"For The Love of Chicken" Part 1
Feb. 28th, 2003 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zesty_pintoone girl and her chicken sandwich addiction. *passes some sweets to zesty* [~*blue*~]
“Chicken Francaise, Shrimp Alfredo, Beef stir fry, Haggis, Tuna Noodle Casserole…” Marty fingered the laminated gloss of the menu as his eyes pawed over the countless items and the credit cost that was next to it in the sort of diner you would expect a fellow like him to frequent on a lunch hour: sanitary but not at all unpleasant with a sort of retro feeling that came from the bubble lines in the booth seats and the chrome smoothed over edges that reflected everything in strange obscure lines.
Marty fancied himself the connoisseur of foods. He could tell the difference between fish and chips from the diner next to the transit terminal by London to ones made in Chicago at the “best” fish and chips place there to the same dish made as a Friday blue special in Skye colony. But he never was a fan of fish and chips, nor could he tell which one was best, though he could tell differences within them.
“Did you know that there were people whose job was to actually just taste people’s food?” Marty had a look of bewildered joy at the thought of that. His friends, of course, always liked to keep his head back to earth.
“I think it was originally to make sure someone didn’t poison the king’s food; would you like to end up eating poison by accident?” Josh preferred correcting him.
“If you ask me, it sounds like that is why the Old World is so primitive. Did you know that in ancient times people would use animals as slaves?” Mariah was a woman that liked to remind him to appreciate the time now as compared to those “good old days” that Marty liked to think of so much.
“She’s got a point, Marty old pal,” he sipped the orange twist tea to dampen his tongue a slight bit before continuing “Those old times aren’t as hot as you think they were.”
“Yeah? Well then what’s so great about now? Did you know the last guy I had to headjob? He kept pounding my box like it was going to make life go any faster; almost broke my interface entirely.”
Mariah looked him over with her green-gray eyes shifting curiously towards him “Didn’t you tell us this story five times over today?”
“If my credit goes belly up, don’t blame me for it then. Are we all ready to order?” They both nodded in reply “Good, then let’s order.” He pressed the inconspicuous red “Call” button that rested against the rim of the diner window. Without much time, a female voice appeared to greet them through a holographic frame that formed from the liquid crystal inside the window. In solid white, letters formed proclaiming the name of the diner on the top like letterhead.
“Caesar Salad,” said Josh almost in a business like fashion. The words appeared on the black screen in fancy but legible script to confirm the order.
“Cheeseburger platter, no tomatoes please.” In response to Mariah’s order, it scripted up the order as “ChBurger plat, no tmt” for the sake of saving space on the black window screen.
Marty smiled “May I have a chicken sandwich platter with extra mayo on it, please?” The screen complied and Marty pressed the confirm button. Promptly, it gave the estimated time it would take for the food to come, “3 min 14sec” and then promptly faded into the clear window as they began to pay it no mind.
“Were you trying to hit on the program, Mart?” Mariah giggled and her finger took a playful poke at him, which his hand brushed away as his fingers took to strumming against the shale gray rounded square table.
“I still have memories about that guy mistreating the instruments. Now I know why cabs tend to look so busted up sometimes after seeing that. I should have gotten him arrested for the feedback he gave the system and the migraine that I got from it.” He clenched his head, feigning the pain almost in a recall of the prescription medication he had to get from the medical diagnostic machine.
“You know what you need?” Josh said as he pointed the fork at him.
“Aside from a jar of painkillers?”
“-you need to remember it’s your birthday. What do you want anyway?”
The expression Marty held now changed to surprise. Not a fake surprise but an actual surprise; for all the time that happened, he had forgotten that his birthday was coming in a few days.
“Maybe he wants us to find him a girlfriend,” said Mariah with a malicious grin as he watched Marty almost jump back from the booth he sat in “Oh, you didn’t like the last girl we sent you with?”
