4.01

“Strength is just misunderstood weakness.” - unknown.

The delivery arrived within five minutes. Ba and I agreed that though getting it delivered to Matt’s house would be faster and more efficient, it would be too embarrassing to have a delivery drone show up there right after we said we had enough.

Well, we didn’t say we had enough, we just sorta implied that.

“I did not imply anything,” ba muttered as he packed the meat into a cold bag. “This was all you.”

I ignored him as I took the bag. There was another kilo in the fridge for when ma comes back, which ba was probably overjoyed with, having an excuse to splurge twice in a week.

KBBQs also gave me a good excuse to get ba drunk. He normally abstained but eating natural meat put him in a celebratory mood.

It’ll be a hassle dragging him out of the car later, but god knows he needs the sleep.

Ba did a few hand motions as we stepped into the garage. The loud sound of gears grinding heralded the opening of the door, letting natural light in. I read somewhere they could’ve made garage doors soundless ages ago, but kept the loud noise because people weren’t used to handling soundless garages.

Weirdos.

As I made my way to the car, ba called out to me, “Will you be fine in a vehicle?”

I turned around to see him giving me a concerned look. “Of course, I will,” I replied with an eyebrow raised.

‘Why wouldn’t I be… oh.’

The crash was barely two days ago and yet it feels almost a week had passed. Practically speaking it was almost a week ago for me since I’ve been doing double time. Literally.

Ba just raised his eyebrow, before shaking his head in an exasperated fashion. “Goddamn freak accidents,” he muttered as he passed me.

“Me or the crash?” I asked as piled the bags in the back seats.

“The crash,” he answered as he took his seat at the front. Though I could hear the slight quirk on his lips. “It’s not every day a driving AI glitches out.”

“No one got seriously hurt.” No one I was aware of or cared about anyway. Though it sucks to be that Maple executive.

“Yeah, I read,” he answered as he typed in Matt’s address with his AAD. “Apparently the AI corrected itself last minute so everyone only got off with minor injuries. They found a logic error had occurred after they looked at the logs. Apparently due to a few poorly written lines of code.”

Ah, false evidence. Though I would’ve added the bug to other AI so that-

“It’s showing up in other models so it’s good they found it before anyone got seriously hurt,” ba continued as the car started up and drove out.

She was thorough.

I had to show a bit of interest in this, I was directly involved after all, “Has it been patched yet?”

“Yeah,” ba answered, “I downloaded the update today. Don’t worry.”

“Mmm,” I murmured.

“This stuff used to be a lot worse back in the day,” ba said as he reclined his seat.

Huh, so he didn’t drink coffee today, is he actually making an effort to rest?

“Back in the day people actually drove cars,” he said, his eyes closing. “Can you imagine that?”

“I can, yeah?” I read about that before and Matt has pestered me to try out more than one racing game in the past.

“Over a million people died each year when they did that shit,” he murmured, his voice turning quiet. “Fifty times that injured as well.”

“Sure they weren’t intentionally killing people?” I joke.

If Eve wanted to kill me, a vehicle would be the best bet.

He chuckled lightly, “I bet a few were…”

“I’m sure,” I answered as ba drifted into sleep. Right now wouldn’t be ideal, since the same person getting involved in two highly unlikely traffic events in the same few days would be suspicious, to say the least.

I glanced to the front of the car, seeing the smooth surface and briefly tried to imagine where a steering wheel would be. Right in front of ba, where the compartment was.

Most cars nowadays had more fail-safes than what is probably reasonable but Eve already overcame them once.

I shrugged. There was nothing I could do if she could overcome the already inbuilt stuff, which by law was required to be the best of the best. I barely had a college-level grasp of coding, I needed to be insanely lucky to create a system better than programmers light years ahead of me.

Though I didn’t actually believe she would actually try to take me out. Sure she played a few ‘pranks’ on me, I learnt later on that no one else actually got dropped from the sky during the intro, I was the only one who got that treatment. Which I couldn’t even really blame her for, I did emotionally extort her with a recently dead family member or whatever the Frankenstein equivalent was.

I internally grimaced, I… could’ve done that talk better. I met many short term goals at the cost of a long one. I made her dislike me, not enough for her to actually do anything substantial about it but the enmity is there. There could’ve been another way. The ideal was friendship but I would’ve settled for apathy. My current assessment of Eve tells me she is human enough to be angered and tied down by sentiment. She might not like me but she probably wouldn’t outright kill me.

‘And even if she just wants me to think that the fact that I’m thinking it means I’m already under her thumb and therefore not a short term threat,’ I thought with a pessimistic smirk.

