and not real. Real is just whatever is. That’s all.”
Before I could reply, the waiter returned with dessert menus displayed on sleek high-resolution panes of soft light that almost mimicked paper and handed them to us.
Mina ordered chocolate mousse cultured from preserved cacao genomes.
The waiter nodded approval and turned to me politely.
“And for the gentleman?”
I looked once more at the lamb laying half-eaten on my plate, at the perfect grain of the meat, the perfect printed texture of it. I swallowed hard and forced myself to inhale through my nostrils.
Beyond the windows, the city glowed wetly in the dark, consuming and remaking itself forever, an ouroboros of appetite and desire.
I smiled thinly and handed back the menu.
“It all looks very good,” I said, “but it’s just not my taste.”
***
Thankyou for reading! Please let me know what you think in the comments and please like, restack, and share with anyone you think might enjoy this! Everything here is human-written using a recycled and modified roman alphabet that has been handed down from human to human for generations.
Gravity of Darkness returns with a new chapter next Wednesday! Until then keep reading and be kind to each other!
- Owen
Your writing pulled me in and the way you described their world kept me there. I kept waiting for the classic line... 'soylent green is people'.
Nicely done.
Just got in and had a chance to read this. Reeeally loved this one. The nausea was legitimately felt by the time I got to the end. The “closed loop of it all” line was perfect 👌 And the subtle metaphor of not only recycling our protein but also our faces is really clever here. Loved it my friend! Hideous, nauseating and really well done!