“I liked the fact that she didn’t kill me immediately when I insulted her father by accident, but aside from that… No.” He took another sigh, which was to be expected from a fellow that liked to sigh a lot, and replaced the menus into the holster next to the edge of the table. He clicked the order button to check and found out that the order was already being sent to them. His eyes turned to the vinyl-covered door with a porthole window that led to the kitchen and saw it swing inward with a treaded table scooting towards them, the food steaming hot as it continued to journey towards them. Finally, it stopped with a polite “Caution food is hot” in its plastic warnings. Josh, who was closest to the plates, took each and began to distribute them to the appropriate person. After the third dish was taken, the table crawled back into the sliding door that went to the kitchen.
They left the diner, Marty sighing “I don’t think the food here is that great. Hey, you know what I missed? The chicken sandwiches they had back in Ander’s colony, at that shack not too far from the stadium.” His friends gave an idle nod, the same idle nod that they learned awhile back just to avoid going into drawn-out arguments with them since food did not make them in a mood to argue too much “I could go for another new type of taste of a chicken sandwich.” At that point, he stopped for a bit and then continued with the pace of his friends.
“-so you’re telling me that we should go help you make a chicken sandwich for your birthday?” Mariah rolled her dark eyes back and pushed her knuckles into her hips, looking at Marty with a sort of “what-the-hell-are-you-thinking?” sort of look that reflected the appearance in her eyes.
“Sure, what could be so wrong with that?” This was, in Mariah’s opinion, one of the most nonsensical things he had ever asked. Ever since you were born it was taught to you to never take the life of any living creature that moved and breathed. It was a fineable law; children that were found to kill bugs at a young age were quickly sent to schools to rehabilitate them. Adults found killing animals were fined an exorbitant fee of up to 15,000 credits and readjustments of their job accessibility, usually into something of a lower status. Cooking was like putting one sin on top of another; no one ever needed to cook and it wasn’t encouraged since the companies did the cooking for you: the only thing people were technically allowed to cook were the century old MRE’s that you had to put water on to heat; currently they were selling online for thousands of credits from cooking fanatics that still reveled in the spectacle of getting their food the old-fashioned way nd some old-timers that didn’t think the system provided the people with real food. From what both of them knew even without the knowledge of cooking, though, they knew that century-old food would taste terrible.
“Okay, so maybe it’s a little risky.”
“A LITTLE?!” She would have stamped her foot at that moment in anger if she didn’t feel that she made her point already.
“…no wait, it could be done,” said Josh. He was silent all through the conversation until now. She covered her forehead with her hand and sighed in disbelief. Her friends were going to become murderers.
“I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. We don’t have to kill an animal.”
They blinked in surprise.
“All animals have a natural life span, right? We can just wait for one to die from natural causes.” He slapped his hands together in satisfaction.
“Do you mean we have to find one that dies from disease? Do we have to pink one that died from Ebola?” Marty’s tongue immediately took a look of disgust
“They don’t all die from disease you know.” Josh shook his head and replied, “Some of them die from old age.”
At this, they all stared at each other.
Yosemite Mountain National Preserve. Mount Rushmore, Old Faithful, and several thousand species of plants and animals made it an ecosystem living in harmonic balance. The history books said that this was once a national park, which was why it was so abundant and untouched, even though they said that most of the surrounding land was eventually donated away when it became an animal Preservation. In the Audi Quattro Deuce, the three sat in their car by the road to look about as they were told, and went with binoculars around to look for the wild chickens that were said to roam around here.
“I see one! I see one!” Marty pointed up as he looked through the binoculars.
Josh didn’t need to look up to reply “Chickens don’t fly, Marty; it’s probably a pigeon or a falcon or vulture or something.”
“Do you think they’d taste good in a sandwich?”
Mariah nearly jumped out of her chair as she was hearing this I’m in a car with murderers, murderers… but she just tried to give an uneasy smile to them so that they might not think of killing her like the barbaric people that used to kill animals and then people. The past was a very primitive time. All thoughts stopped though when she finally pointed to the side of the car in exclamation at seeing it “Look! Look! A CHICKEN!”
Sure enough, they turned… and saw a three-striped black and tan brown chipmunk bending over to nibble on an acorn.
There was a dead silence that began to spread through the car for those five seconds before the two began to break out in hysterics at what they saw. Mariah just crossed her arms and mumbled about how they all look the same.