I glanced at my sleeping father.

People were flawed and if Eve really was more human than AI, then she too was flawed.

And flaws could be exploited.

I really am an asshole.

As the car pulled up in front of Matt’s garage, I sent a quick message telling him we were here. Before gently tapping ba’s shoulder three times.

He instantly opened his eyes, “What’s the patient’s condition-” he stopped, eyes taking in his surroundings and his mind quickly catching up. I was already half-out the car by then, cold bag in hand.

The house’s front door opened, revealing the skinny form of Matt, his face lighting up in a delighted smile. He threw up his right arm in an exaggerated motion, “LOOKS LIKE MEATS BACK ON THE MENU!”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a weird-ass saying,” I said as I entered the house.

Ba right behind me said. “Afternoon Matt.”

“Afternoon sir. And I heard it in my Humanities class,” he answered, “apparently it was a meme inspired by a movie or something.”

“Huh,” I answered, I didn’t take history as an elective past year ten, mostly because I learnt the important stuff passively from wikidives. “Any other stuff?”

“Something about the ninth of November 2001, but I forgot most of it,” Matt answered as he led us in.

There weren’t any major events associated with November ninth that came to mind. “Must’ve not been important,” I said as I spotted Matt’s younger brother, Max running up to us. Though, his running speed was actually pretty slow because A, he was ten and B, his legs were short, like really short. The shortness gene in Matt’s family was prevalent even as a kid, so really he looked closer to six year old.

“Yo,” I said as Max ran next to me, his hands zipping open the cold bag, where the meat was being kept in synthetic packages.

Max took a single glance at the contents, then pointed an accusing finger, “You lied to me! There is no difference!”

“Of course there is!” Matt retorted.

“Something was killed for this meat,” I drily continued, “Probably many things since there is no way all this pork belly came from the same pig.”

“And it tastes a lot better,” Ba added. Though that part was debatable. I still never tasted the difference between ‘real’ and synthetic meat but people kept insisting there was. Probably a placebo. I’ll have to trick ba with synthetic meat one of these days to test it out.

“Are you bothering the guests Max!?” I heard Matt’s mother, Denise yelling out from the kitchen further back.

Max simply stuck his tongue out and ran past us.

“Afternoon,” Ba said as we entered the living room, which was connected to the kitchen.

Matt’s other mom, Sarah glanced up from the kitchen counter, where she was halfway through cutting apart a sweet potato into thin slices, “Welcome welcome! Lemme grab that,” she said as she hurriedly put away the knife.

“Afternoon Sarah,” ba nodded, then turned to the other woman in the room, who was setting up an electric stove, “Denise.”

“Oh, your family is always welcomed here,” Matt’s mom said as she took the bag, then almost reverently, removed the kilograms worth of pork belly and placed them on the chopping board.

“I’ll be taking a nap in the living room then,” ba said as he turned around. “Holler when the meat is ready.”

“Alright!” Sarah answered as she began poking the slab of pork belly with an appraising stare. “Perfect! I can begin cutting.”

“Any way I can help?”

“Sure, can you mix the sesame oil and salt pepper,” Denise asked as she pulled out their large Korean BBQ pan.

“Matt finish up the sweet potato for me,” Sarah said as she skillfully sliced the pork belly into small bite-size pieces.

I followed my memory to their spice cabinet. Salt and pepper were in the back left, sesame oil was front right. There was also the chilli paste in the fridge along with the fish sauce and sugar in another cabinet I would need to mix the chilli sauce.

Matt took out another board and knife along with the half-cut sweet potato. Unlike me he didn’t rely on instant food when his parents weren’t home, so he was actually half decent with a knife.

We fell into a flurry of preparation. Denise was setting up the table, her wife Sarah was cutting the meat with expert precision, Matt cut apart the vegetables that we would grill alongside it all and I was mixing the sauces. After I was done mixing a small bowl of sesame oil dipping sauce, I moved to mixing the chilli paste.

The formula was simple, two sauces, the first was sesame mixed with salt pepper, the second was chilli paste mixed with fish sauce and sugar. Everyone had different preferences and I had them memorised after some observations. Matt and Denise liked the chilli sauce over the sesame oil, though both of them had a stupidly high tolerance to chilli so I didn’t bother mixing their portion with a lot of fish sauce and sugar. Ba and Sarah used the sesame oil more so I didn’t portion them as much chilli sauce. I preferred sesame oil as well but I liked a higher portion of salt so I mixed mine separately. Max seemed to like both equally, though he didn’t have the same chilli tolerance as his brother and mother, so I mixed more fish sauce and sugar in his to sweeten the flavour.

