The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 5

Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Singapore) — "A Series of Steaks"
Daína Chaviano (Cuba, translated by Matthew D. Goodwin) — "Accursed Lineage"
Darcie Little Badger (USA/Lipan Apache)  — "Nkásht íí"
T.L. Huchu (Zimbabwe) — "Ghostalker"
Taiyo Fujii (Japan, translated by Jim Hubbert) — "Violation of the TrueNet Security Act"
Vandana Singh (India) — "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination"
Basma Abdel Aziz (Egypt, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette) — "Scenes from the Life of an Autocrat"
Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia, translated by Jessica Sequeira) — "Our Dead World"
Bo-young Kim (South Korea, translated by Jihyun Park & Gord Sellar) — "An Evolutionary Myth"
Israel Alonso (Spain, translated by Steve Redwood) — "You Will See the Moon Rise"
Sara Saab (Lebanon) — "The Barrette Girls"
Chi Hui (China, translated by John Chu) — "The Calculations of Artificials"
Ana Hurtado (Venezuela)  — "El Cóndor del Machángara"
Karla Schmidt (Germany, translated by Lara M. Harmon) — "Alone, on the Wind"
Eliza Victoria (Philippines) — "The Seventh"
Tochi Onyebuchi (Nigeria/USA) — "Screamers"
R.S.A. Garcia (Trinidad and Tobago) — "The Bois"
Giovanni De Feo (Italy) — "Ugo"

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, the World Fantasy Award-winning Osama, and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century. His other works include the Bookman Histories trilogy, several novellas, two collections, and a forthcoming comics mini-series, Adler. He currently lives in London.

Cristina Jurado is a bilingual author and editor who writes in Spanish and English. She studied Advertising at the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) and holds a Master’s degree in Rhetoric from Northwestern University (USA).

From: "A Series of Steaks" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

All known forgeries are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake cheques, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.

The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life mouldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.

Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fibre regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomise marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.

Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.

Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.

The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.

As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.

“Hi, Mr Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”

“Nonsense!” Mr Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”

“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”

“You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to …” Mr Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes— Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr Chan’s relentless cheerfulness. 

Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymised, which is quite a change from the usual. She pops the earpiece in.

“Yeah, Mr Chan?”

“This isn’t Mr Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”

“All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help, too.”

“I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.

“Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”

“I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the eighth of August. 38.1 to 40.2 millimetre thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info.KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”

“I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”

Shit.