IN THE YEAR 2177.

The year was 2177. The East Wall that separated the country into two parts had just been demolished by the new government, allowing inter-mingling, for the first time in seventy-seven years, between those who had enhanced their minds and bodies, and those who had chosen to keep all the human vulnerabilities and limitations that the new generation had developed a deep-seated intolerance for.

It was a dawn of a new age. People on both sides of the wall were able to explore previously forbidden regions of the country, meet people who sharply contrasted with them, and in some cases, dust off long-forgotten memories after reuniting with relatives they hadn’t seen in decades.

***

She had watched with fascination and struggled to hold down vomit as he gutted the four-legged beast his kind called ‘sheep’. Although she had vague memories of witnessing similar acts when she was younger, she couldn’t bear to see the animal – or what remained of it – being treated in such a manner. Most of her twenty-two years had been spent on the other side of the wall, where such practices were first forbidden, and then rendered unnecessary as the nature of food was transformed by new technologies.

She curiously watched as he piled blocks of wood into the mechanism he called an ‘oven’ and poured an ‘accelerant’ on it. When he struck a small strip of wood on a rough piece of what seemed like sandpaper, she jumped backward instinctually. It had been a long time since she had been that close to fire. None of her memories of it were good ones. The most vivid of them was of the time the electrical fuses in her apartment block had exploded due to excessive demand for power by occupants’ new technologies. The entire building had burnt to ashes before her very eyes, despite the efforts of the firemen and their advanced fire-fighting technologies. That was one of her worst memories. She had lost a lot to the fire, the most important of which were the few artifacts she had left of and from her childhood.

It had been eleven years since that happened, and although she had tried to have the memory deleted – and her therapist confirmed its destruction – the burning strip of wood brought it back in all its glory, or lack thereof.

She watched him as he attached the carcass of the sheep to a stake and struggled to lift it off the slaughtering-table. She would have loved to help him, but she was too troubled by the sight of the carcass to go near it. He finally managed to lift it off the table and prop it into the oven. With the heavily-spiced carcass in place, he huffed and puffed as he cleaned up the internal organs of the animal and arranged them beneath the carcass on the grill. With that done, he covered everything with the lid of the oven. In her mind, she concluded that there was no way she would allow any of it near her.

He exhaled and turned to face her. He had a look of contentment on his face. “Well, that’s how we do it around here. We’ll leave that to cook for about two hours and then we will return and have us a glorious meal!” He flashed a grin.

“Glorious?” she grimaced. “I don’t think so.”

He laughed heartily. It put an extra strain on him, so he leaned on the table by the oven for support. “This was my favorite recipe when you were a little girl. I remember you running around here in your early days, before the government began tightening its restrictions on movements to and from either side of the wall.” He looked up, as though the memory was descending from somewhere in the sky. When it had descended in its entirety, he turned his gaze in her direction. “You’d run around playing tag with your siblings and then return to ask me when the barbecue would be ready. I used this same recipe then. It was your favorite. No visit was complete without it. I’m sure there’s still a part of you, somewhere in that mechanical jungle, which still loves my barbecue.” He scoffed.

She hissed. In the six months since the wall had fallen, she’d become used to such comments by ‘pure-breed humans’ – as they liked to call themselves – but she couldn’t avoid being made to feel vulnerable by them. She folded her bionic arms below her surgically enhanced breasts, defensively. “This mechanical jungle will have nothing to do with your barbecue.” She pouted and led the way back into the farmhouse. 

***

The two hours passed in a heartbeat. They spent the entire time recalling fond memories about the great times they had together. She had spent many of her earliest years on the farmhouse with him, to the chagrin of her parents. There was so much she wanted to ask, and there was so much he wanted to tell her, so they made an unspoken agreement to meet many more times in the weeks to come. 

She was surprised when he opened the cover of the oven. She had expected a putrid smell to issue forth – the smell of death. She remembered how it pervaded the room when she visited the morgue to identify the mangled bodies of his daughter and son-in-law. She had such a strong recollection of the experience that she had even perceived the smell before he opened the oven. But the smell disappeared instantly and was replaced by a tantalizing aroma. So tantalizing, in fact, that her mouth began to water and her body developed a craving for the source of the aroma. 

She had been standing back, but the aroma had such a pull that she stepped forward to inspect the insides of the oven. 

When he saw her standing beside him, he chuckled. “Give me a hand.” He said, handing her an oven mitt and gesturing toward the other end of the stake. They lifted the carcass out of the oven and set it on a large chopping block. While he cut the carcass to pieces, she fetched the internal organs from the grill.

He had gone through the process so many times that he did it without thinking. In a matter of minutes, the carcass had been sliced-up into smaller chunks, most of which he stored for later consumption and the rest of which was piled into two generous servings on two trays. 

He set the trays on opposite ends of the table by the oven and hobbled into the house to fetch the orange juice they made during the two hour wait. He set cups down beside the trays and filled them up from a jug, then he took his place in-front of one of the trays.

She had been eagerly awaiting his return. As soon as he sat down, she picked a chunk of meat with her fork and raised it up for inspection. She still felt irritated by it, but the aroma had severely diminished the irritation. She propped it into her mouth and stayed still for a moment, waiting for something to happen. When nothing happened, she began to chew. The meat was so soft, it instantly scattered in her mouth. It gradually released the juice confined within it, and as the texture and taste interacted with her mouth, she closed her eyes without realizing it. She remained in that state, savoring the sensations, till he spoke again.

“This is what real food tastes and feels like.” Her grandfather commented. “Unlike that worthless pre-packaged goo you ‘modern and enhanced’ people allow manipulative corporations feed you.”