Steak is Good

The line cook slapped the bell hard. Its loud ding ricocheting off the walls of the 24/7 diner and my head. White-red streamers goosed my amygdala before evaporating in scratchy blobs of mental light. Clearly, I had had enough coffee for the evening. I moved away from the food window and the bell. I parked it at the end of the counter.

My job. Essentially a court reporter spinning curt yawns about an abandoned people, stuck on a ball of dirt whizzing through an apparently empty universe with nobody driving the bus. People who would be thrilled to pieces if a non-local dropped in for five minutes en route to a more exciting part of the universe.

My server. Marge. Large and in charge Marge. She took my order while staring at her phone. I can’t complain, my order came fast and correct. Upon delivery, Marge wheeled around with surprising agility and made tracks back toward the kitchen window and the bell slapping man.

My steak. My steak smelled of July. July and rain. Normally steaks smell like disinfectant and fluorescent lights. And fear. Perhaps my evening was beginning to look up.

The guy I interviewed today was telling me about how the Native Americans up in Dulce, NM were all just meat vehicles for small aliens who piloted said Native Americans from control centers located in their bellies (not the alien’s bellies, the Native American’s bellies sillys). I flashed on a mental image of tiny space aliens peering out of hairy bellybuttons. He said they didn't drive around all the time, just when they needed to get somewhere. I asked him "Why Native Americans?". He said that they don't stick out in a crowd and nobody expects them to do anything weird. “Except perhaps,” I thought, “when they are being driven around by small space aliens inside their bellies.” But I conject. Or whatever.

I glanced at my timer, and then around the diner. The place was almost empty. Marge, earphones in, and her back facing me. I soon had what I needed, but I was ahead of schedule and the steak called out to me to stay a little longer. I decided I wanted my experience with this lightly July-ed, non-frightened steak to deepen into something more meaningful, so I thought about tiny holes being drilled into the fibers of the meat. So tiny that only the faintest odors could escape it. Boring deeper into the flesh, the smell given off changed into something like... not-urgent yellow. The only thing I could compare it to was the way young people smell on a sunny day. Sunlight, yes. And lavender!

He had said that the Native-American-driving aliens had a secret tunnel that connected them to their homeworld in a parallel universe - connecting Dulce with a large city in another reality. He said that the aliens on planet earth had made some poor choices when they decided to stay here after their explorations were complete. They assumed that the earthlings would develop and advance relatively quickly, and so might be fun to talk to in a few hundred years. That hadn't happened. And not for the obvious reasons. The problem was that the aliens had wildly overestimated the availability of ultra-heavy elements in this part of the universe. No naturally-occurring super-heavy particles meant no super energy-dense power generation and no super-interesting people for at least a few hundred thousand years.

I edited my notes, checked my timer, and opened my eyes just in time to see Marge standing about a foot away from me across the counter. Somehow, she was squinting at me and the steak at the same time. Of course, I had not touched it. "Still workin' on that?", she deadpanned. "Yes! A lot of work! It smells very interesting!", I said. Her upper lip began a delicate curl. Her eyes appealed to the ceiling for a moment. She then rotated and slow-walked back to the drink station.

This time I thought about drilling across the grain of the steak. I saved this part for last because I have this kink about drilling against the grain. Each little fiber slows the drill and offers some resistance to my efforts. That little resistance is what gives me a rise. It started when I first started experimenting with hot foods. A smile began knocking at the back of my lips. It knocked harder as I sent the drill around the rim of that juicy meat. Every so often, the drill would hit an empty space I had made previously. The combination of variable resistance, random space, and millions of electron volts was like an orchestra without rosin. Much sawing for not quite enough pleasure. Divine.

I asked how he knew all this; who was his source for all this alien stuff? He said that one of the locals in Dulce had told him. I asked him how he could trust anybody from up there: "They could all be aliens right?". He said the aliens couldn’t seem to control his source guy. "Too much bran in his diet one might surmise." - my brain again.

Now this. Marge and the staff were in some kind of huddle. Furtive glances shot in my direction. Perhaps I was making her nervous. She was back. She leaned in close to my face and said: "You don't have to eat it, but you do have to pay for it." In my aroused state, I leaned in even closer and stared at her cherry-red lips: “I know exactly what you mean." She backed up and hastened away. Cook-The-Bell-Slapper was beginning to stare at the weirdo at the end of the counter who seemed to be having a telepathic encounter with a piece of meat. Marge’s chemistry had changed since her last visit. She was releasing adrenaline derivatives, the smell of her breath adding something vaguely unsettling to the milieu of traffic plying my nose buds. Or whatever.

Beginning to feel like I was attracting too much attention, I decided it was time to go. I added a couple of lines to my report and almost closed the file when my steak did a curious thing. A small wave had started traveling across its surface, like a pool after a pebble has been thrown into one end. Tiny steak waves played and pulsed about as it inched toward the far side of my plate. It was caught in the breeze of the diner’s air conditioning. As it slid off the plate, it started to float upward toward the ceiling. Marge still had her back to me, but Bell Guy saw the whole thing. His mouth began to gape.

This was the first time I had seen a target defy gravity. In my zeal to get more scent from it (and collide enough particles to create the massive ones I needed), I had made so many holes that the steak was now almost lighter than air. I had already gathered and stabilized more than enough ultra-heavy atoms with my beam drill, yet I had continued drilling. Drilling for pleasure! I must be tired.

My timer went off. It was now past time for me to get up and find a place to slip away unnoticed. I saw not hide nor hair of Marge as I got up to leave. Pity, I wanted her to see that my long-ignored steak was finally gone to a better place (it was currently clinging to the positive charge of the ceiling light fixture above my head).

I left Marge a large and walked out of the diner. I waited while all my newly-created ultras dropped into the containment field of my transport, and hit the start switch. As I was dissolving, I reflected on what I would say in my report:

1. The prisoners are secure and have not yet found a way to spawn physical bodies of their own (although they seem to have found a way to hijack human bodies for joyrides).

2. There have been almost no significant advances in technology on this planet, so the bridge to our home universe is still inaccessible to the prisoners and will be for the foreseeable future.

3. The humans still know exactly doodly about us.

4. Steak is good.