Reflections Of Chaz - SCP Foundation

PLANASTHAI WATCH

Sweep The Ash Away

PORT ALEPH
SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 2032
210 ¥

AMBROSE: A REFLECTION

by Matthew Waldon

My autorickshaw is a Mekhanite, his hydraulic legs pump in a rhythm as he carries my luggage and I down the highway. His mouth has been replaced with a chrome grille, the sole reason I chose him out of the horde of competing chauffeurs at the apportation terminal. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the speaker embedded in his back, which bombards me with questions.

Business or pleasure?

Business. Covering Port Aleph’s crackdowns on Insurgent cells for the Watch.

How long was I staying?

No longer than I have to.

Liking it?

I was. That was before I got in here with you.

That gets a laugh out of him - a screeching metallic crackle - before he moves on to the next topic in his interrogation. I mutter a quiet curse towards Bumaro for making his inexhaustible servants absolutely insufferable.

Along the roadside, the barren dirt gives way to the hydroponics, massive silos of vibrant blue and green, bullet-proof glass displaying their harvest for all to see. The last of agriculture. Amber fields and fruited plains boxed up or left to rot in the wake of the all-consuming cities.

A fleet of sixteen-wheelers idle on the asphalt, ready at a moment’s notice to transport carrots and lettuce to the inner Port, where they will be shredded, stir-fried, blanched, and devoured by high-rise dwellers. For a moment, I let myself be caught in a past life.

But my Mekhanite friend moves quickly, and the farm-towers soon fade as we enter the outskirts of the Port. Thomasvilles — little more than anomalously expanded shanty towns — pile on top of each other, leaning precariously towards the street. Strange men smoke from open doorways, skin raw and covered in a thin layer of grease. Cards and bills exchange hands in a steady flow, passing over rattling dice on the cracked pavement.

My cart moves faster here, the driver’s head is swiveling near-constantly. A mysterious hum sets my teeth on edge until I identify the source; a glowing, vibrating knife, tighly gripped in a fuladh hand. He explains the edges of the city is where the worst lurk, scouring the streets for easy prey. Again, the nostalgia of the World Before spurs curiousity — the distribution networks don't reach this far, so what do they eat? The driver screechlaughs and simply presses onward, knife in hand.

We pass under a maglev bridge reinforced with tendon and bone; as a tram rumbles over us, I hear a steady tap as blood hits the roof of the cab.

It appears our presence is not unnoticed. Hawkers and merchants line the street, each shouting over the other to get a moment of our time. Cheap plastic toys from Pakistan, dull gunmetal watches from Italy, Ugandan shirts, Brazilian radios, Chinese books — the whole world can be found at a Port.

As a man with painstakingly intricate runes carved in his chest bangs on the cab’s glass, shouting the prices of scrap metal, my stomach growls; I haven’t eaten for the past two days. The nearest distro center’s a half-hour away, smack-dab in the middle of a tram hub for Little Esterberg. Queue’s probably no more than ten minutes. I can make it.

As we push our way through the crowd, I spot him in the back of an alleyway.

Touchingly, the driver is exceedingly worried for me. The center’s just a little further, he has a cousin’s cousin nearby who can get me anything I want to eat for a small fee, I shouldn’t be out here with these people, et cetera. I throw enough yen at him until he happily sprints away, leaving me standing on the sidewalk with a considerably reduced stipend.

He’s right of course, walking out here without protection would be suicide. Lodges endlessly battle in these streets, and it is best to avoid the crossfire, lest you become ammunition. I quickly trace a sigil on my right palm: standard ISCUT-style protection spell, should protect me from the bog-standard hexes and curses. I also have a gun. It has bullets.

I had seen Chaz before: a trolley commute through the Plaza, sitting alone at Hersh's, profiles in newspapers, but nothing more than glimpses. I first met him in the kitchen of a Portlands house party.

Me: horned-rim glasses, skin bordering on anemic, still nursing a hangover from the conclusion of my exams.

Him: dark-skinned hands rubbed red by scrubbing, humming a mundane Top 40 hit, smell of lilac and diesel.

He sits behind a gas stove, flames threatening to consume the carbon steel wok. Waves of heat sends the scent of spices unknown to tickle my nose. It feels wrong to talk to him, to interrupt an artist at work. So, I lean on a granite countertop and watch his strange, flowing dance throughout the kitchen.