“I don’t think we’re going to find a chicken at this rate.” The two, Mariah and Josh, were lying back in their seat, tired and beginning to wonder why they were sitting around for the past several hours. Marty, however, was ever-vigilant for the elusive flightless bird. At this point, however, he sighed and opened his door. The others looked at him as though he was crazy.
“What are you doing?!”
He looked to them as he was halfway out “If I can’t find an old chicken, then I’m going to look for one myself.” He turned away and began to walk into the woods.
“Should we follow him?” inquired Mariah.
“And get lost? No.”
Hours passed again. It was dark, deathly dark, and the two waited. Several rangers already drove past them checking on them since it was late and they were still parked by the road “Looking at the night wildlife was the excuse they had to give them” and several minutes of pointers at looking for these things was what he said.
“Maybe… we should call him lost.”
“But if we do that, then they’re going to find out what happened and we’ll be marked as criminals.” Mariah sighed when she heard that because she knew as well, but the risk of their dead friend was weighing heavily upon them.
-
“Damn it, I am lost…” Marty was smart enough to bring one of those flashlights for his keyring, but was foolish enough to believe that he was going to get enough light out of them to keep himself knowing where he was. On one bright side, he knew that he was not completely in the dark, but on the darker note, he was literally lost. Actually he knew that before it was really dark; it was when he found himself unable to find a road or the car that he knew that he was lost, and that frightened him enough to make him stand still until it started to go into sunset and he knew that he might die in these woods forever.
He was completely unable to find anything available that could be identified by him except trees, plants, and bugs; so many bugs! All of them swarmed over his key flashlight and he almost felt compelled to swat them away with his hand until he remembered that he was already going to be charged as a loiterer for getting out of his car in a national preserve. He felt his arms begin to wobble; his legs were weak enough to tell him something; that from continuing to trudge through the woodlands in the darkening night had made him need to use the bathroom.
He looked around and then unzipped his pants and started to pour golden showers. As he turned, he then froze in his tracks. The sound of the trickle of water was only heavy in his ear as he saw the cockled head and plumage of a fat brown and tan bird that just walked around on its legs. Behind it was a number of other birds like it, though they lacked the prominent comb on its top. The sound of clucks and bocks filled his ears slowly as soon as he began to finish his urination. The big bird stared at him with one eye, one curious dark red eye of crimson. The talons it had began to scrape against the ground and it started to scream a carooning howl…
-
“Hey, do you hear something?”
“…” Josh stopped holding still and replied “Nope… maybe you’re just shaky.”
“I guess… do you think he’s okay?”
“Marty? I’m sure he’s fine.”
-
He ran like there was no tomorrow.
IT took him five minutes before he realized that he was still unzippered and tried to pull his fly up while keeping his legs going as fast as possible. The dreaded chicken was howling for him like a demonic creature from the beyond: several times he thought he outrun the creature and took to stopping and catching his breath only to find out that the thing was following him from behind with flapping wings and that loud battle cry of death that it was giving him. It wanted his blood, and he didn’t know what to do except sob for his unfound corpse in the deep forest of Yosemite…
-
“No, wait, I definitely heard something.”
“Yeah, same here, I- hey, do you see that light?”
“Yeah, I see it! It’s Marty, he’s alive! He’s… …running?”
“OPENTHEDOOROPENTHEDOOROPENTHEDAMNDOOR!!!!”
They looked in awe at Marty as he was running from the small angry flightless bird that was up to his ankles and screaming bloody terror towards him.
“Quick, unlock the door!” Mariah complied and hit the autolock, stirring the disturbed air with the click noise. Marty went for the latch and started to pull in one quick gesture for the door to open… but it was locked.
“OPEN!!!” They could see he was starting to well up and cry as he turned to see the demon bird bullrushing towards him with talons beaks and all.
“You pressed the autolock the wrong way!” Josh was keeping his eyes fixed on the killer chicken all the while.
“I know I know!” She went for it again and the clicking noise came up. Marty tried, but it didn’t work again. The bird was getting dangerously close.
“Stop pressing lock!”
