Chương 176: Two Futures

The last forty minutes ran at the edge of what anyone could stand. The American kitchen turned into speed and nerve. Ethan cleared everything else out of his head and went entirely into Chris's insane plan. He built a deeply flavored sauce at maximum speed, blended it with the algae gel and warmed it, then took a row of fine-gauge syringes and, like a surgeon, injected flavor capsules precisely through the interior of that enormous P-7 block.

Kira worked beside him and carried the loaded protein to the pressure machine. When it started, the low sound it made was the heartbeat of everything they'd bet. And in the other corner, Chris worked on his dessert. He spooned a white foam like cloud into a dark ceramic bowl, carefully. It was pure white and weightless and looked like nothing at all. Across the floor, England's kitchen was as unruffled as ever. Their main was a protein block cooked at exactly 72.

5 degrees for twenty-eight minutes, its surface the warm color of ivory. With long tweezers Arthur was setting jewel-like vegetable gels around it in a strictly geometric composition. Their dessert was closer to a made object. Imogen had blown a perfect, transparent hollow sugar sphere from a special syrup, with a brilliantly colored fruit juice — centrifuged clear — sealed inside it. The diner could only taste what was in there by breaking the sphere.

Every plate they made shone with reason and intelligence: the most precise and coolest possible reading of the Future Kitchen.

"Time! Stop all work!" With that, the battle over the future was finished. The dishes went up to the judges' table in order. England first. The appetizer was a Deep-Sea Forest, simulated out of several algae extracts and synthetic aromatics: layered texture, flavors arriving in precise sequence, an astonishing display of control. The main was Perfection at 72. 5°.

The judges cut into the protein and found an interior as even as silk, dissolving on contact, and with the differently flavored vegetable gels alongside, every bite was a precisely computed act of tasting. The dessert was Pandora's Fruit. When a judge tapped the transparent sphere with a small spoon, the juice ran out and the sweet-sharp aroma detonated, a hard hit straight to the senses.

"There is nothing in it to attack," Chairman Benini said.

"England has shown us a future entirely governed by data and by science. Every dish is the optimal solution to a problem. Cool, precise, formidable. This is cooking's technological singularity." Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Every judge nodded. England's performance had been flawless. Out in the hall, the audience made noise over food that looked like science fiction. Nothing much moved on Arthur's face, but the slight lift at the corner of his mouth gave away a certainty.

He believed the correct answer could not be beaten. Then the American dishes came up. When The Tide Pool, 2050 was set down, the judges stopped. A deep blue plate. A wave of ice crystal. A quiet stone. And in the air above it, faint and salt-damp, a sea wind.

"This…" Madame Dubois, the most stubborn traditionalist at the table, had nothing to say. She took a careful spoonful. The cold granita melted on her tongue and left a clean chill behind it. Then the scallop, springy, with no flavor at all. But the instant she chewed, the blue leaf around it released a strange mineral note that met the sea wind still hanging in the air. For a second she was genuinely standing on an empty beach, with the last warmth of the tide and the wind coming off the water.

"My God," she said under her breath.

"I ate nothing from the ocean. I tasted the entire ocean." Emily Jones's eyes were bright.

"That isn't imitation. That's synesthesia. They used sight and touch and smell to wake a taste memory of the sea in us." The appetizer landed. Then the main. From the outside, the injected and pressurized protein was completely unremarkable. Then a judge cut it, and a low sound went around the table. Inside, it was no longer uniform white. It was full of countless tiny amber capsules.

As the blade went through, the capsules broke and heavily flavored sauce came out from the interior and soaked into the snow-white flesh around it. The faces at the table did something complicated. Every mouthful had the surprise of flavor capsules bursting in it. The taste was intense, and yet the protein itself held a texture of startling purity and tenderness.

"Insane. That may be the most insane idea in the history of cooking." Benini couldn't hold it in.

"They abandoned giving flavor from outside and chose to detonate it from within. This dish is full of life, full of accident and surprise." Last came the dessert Chris had built at the limit in ten minutes. A dark ceramic bowl, and inside it a handful of white cloud. Weightless, pure, and there was nothing else. The judges looked at one another. Was that a dish?

"The dish is called A Minimal Future." Chris's voice came through the microphone into the quiet arena.

"In the world to come, when every food can be synthesized and every flavor can be copied — what will still be precious?"

"We think it will be the experience itself." Kira lifted the atomizer and pressed it once over each judge's bowl. A manufactured fruit aroma, artificial and extraordinarily clear, settled over the cloud like a light mist. The judges hesitantly spooned up a little of the foam. It had almost no weight. It dissolved instantly and carried only a faint sweetness. But at the moment it melted, the nasal cavity filled entirely with that sprayed fruit aroma. The taste was minimal. The smell was enormous.

One of the older judges shut his eyes and said nothing for a long time.

"Are you all right?" Benini asked. He opened them again, and there was something complicated in them.

"I remembered a fruit candy I used to eat when I was small. That is the smell. I don't remember at all what the sweet tasted like. That aroma I have never forgotten in my life." He looked at Chris and said it seriously.

"This is less a dessert than a device for waking memory. It has made me understand that in the future, what food carries may no longer be nutrition. It may be a key to feeling and to memory."

"England defined the future with technology."

"And Team USA—" Benini's eyes went across Chris, Ethan and Kira with open admiration "—warmed the future with what is human." Two teams. Two completely different roads. Both of them had arrived, today, at their own summit. All that was left was the last stage, and the cruelest. The scoring.