After Blake promised Bella to bring fruits for her, he really started searching for fruits. But there’s no fruit plants in the capital asteroid as well as the surrounding asteroids. Yes, the place Bella and her brothers live isn’t actually a country or even a planet, but rather, a group of asteroids. It’s like how on Earth some countries consist of many islands, their city, Orion, is actually a combination of different kinds and shaped asteroids. The city they live is actually the capital of all the surrounding asteroids and the largest among them. But there are no plants in the whole city, be it flowers or fruits. Actually, there are plants of many kinds but they are only for decoration. They aren’t planted for producing oxygen.
The group of asteroids surrounding a nebula named Orion is covered by a barrier called Biodome. Although it’s astonishing that the trees planted on these asteroids don’t produce oxygen, people can still breath. That’s because of the countless oxygen producing machine at every asteroids under Biodome produce the extremely necessary oxygen. The machine operated by highly intelligent AIs not only produces oxygen but also other elements of air that humans need to survive. So even though the trees are basically useless, they can still live and breathe openly in the air. The job of the AIs maintaining Biodome is to produce gases continuously and fix the barrier if there’s any problem.
The asteroids orbit not around your typical sun-like star but rather a nebula, which name is Orion. But people still get ample amount of sunlight because the asteroids are always facing the nebula. The colour of the nebula is a bit orange-ish and yellow, a bit like the sunlight from Earth. That’s why Bella still doesn’t know that they are living on an asteroid, not an actual planet. And since the asteroids are covered by Biodome, at night, the sky looks as usual black, with some twinkling stars here and there. If Bella were to look at the night sky and concentrate properly, she may have seen the picturesque view of the nebula shining brightly and beautifully, although faintly.
Fortunately and coincidentally, the nebula burns only for 12 hours. The gases in the nebula burns for 12 hours continuously when it is considered daytime for the people living in the asteroids. After 12 hours, it stops burning and it is when night falls. This is how 24 hours are counted in the cities of Orion. But the people doesn’t count the days as monthly or weekly, they count 15 days as one week and months as tricentenary. And one year doesn’t consist 365 days but 589 days. The number of days the nebula takes to move around its orbit is 589 days, so the years are longer than Earth.
Bella is ignorant about all of these. She doesn’t know that the place she lives isn’t a planet, neither the sunlight she sees are from the sun or a star nor that the asteroids are covered by a Biodome. By the time she knew that, she was no longer shocked. She accepted all the facts very calmly, because she encountered even stranger things than that. But that’s the story of another time. Right now let’s see what her two elder brothers are doing to buy fruits for her.
“What’s wrong?”
Berson looks away from his floating panel to Blake who has been sighing for the past 30 minutes. At first Berson tried to ignore it thinking Blake might be missing Bella. But he kept sighing after every five minutes even though it hasn’t been an hour since he left home. He (Berson) couldn’t hear him sighing as if he had lost the world anymore and decided to ask.
“I was actually thinking about something?”
“What thing?”
Both the brothers removed the screens hovering in front of them and began to discuss. Blake again let’s out a dramatic sigh before saying,
“Bella asked me to find something for her. She didn’t want to drink her nutrition liquid so when I asked what she wants, she said she wants to eat fruits.”
“Fruits?”
Berson asks in puzzlement. He was confused at first but then he realised what fruit is and asked with raised brows.
“Those round balls like colorful things that grow on….trees?”
“I don’t know how they look.”
Blake says with a frown. He has been searching about fruits for the past two days but found very little information about them. The people of this era are not completely oblivious of food. They know what food is but don’t pay much attention to it. The existence of food isn’t fundamental to them, because they think nutrition liquid or solution have much more nutritious value than food. They choose to have nutrition solutions. For them, nutrition solutions are much easier to get, to digest and much cheaper to buy. While on the other hand, food is expensive, harder to get and digest. From the moment nutrition solutions were invented, people became so much dependent on it that they forgot about food. After people began to produce nutrition solutions commercially and spread across the countries and cities, people completely abandoned food and began to rely heavily on nutrition solutions.
At the beginning of the 4th Industrial Revolution, people’s lives became busier, they had hardly any time to rest let alone have time to eat. Prices of basic needs like food, clothes, medicine began to rise higher and higher, so people sacrificed their rest and meal time and began to work almost 24/7. It was hard to survive at that time, even though it wasn’t the end of the Earth. Living conditions became harsher, and various immoral acts like corruption, money laundering, theft, robbery, and even murder were so common that people didn’t even bat an eyelash seeing a dead body in front of their homes. People became robotic-like. Just for a piece of bread to eat, clothes to cover and a place to live, they began to work mouth to feet. And it was at that time when nutrition solutions were first invented.
The invention of the nutrition solution was like a beacon of light that shone upon the people of that time. Advertisements of how cheap it is, medical theories of how good it is to the body, and rumours of how it makes people energetic and youthful began to circulate in the whole world. It was when the corruption of Earth’s environment became much severe to the point the planet became inhabitant, natural disasters began to hit the surface of the Earth more frequently, earthquake shook the ground like sand castle and finally the historical drought hit which caused the cruelest famine recorded in human history. People finally snapped.
People who had the ability to leave the planet escaped as if there was no tomorrow staying on the dying planet. And the rest of the people who were left behind began to survive as much as they could. Foods became scarce and eating three meals a day became a luxury which many couldn’t afford. Fortunately, nutrition solutions were invented before all the calamities hit them, so people who escaped to the vast space and those who were left behind both began to produce the nutrition solution in a great number and began to consume. Earth couldn’t regain its formal vigour, but all the calamities that happened before stopped for mankind to grow again. Because foods couldn’t be produced in a vast number unlike before, people completely abandoned food and welcomed nutrition solutions.
The same goes for the people who started to region on new planets. It took so many years for humans to find another habitable planet, so the habit to consume nutrition liquid was set, and because of this, they began to forget about food little by little. Now, even if people know about food or things related to food, they don’t have any intention to consume them. Only a small number of people who are curious about their forefathers’ history would have some out of curiosity. Now food has become like an unnecessary object to them, it’s okay if you eat them, it’s also okay if you don’t.
Since food is now nothing but a hobby rich and curious people have, many small business groups have been opened to relish the curiosity of those rich people. And Blake was searching for one of those groups to buy fruits for Bella. But unfortunately, he couldn’t find any and the ones he found aren’t reliable in his eyes.
T/N: People who are science lovers, please forgive me for all the bullshit I wrote. I hope you will think of them as the childish blabbering of a childish author and don’t kill me. And so sorry for such a late update. I actually forgot that I have a original story to post.😭
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Number One Chef in the Intergalactic Era
Posted by , Released on March 30, 2023
