Cydon’s Cyborg Cuisine
A restaurant chain catering specifically to those with unusually energy-hungry augmentations without external power sources, Cydon’s Cyborg Cuisine (CCC) provides a dizzying selection of dishes across several Imperial cuisines designed specifically for their, or rather their fuel cells’, special requirements.
That is to say, CCC’s back-end chefs and nutritionists have found a way to pack close to the theoretical maximum quantity of fats and simple sugars into each mouthful, while still leaving the food tasty and suitable for semi-regular consumption, unlike more typical offerings to this market, such as Biogenesis’s Proven-Potency Power Paste, Steeleye Labs’ high-erg fuel bars, or even Peregrinate’s Minty Sugar Slab. Sorry, guys!
All of the food available at CCC is vat-grown or synthetic, of course, but such is to be expected when nature simply cannot pack that much energy into a bite.
Finally, while it is company policy not to question the details – or for that matter existence – of customers’ augmentations, those closer to baseline accompanying their cyborg friends to CCC are strongly urged to confine themselves to the Lily-Livered side menu.
Eating CCC’s regular offerings without both an augmented digestive system suitable to process them and the sort of augmentations they are intended to power has been observed to have side effects including but not limited to acute gastrointestinal distress, angina, atherosclerosis, cerebrovascular insult, cholelithiasis, diabetes, diarrhea, generalized steatosis, hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, jaundice, myocardial infarction, pancreatitis, steatohepatitis, and death. A waiver is included with each meal.
– Restaurant Review, from the Mer Covales Advertiser
Possibly a dumb question, but if you were getting yourself augmented with something that energy-hungry, why wouldn’t you also have them tweak your sense of taste to enjoy sugar slabs more? Is this from a point in history before sophotech had caught up enough to do that? Or is it just that their sense of extravagantly elegant excellence sees that as a cop-out?
(I like the idea of eldrae living off a diet of Kendal mint cake and tablet and acting like this is perfectly normal. I wonder how the former compares to Peregrinate’s version…)
I can see places like this, as long as there wasn’t cross-contamination issues, having a “please have your muse ping us for the right menus” that would be discretely marked in such a way that nobody has to think they’re being left out of the meal. And, a definite “sharing” menu so that couples and such could have an appetizer or such that would allow them all to have a food option they can all enjoy.
And, they might have to keep out the “so good…” and drop over dead kind of foodies. The sort that would eat enough fugu to be a real problem.
Mostly because while you might do this if you want to eat nothing but Proven-Potency Power Paste, there aren’t all that many people who want to want to eat nothing but Proven-Potency Power Paste.
(Already canon in a sense; military rations as well as industrial ones tended to be heavy on that as well as high-proof fruit cake, for the purpose of maximizing energy intake for people throwing stuff around with their brains all day.)
(ETA: Man, I’m going to have to import some KMC now.)