After work the next day, Brooke plugged her laptop into the USB port on the food synthesizer device. She’d had to wait until Mikayla left for her shift at the Bean Machine to get the damn thing to herself. Her ditzy little sister had been popping back into the kitchen every 10 minutes to get the machine to make her some kind of beverage or snack.
The console on Brooke’s computer showed an all text readout with the Dyna-Corp copyright at the top and the name of the device, which would certainly be changed by the marketing team: “Cornucopia 3.8.1a”
“Cornucopia? Could the dev team have been more on-the-nose?”
Scrolling through the diagnostic readouts, Brooke attempted to understand the device. Deciding to run a print, –she had decided to think of the device as a food printer– Brooke tapped through the menu and selected a slice of peanut butter pie.
The Cornucopia made an angry beep, and her computer terminal spat out some numbers and a timestamp and “unable to locate source matter for fabrication” while the display simply read “Pod Depleted. Please Replace Pod.”
“Jesus, Mikayla…” Somehow her ditzy sister had used up an entire fuel pod in one day? Those pods would make fifty double cheeseburgers, by Brooke’s quick head math. Well, maybe the other shit Mikayla kept making like milkshakes were more fuel-intensive. Oh well, just more stuff to test.
Brooke replaced the pod and ran the pie order again. She opened the drawer and pulled the dessert out, and took a tiny taste. Still soap. She’d planned for this and had a small bucket handy and a bottle of ginger ale to rinse out the taste.
Brooke ran a few more tests, watching the readouts on her laptop as she did. There was a lot she wasn’t able to follow, stuff about protein sequences and cellular bonding, but what she knew for sure was it all tasted like soap. Cheesecake, custard eclair, and cinnamon roll, all tasted just as bad as the pie. And it wasn’t even a mild soap like a nice peppermint mocha hand soap or something, no this was full on Lava soap, making Brooke nearly gag every time.
Browsing through the file structure on the device, Brooke found a set of very complex configuration files. Very little of it made any sense to her, but she kept digging and decided to do some more experimenting. Changing some values, she ran another print, pizza this time. It was even worse.
Brooke repeated this process, always changing values back and trying different ones. Spaghetti, French onion soup, grilled cheese, the flavors changed wildly but surprisingly were always worse than the baseline.
Brooke heard the front door creaked open and Mikayla return.
“Are you back already?”
“I’ve been gone like three hours…”
Mikayla plodded into the kitchen, tossing her keys in a bowl on the counter.
“Oooh, are you testing the air fryer?”
“It’s not an air fryer Mikayla. Apparently they called it a ‘Cornucopia.’”
“A corn-what now?”
“Cornucopia, it’s from Greek mythology or something, it’s that horn full of food, like in Hunger Games.”
“I thought you hated those movies.”
“I did, but that’s beside the point. How are you back from work so soon?”
“Well, it was super slow, and Brittany put me, Emma, and Jackie all on the schedule, so I got cut early.”
Mikayla had plopped her plush booty on a nearby stool and slid the slice of pie toward herself.
“You done with this?”
Brooke nodded, and her sister tucked in. Returning to digging through the settings, and looking across the counter at her failed experiments, Brooke decided to try approaching this from another angle.
“Here, see how this pizza tastes.”
“–chomp– Hmm, it’s not as good as the ones I made last night, but it’s still okay. Kinda like a decent frozen pizza.”
“Okay how bout this grilled cheese?”
“–nom– Oooh, this is like a fancy food truck grilled cheese!”
“Fancy food truck?”
“You know, with like real cheese instead of kraft singles.”
Mikayla tried each of Brooke’s experiments, and Brooke opened another file on her computer to document the various subjective changes each setting affected. Meanwhile, Mikayla went from dish to dish, nibbling and chomping on all the various synthesized food.
“I guess this thing has to be tuned to a person’s specific taste profile, but there’s no documentation for it.”
“Hmm, weird.” Mikayla responded halfheartedly as she took another large bite from the eclair.
Some time later all the first round of test food was gone, along with a few more tests Brooke printed and Mikayla devoured.
“Ugh, I need to make something to eat. I wish all this stuff didn’t taste so bad.”
“I think it’s great!” Mikayla smiled, rubbing her belly as it pressed tightly against her Bean Machine shirt.
“Hey,” the bloated blonde added in an unexpected turn of creative thinking, “what if you use the Corn-thing to make like eggs or something and then cook them yourself? Maybe that would work.”
Brooke hadn’t considered that, so she tried it.
Fifteen minutes later, Brooke was digging in the fridge, and Mikayla was adding scrambled eggs to her already stuffed tum.
Some time later...
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