Barely ten minutes later and we were done. Matt helped his mom move the plates to the table, I placed everyone’s sauce bowls in the spots they normally sat along with their chopsticks, or fork in Max’s case.

“Ba!” I called out as Sarah turned on the electric stove. I heard the living room couch being reclined back to its original spot along with a hurried “Coming!”

“Hurry up and come eat sir!” Matt called out as we took our seats.

“You too Max!” Sarah yelled out as she began laying the slices of meat on the pan. The sound of the sizzle began like a whisper but slowly increased in intensity as the fat of the pork began to melt. Ba got here with Max trotting in tow just as she filled the pan.

Denise led her son Max to a spot next to her, ba glanced around and asked, “Do you have soju?”

“Yeah, it’s in the fridge,” Denise answered.

“Thanks,” Ba said as he went to it.

“Bottom shelf, back right,” I called out as I saw him open the door.

Strips of golden brown were revealed as Sarah began flipping over the pork. Right as my dad took a seat.

“Already done?” ba asked as he cracked open his soju can.

“No I just flipped them,” “They were just flipped,” Sarah and I both answered.

“Just a minute or two now,” Sarah finished, clacking her tongs a few times before setting it aside.

Six pairs of eyes were glued on the sizzling pan. Sarah signalled when the meat was done when she flipped over a piece to reveal another side of rich, golden brown.

Six pairs of chopsticks were already moving as she declared them ready- wait, six? Denise usually held a very neutral expression, but I could see the small smirk of triumph as Max began picking out pieces with his own pair. So she finally got through to him, I’ll have to make sure I don’t take out a fork for Max next time we’re here.

I quickly snatched three pieces. Liberally dipping them in my sesame oil sauce. Each kilogram of pork belly cost fifty dollars at discount, I had just taken several grams worth.

At least a fifty cents, I estimated as I ate them. One bite and I ate fifty cents, I almost didn’t notice the texture of the pork, its crunchy exterior quickly gave way to firm yet chewy flesh.

As if the stupor was broken, conversation began as everyone had their first bite.

Ba was slumped over on the chair snoring, he had a comically weak resistance to alcohol. One shot was all that was really needed to knock him out.

Max and Matt were energetically running around, definitely playing an AR game given how their hands looked like they were holding a blaster despite nothing being there. Denise was watching over them making sure they didn’t hurt themselves despite the fact most AR nowadays did almost one to one overlays on reality.

Sarah and I were sat cooking the last of the sliced sweet potatoes. Two kilograms of pork belly, a hundred dollars eaten in one determined dinner. I was probably responsible for at least a third to half the worth and that was just counting the meat. Though the vegetables were negligible compared to it.

Sarah placed the cooked sweet potatoes into my bowl as they finished cooking. “Anything else you all want to eat?”

I shook my head, “Nope.”

“I’ll turn it off then,” Sarah said as she switched off the stove. “I’ll start the pack up.”

“Oh! I’ll help!” Matt yelled, turning off his AR display with a few flicks. He stepped towards the table and lifted the BBQ pan.

If it were anyone else, they would’ve dropped it like a hot iron because, well, it was. But for Matt, he barely seemed to notice, hell, I’m not even sure his prosthetics felt anything other than pressure.

Matt casually carried away the still hot BBQ pan and set it to cool at the kitchen counter. Both of his arms and legs were prosthetics. From what I’ve heard from conversations between him and my ba, it seems that even one of his lungs and his heart are too. Which struck me as incredibly odd.

I knew little about Matt and his family’s past, I gleaned over the years they were immigrants from one of Europe’s underground Metro Cities and that they likely ran into an old war weapon as they were crossing the borders.

That part was easy to deduce, when I first met Matt’s mom Sarah, her left arm showed signs of having been recently regenerated, even now you could notice that her left arm had a slightly lighter tone. I caught their place of origins in conversation later on and Max showed a great fascination to the sun when he was even younger.

But Matt still had all his pieces when I first met him and he was one of ba’s patients. He lost them later on when they reached Australia and was at my ba's hospital. Stranger was that his limbs were actual artificial prosthetics, not stuff cloned from his DNA and replaced.

Why didn’t he get his limbs regenerated and stayed with prosthetics? In this day and age getting and maintaining artificial prosthetics was more costly than just taking a dip in a regenerating pod, so why didn’t he?

I had several theories, many of them even made sense and I knew for sure that Matt would provide them easily should I ask.

I knew for sure he would, as certain as I would of the sun rising.

But I never asked and I never will. I have constantly dismissed the thoughts as just theory, no matter how much they made sense, no matter how much everything added up.

I owed him that much.