“Stop holding the latch up!” Mariah replied to Marty in frustration. He looked and found out that he forgot to let go of the latch in fear.
“Chicken Francaise, Shrimp Alfredo, Beef stir fry, Haggis, Tuna Noodle Casserole…” Marty fingered the laminated gloss of the menu as his eyes pawed over the countless items and the credit cost that was next to it in the sort of diner you would expect a fellow like him to frequent on a lunch hour: sanitary but not at all unpleasant with a sort of retro feeling that came from the bubble lines in the booth seats and the chrome smoothed over edges that reflected everything in strange obscure lines.
Marty fancied himself the connoisseur of foods. He could tell the difference between fish and chips from the diner next to the transit terminal by London to ones made in Chicago at the “best” fish and chips place there to the same dish made as a Friday blue special in Skye colony. But he never was a fan of fish and chips, nor could he tell which one was best, though he could tell differences within them.
“Did you know that there were people whose job was to actually just taste people’s food?” Marty had a look of bewildered joy at the thought of that. His friends, of course, always liked to keep his head back to earth.
“I think it was originally to make sure someone didn’t poison the king’s food; would you like to end up eating poison by accident?” Josh preferred correcting him.
“If you ask me, it sounds like that is why the Old World is so primitive. Did you know that in ancient times people would use animals as slaves?” Mariah was a woman that liked to remind him to appreciate the time now as compared to those “good old days” that Marty liked to think of so much.
“She’s got a point, Marty old pal,” he sipped the orange twist tea to dampen his tongue a slight bit before continuing “Those old times aren’t as hot as you think they were.”
“Yeah? Well then what’s so great about now? Did you know the last guy I had to headjob? He kept pounding my box like it was going to make life go any faster; almost broke my interface entirely.”
Mariah looked him over with her green-gray eyes shifting curiously towards him “Didn’t you tell us this story five times over today?”
“If my credit goes belly up, don’t blame me for it then. Are we all ready to order?” They both nodded in reply “Good, then let’s order.” He pressed the inconspicuous red “Call” button that rested against the rim of the diner window. Without much time, a female voice appeared to greet them through a holographic frame that formed from the liquid crystal inside the window. In solid white, letters formed proclaiming the name of the diner on the top like letterhead.
“Caesar Salad,” said Josh almost in a business like fashion. The words appeared on the black screen in fancy but legible script to confirm the order.
“Cheeseburger platter, no tomatoes please.” In response to Mariah’s order, it scripted up the order as “ChBurger plat, no tmt” for the sake of saving space on the black window screen.
Marty smiled “May I have a chicken sandwich platter with extra mayo on it, please?” The screen complied and Marty pressed the confirm button. Promptly, it gave the estimated time it would take for the food to come, “3 min 14sec” and then promptly faded into the clear window as they began to pay it no mind.
“Were you trying to hit on the program, Mart?” Mariah giggled and her finger took a playful poke at him, which his hand brushed away as his fingers took to strumming against the shale gray rounded square table.
“I still have memories about that guy mistreating the instruments. Now I know why cabs tend to look so busted up sometimes after seeing that. I should have gotten him arrested for the feedback he gave the system and the migraine that I got from it.” He clenched his head, feigning the pain almost in a recall of the prescription medication he had to get from the medical diagnostic machine.
“You know what you need?” Josh said as he pointed the fork at him.
“Aside from a jar of painkillers?”
“-you need to remember it’s your birthday. What do you want anyway?”
The expression Marty held now changed to surprise. Not a fake surprise but an actual surprise; for all the time that happened, he had forgotten that his birthday was coming in a few days.
“Maybe he wants us to find him a girlfriend,” said Mariah with a malicious grin as he watched Marty almost jump back from the booth he sat in “Oh, you didn’t like the last girl we sent you with?”
“I liked the fact that she didn’t kill me immediately when I insulted her father by accident, but aside from that… No.” He took another sigh, which was to be expected from a fellow that liked to sigh a lot, and replaced the menus into the holster next to the edge of the table. He clicked the order button to check and found out that the order was already being sent to them. His eyes turned to the vinyl-covered door with a porthole window that led to the kitchen and saw it swing inward with a treaded table scooting towards them, the food steaming hot as it continued to journey towards them. Finally, it stopped with a polite “Caution food is hot” in its plastic warnings. Josh, who was closest to the plates, took each and began to distribute them to the appropriate person. After the third dish was taken, the table crawled back into the sliding door that went to the kitchen.
