Chương 171: The Future Ingredients

The next day, when the Americans walked back into the arena, the whole team carried a different field around it. There was still tiredness on Ethan's face, but the cloud in his eyes had gone, and in its place was the edge of a man with nothing left in reserve. The first-round loss still sat on all of them. The result of round two would set the mental state everyone carried into the last day. Mario Benini came up onto the stage, looked around the hall, and announced the theme with a smile.

"Yesterday we paid homage to the classics and looked back at the past of cooking. Today we look forward together. The theme of round two is — The Future Kitchen!" The words had barely landed before the screens on both sides of the floor filled with strange footage. Cells dividing and multiplying in culture dishes. A 3D printer printing a head of broccoli. Insect protein being milled to a fine powder. Then, behind each team's station, two enormous metal cabinets rose out of the floor.

The doors opened slowly on rank after rank of labeled transparent boxes.

"Chefs," the chairman's voice carried through the hall, "in front of you are the newest results from the world's leading food-technology laboratories. Inside you will find seafood grown in a lab through cell culture; vegetables gene-edited for particular flavors and textures; new proteins extracted from insects and from algae; and unknown aromatics synthesized through molecular reaction."

"Your task is to create a complete three-course menu, in the next three hours, using future ingredients none of you have seen before. Appetizer, main, dessert."

"The future is in your hands." The hall broke into noise. That wasn't cooking. That was science fiction. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! In the American kitchen all three of them had stalled. They looked at the ingredients and for a moment had no idea what to do with any of it. In one box, a piece of scallop held a circle too perfect to be real, its texture as even as a disc of white plastic.

A carrot was an uncanny purple with a metallic sheen along it. A jar of powder was labeled only PROTEIN P-7, and had no smell at all. Kira's brow came down hard. What she did was listen to ingredients, and these things were silent, and dead. They held no memory of soil and no breath of any ocean. Ethan's confidence tightened into something more careful. Chris drew a breath and forced himself steady.

This was the committee's final exam for every cook in the building: when all your familiar experience stops working, what's left of you? He pulled up the system without thinking. Run Flavor Atlas analysis. Rows of data flashed past — and the result put a stone in his stomach. [Target: Cultured Scallop A-3] [Result: insufficient data. Composition unknown. Flavor model cannot be constructed.] [Target: Gene-Edited Carrot G-7] [Result: insufficient data. Anomalous sugar structure. Reaction to heat cannot be predicted.] [Target: Protein Powder P-7] [Result: insufficient data…] Insufficient data. Cannot analyze. Over and over, like a bucket of cold water tipped over him from the crown of his head. The system — the thing he had leaned on hardest for as long as he'd had it — had failed for the first time, in front of a real future. And then, while he was still sinking, a module he had never paid much attention to lit faintly at the edge of the panel. [v2. 5 "Concerto" active.] [Extreme unknown environment detected. Dynamic Inference engaged.] [Function: constructs temporary flavor models from live experimental data and extrapolates the possibilities of multiple combinations.] Chris read the small print and felt his heart start working properly again. The system couldn't hand him the answer. It had handed him a key to the unknown. He raised his head, looked at his two equally blank teammates, then at the countdown.

"We don't have time to hesitate." It wasn't loud, and it was completely certain.

"We know nothing about this material. Neither does England. Right now we're standing on the same line. Ethan, Kira — we're going to have to write the manual ourselves."