We were young and hungry; I was newly appointed senior editor of the Odyessy and he had just opened his first restaurant: Ambrose: Three Portlands. After some time, I worked up the courage to ask about the name. He said that in five years' time, he was going to have a location in every Free Port in America. I told him he was arrogant. He told me to pass him the pepper.

The crowd has moved on. Even here, no one likes getting mixed up with a thaumaturgist. A Spirit Dust junkie lays slack-jawed against the alley walls, twitching in ecstasy as I nudge him aside.

At first glance, the vending machine is no different than the metal boxes that litter old Tokyo or New York. But nowhere in those crumbling metropolises could you find a machine in a purple and gold veneer, with the smiling face of Chaz adorning the side. This was an Ambrose Restaurants product; once, people would line up for hours just to get a seat. Now, there was no one but me and a man choking on his spit.

He never liked that photo. It was a pained smile made at the end of a long photoshoot paid for by money he didn't have. His real smile was small, highlighted by dimples that ever so slightly dipped into the cheek. The decals show a ghoulish grin, lips peeled back to show too much teeth.

There’s a stuttering touchscreen display on the machine, as soon as I get close it greets me by name in a buffering artificial voice. Remotely scanned my identchip if I was to bet. A small detail, but he always felt that quality was built on noticing the small details.

The variety of the menu is staggering: Caesar salad, quiche lorraine, tonkotsu ramen, ribeye steak; I couldn’t even remember the last time I had real steak.

My hunger takes over as I punch in my order: three dishes of anything. Now. My mouth waters in anticipation. The price is exorbitant (at least one thing remains the same), but I don’t care. The machine rumbles, and I hear three tell-tale thuds. Bon appetit.

As my hand moves under a plastic flap to retrieve the food, my heart sinks. I didn’t know what I was expecting, perfectly shrink-wrapped morsels on fine china? Instead, I receive three small packages, each no bigger than an old chocolate bar. On the front is the familiar three-arrow logo, indicating the package is nothing more than a 7314 derivative, the same you’d get at any distro center.

Flipping over the packaging revealed more of the same. A precise formula of meat, dairy, grains, fruits, veggies, all the right vitamins and nutrients that a growing reporter needs. Unusually, there's a purple label with flowery font. It claims that this one is otoro, the fatty underbelly of a tuna. The bar doesn’t even contain fish.

The junkie mumbles the virtues of a drooling path as I lean on the wall across from him, quickly unwrapping my “dish.” It’s an unappealing brown-grey with flecks of dull, dehydrated green. Looks closer to dirt than anything coming out of the sea. Surprisingly brittle too, I easily break off a small piece, and place it in my mouth.

His knifework is methodical, bordering on sluggish. He sorts through a bowl of chickpeas, carefully unwrapping the skin from each one before placing them in an oiled sheetpan. Aren’t chefs supposed to be showy and bold, onion volcanos and gold-plated steaks and the like?

He laughs, telling me that you can’t sous vide with a microwave. The metaphor escapes me, I can barely boil an egg.

The chickpeas are done, and he tosses them into the oven with a laundry list of spices. Put a little time, effort, and care into it, he says, and the food returns the favor.

It tastes savory, but it’s not salty. It’s fatty, but not greasy. It tastes like a fish, but it was assembled in a facility hundreds of miles from the ocean. It tastes delicious, it tastes real. I stuff the remainder in my mouth like a starving man, even licking the packaging before shamefully casting it aside.

In my career, I have dined at every single Ambrose location in the world. From the neon highrise of Eurtec to the backalley teahouse of Hong Kong. Yet, this meal stands alone. It is nothing short of a miracle; from these simple ingredients, Ambrose has created the first flavor I have had in a decade. Even now, he still managed to amaze me. Like his dishes of old, it's a carefully crafted enigma.

As I eat the second dish, the illusion falls apart. It is spaghetti aglio e olio, a recipe that is an exercise in restraint, a careful balance between the slightly fruity oil and pungent garlic. I absent-mindedly rub the wrapper and receive a mouthful of blended oats and meat. I gag and the half-eaten mush is spat onto the ground. Another bite yields similar results; the magic is broken, the bar now no different from what I could get at a distro.

A brief investigation exposes the trick. There are barely imperceptible raises on the plastic wrapping, connecting together to form spirals and fractals. Memes. Nothing more than a simple misdirection, telling your brain to ignore certain signals and process different ones.