They left the diner, Marty sighing “I don’t think the food here is that great. Hey, you know what I missed? The chicken sandwiches they had back in Ander’s colony, at that shack not too far from the stadium.” His friends gave an idle nod, the same idle nod that they learned awhile back just to avoid going into drawn-out arguments with them since food did not make them in a mood to argue too much “I could go for another new type of taste of a chicken sandwich.” At that point, he stopped for a bit and then continued with the pace of his friends.
“-so you’re telling me that we should go help you make a chicken sandwich for your birthday?” Mariah rolled her dark eyes back and pushed her knuckles into her hips, looking at Marty with a sort of “what-the-hell-are-you-thinking?” sort of look that reflected the appearance in her eyes.
“Sure, what could be so wrong with that?” This was, in Mariah’s opinion, one of the most nonsensical things he had ever asked. Ever since you were born it was taught to you to never take the life of any living creature that moved and breathed. It was a fineable law; children that were found to kill bugs at a young age were quickly sent to schools to rehabilitate them. Adults found killing animals were fined an exorbitant fee of up to 15,000 credits and readjustments of their job accessibility, usually into something of a lower status. Cooking was like putting one sin on top of another; no one ever needed to cook and it wasn’t encouraged since the companies did the cooking for you: the only thing people were technically allowed to cook were the century old MRE’s that you had to put water on to heat; currently they were selling online for thousands of credits from cooking fanatics that still reveled in the spectacle of getting their food the old-fashioned way nd some old-timers that didn’t think the system provided the people with real food. From what both of them knew even without the knowledge of cooking, though, they knew that century-old food would taste terrible.
“Okay, so maybe it’s a little risky.”
“A LITTLE?!” She would have stamped her foot at that moment in anger if she didn’t feel that she made her point already.
“…no wait, it could be done,” said Josh. He was silent all through the conversation until now. She covered her forehead with her hand and sighed in disbelief. Her friends were going to become murderers.
“I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. We don’t have to kill an animal.”
They blinked in surprise.
“All animals have a natural life span, right? We can just wait for one to die from natural causes.” He slapped his hands together in satisfaction.
“Do you mean we have to find one that dies from disease? Do we have to pink one that died from Ebola?” Marty’s tongue immediately took a look of disgust
“They don’t all die from disease you know.” Josh shook his head and replied, “Some of them die from old age.”
At this, they all stared at each other.
Yosemite Mountain National Preserve. Mount Rushmore, Old Faithful, and several thousand species of plants and animals made it an ecosystem living in harmonic balance. The history books said that this was once a national park, which was why it was so abundant and untouched, even though they said that most of the surrounding land was eventually donated away when it became an animal Preservation. In the Audi Quattro Deuce, the three sat in their car by the road to look about as they were told, and went with binoculars around to look for the wild chickens that were said to roam around here.
“I see one! I see one!” Marty pointed up as he looked through the binoculars.
Josh didn’t need to look up to reply “Chickens don’t fly, Marty; it’s probably a pigeon or a falcon or vulture or something.”
“Do you think they’d taste good in a sandwich?”
Mariah nearly jumped out of her chair as she was hearing this I’m in a car with murderers, murderers… but she just tried to give an uneasy smile to them so that they might not think of killing her like the barbaric people that used to kill animals and then people. The past was a very primitive time. All thoughts stopped though when she finally pointed to the side of the car in exclamation at seeing it “Look! Look! A CHICKEN!”
Sure enough, they turned… and saw a three-striped black and tan brown chipmunk bending over to nibble on an acorn.
There was a dead silence that began to spread through the car for those five seconds before the two began to break out in hysterics at what they saw. Mariah just crossed her arms and mumbled about how they all look the same.