Something bubbles in the back of my throat. Was this what we had been reduced to? An aging reporter fooled by a cheap parlor trick from an alleyway vending machine. Maybe I’m no different from the man beside me, desperately trying to chase a dragon that no longer exists. Crops don’t sprout. Cattle are grown in test tubes. People pile on top of each other in cities like sardines. Food is fuel, only enough to get you to the next day. Ambrose is a shell of itself. Chaz is dead.

There’s one bar left. The packaging is blank: no meme, no label, nothing. I almost crumple it up, but something stops me. Maybe I owe it to him, I guess. As I slowly chew, I remember how —

— we ran up the fire escape together, giggling as we try to balance our bowls of food. The rooftop is barren, so we place our meals on the ledge overlooking the whole city. The Mayor has outdone itself tonight; the night sky is clear and the Moon and stars shine faintly down on us.

We attack our food with paper bowls and takeout utensils. It’s some sort of yellow curry, pungent, spicy, and savory. For a few moments, the night is still, occasionally broken up by a spoon scraping the edge of a dish.

“God, remember when the sky used to look like that?”

I look up. Chaz sits beside me, staring up at the sky.

“What?”

“I mean, it wasn’t like that everywhere all the time, but on a good day, you could spot the North Star in the city at night. Can’t do that now, too much ash. Everyone says it should've fallen a long time ago, but it all just seems to linger up there.”

“That’s— you’re not supposed to say that.”

The words slowly leave my mouth like honey. This isn’t right.

“‘Course I’m not. I’m supposed to talk about a new location I’m scouting out in the plaza, a step up from the hole-in-a-wall I have now. You respond with complaints about your editors, they’re sloppy and unprofessional. I respond that you haven’t dealt with snobby critics and the even snobbier Critic decrying every change you make to your menu. You counter that you haven’t felt stress until it’s three hours til press and you still don’t have a cover story and your writers are completely AWOL. We kiss. It’s nice.”

Chaz sits on the ledge beside me. Is this a dream? Pocket dimension? Food poisoning induced delirious vision?

“But you’re dead. I mean, the last time I ever saw you was in Zürich in that hospital bed. The type of bed you don’t get up from.”

“Charles Ambrose is dead. Ambrose Restaurants is scraping by, but it’ll be gone soon too. The name means nothing, it's just fumes and tricks and pained smiles. But it was never about that. The name's gone, but what made Ambrose, Ambrose — if you don’t mind me being pretentious — still goes on.”

Ever so slightly, the starlight seems to brighten.

“There’s a gurdwara in the outskirts of the Port, up north near Faetown. They have the last commercial greenhouse in North America. Their langar feeds two thousand people daily, free of charge. Every day, seven days a week, two dozen volunteers come in at daybreak, and cook till the sun sets.

“There’s a Foundation researcher working at Abraxas Command, that obelisk at the center of town. Officially she’s a technician for the Way transport system that gets SCP-7314 from distribution centers A to B. Off the clock, she spends every spare moment in the biolab. A plant that thrives with dust and feeds dozens, that’s been her side project for the past five years. If she gets it right, she could turn food deserts into oases. Her supervisors wrote it off years ago, but through budget cuts and committee hearings, she hasn’t budged a bit. Yesterday, she made a breakthrough."

The sky is almost blinding now. Wherever we are, time seems to be up.

“These people are Ambrose, maybe not by name, but by spirit. They just need to see what they can be. I need you to do that for me Matt, can you?”

“I — I will. Can I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“You said yourself that Chaz was gone, so what are you? Noospheric entity? Hallucinogenic vision? Ghost?”

I see that dimpled half-grin for the first time in a decade.

“If I told you, then it wouldn’t be a secret ingredient. May we meet again, Matthew.”

The last thing I see is Chaz putting his head on my shoulder before I

wake up, coughing as I lean against the wall. It’s day now, small sunbeams shine through the sky above. Thankfully, I still have all my limbs and belongings intact. The addict snores across from me, and for a brief moment, our chests rise and fall in unison.

The vending machine is out of power, its display now dark, revealing the web of cracks on the screen. I look at it for a long time before I turn and leave the alley behind.

I write this article from a seat on the Port's morning K Line commute. This line will take me all the way up the city, towards Faetown. As I was walking towards the station, there were small blades of grass sprouting out of a crack in a sidewalk. I bent down to pick one. Wild onion, a bit grimy, but a good wash, and it’s edible.

Spring is here.