“I don’t think we’re going to find a chicken at this rate.” The two, Mariah and Josh, were lying back in their seat, tired and beginning to wonder why they were sitting around for the past several hours. Marty, however, was ever-vigilant for the elusive flightless bird. At this point, however, he sighed and opened his door. The others looked at him as though he was crazy.
“What are you doing?!”
He looked to them as he was halfway out “If I can’t find an old chicken, then I’m going to look for one myself.” He turned away and began to walk into the woods.
“Should we follow him?” inquired Mariah.
“And get lost? No.”
Hours passed again. It was dark, deathly dark, and the two waited. Several rangers already drove past them checking on them since it was late and they were still parked by the road “Looking at the night wildlife was the excuse they had to give them” and several minutes of pointers at looking for these things was what he said.
“Maybe… we should call him lost.”
“But if we do that, then they’re going to find out what happened and we’ll be marked as criminals.” Mariah sighed when she heard that because she knew as well, but the risk of their dead friend was weighing heavily upon them.
-
“Damn it, I am lost…” Marty was smart enough to bring one of those flashlights for his keyring, but was foolish enough to believe that he was going to get enough light out of them to keep himself knowing where he was. On one bright side, he knew that he was not completely in the dark, but on the darker note, he was literally lost. Actually he knew that before it was really dark; it was when he found himself unable to find a road or the car that he knew that he was lost, and that frightened him enough to make him stand still until it started to go into sunset and he knew that he might die in these woods forever.
He was completely unable to find anything available that could be identified by him except trees, plants, and bugs; so many bugs! All of them swarmed over his key flashlight and he almost felt compelled to swat them away with his hand until he remembered that he was already going to be charged as a loiterer for getting out of his car in a national preserve. He felt his arms begin to wobble; his legs were weak enough to tell him something; that from continuing to trudge through the woodlands in the darkening night had made him need to use the bathroom.
He looked around and then unzipped his pants and started to pour golden showers. As he turned, he then froze in his tracks. The sound of the trickle of water was only heavy in his ear as he saw the cockled head and plumage of a fat brown and tan bird that just walked around on its legs. Behind it was a number of other birds like it, though they lacked the prominent comb on its top. The sound of clucks and bocks filled his ears slowly as soon as he began to finish his urination. The big bird stared at him with one eye, one curious dark red eye of crimson. The talons it had began to scrape against the ground and it started to scream a carooning howl…
-
“Hey, do you hear something?”
“…” Josh stopped holding still and replied “Nope… maybe you’re just shaky.”
“I guess… do you think he’s okay?”
“Marty? I’m sure he’s fine.”
-
He ran like there was no tomorrow.
IT took him five minutes before he realized that he was still unzippered and tried to pull his fly up while keeping his legs going as fast as possible. The dreaded chicken was howling for him like a demonic creature from the beyond: several times he thought he outrun the creature and took to stopping and catching his breath only to find out that the thing was following him from behind with flapping wings and that loud battle cry of death that it was giving him. It wanted his blood, and he didn’t know what to do except sob for his unfound corpse in the deep forest of Yosemite…
-
“No, wait, I definitely heard something.”
“Yeah, same here, I- hey, do you see that light?”
“Yeah, I see it! It’s Marty, he’s alive! He’s… …running?”
“OPENTHEDOOROPENTHEDOOROPENTHEDAMNDOOR!!!!”
They looked in awe at Marty as he was running from the small angry flightless bird that was up to his ankles and screaming bloody terror towards him.
“Quick, unlock the door!” Mariah complied and hit the autolock, stirring the disturbed air with the click noise. Marty went for the latch and started to pull in one quick gesture for the door to open… but it was locked.
“OPEN!!!” They could see he was starting to well up and cry as he turned to see the demon bird bullrushing towards him with talons beaks and all.
“You pressed the autolock the wrong way!” Josh was keeping his eyes fixed on the killer chicken all the while.
“I know I know!” She went for it again and the clicking noise came up. Marty tried, but it didn’t work again. The bird was getting dangerously close.
“Stop pressing lock!”
“Stop holding the latch up!” Mariah replied to Marty in frustration. He looked and found out that he forgot to let go of the latch in fear.
