“What?”
Lily fiddles with the lacy hem of her skirt. “Well, I mean, the bakery experience seemed more relevant, plus you don’t have to list every job you’ve ever done when you apply for a new one, right?”
“Okay,” Helena says, trying not to think too hard about how all the staff at Splendid Beef Enterprises are now prime candidates for the death penalty. “Okay. What exactly did you do there?”
“Ears and stuff, bladders, spare fingers… you’d be surprised how many people need those. I also did some bone work, but that was mainly for the diehards—most of the people we worked on were pretty okay with titanium substitutes. You know, simple stuff.”
“That’s not simple.”
“Well, it’s not like I was printing fancy reversed hearts or anything, and even with the asshole clients it was way easier than baking. Have you ever tried to extrude a spun-sugar globe so you could put a bunch of powder-printed magpies inside? And don’t get me started on cleaning the nozzles after extrusion, because wow…”
Helena decides not to question Lily’s approach to life, because it seems like a certain path to a migraine. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”
“Right, you need to send the update! Can I help?”
The eventual message contains very little detail and a lot of pleading. Lily insists on adding typos just to make Helena seem more rattled, and Helena’s way too tired to argue. After starting the autoclean cycle for the printheads, they set an alarm and flop on Helena’s mattress for a nap.
As Helena’s drifting off, something occurs to her. “Lily? What happened to those people? The ones who tried to blackmail you?”
“Oh,” Lily says casually. “I crushed them.”
The brief specifies that the completed prints need to be loaded into four separate podcars on the morning of August 8, and provides the delivery code for each. They haven’t been able to find anything in Helena’s iKontakt archives, so their best bet is finding a darknet user who can do a trace.
Lily’s fingers hover over the touchpad. “If we give him the codes, this guy can check the prebooked delivery routes. He seems pretty reliable, do you want to pay the bounty?”
“Do it,” Helena says.
The resultant map file is a mess of meandering lines. They flow across most of Nanjing, criss-crossing each other, but eventually they all terminate at the cargo entrance of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel on Jiangdong Middle Road.
“Well, he’s probably not a guest who’s going to eat two hundred steaks on his own.” Lily taps her screen. “Maybe it’s for a hotel restaurant?”
Helena pulls up the Grand Domaine’s web directory, setting her iKontakt to highlight any mentions of restaurants or food in the descriptions. For some irritating design reason, all the booking details are stored in garish images. She snatches the entire August folder, flipping through them one by one before pausing.
The foreground of the image isn’t anything special, just elaborate cursive English stating that Charlie Zhang and Cherry Cai Si Ping will be celebrating their wedding with a ten-course dinner on August 8th at the Royal Ballroom of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.
What catches her eye is the background. It’s red with swirls and streaks of yellow-gold. Typical auspicious wedding colours, but displayed in a very familiar pattern.
It’s the marbled pattern of T-bone steak.
Cherry Cai Si Ping is the daughter of Dominic Cai Yongjing, a specialist in livestock and a new player in Nanjing’s agri-food arena. According to Lily’s extensive knowledge of farming documentaries, Dominic Cai Yongjing is also “the guy with the eyebrows” and “that really boring guy who keeps talking about nothing.”
“Most people have eyebrows,” Helena says, loading one of Lily’s recommended documentaries. “I don’t see… oh. Wow.”
“I told you. I mean, I usually like watching stuff about farming, but last year he just started showing up everywhere with his stupid waggly brows! When I watched this with my ex we just made fun of him non-stop.”
Helena fast-forwards through the introduction of Modern Manufacturing: The Vertical Farmer, which involves the camera panning upwards through hundreds of vertically stacked wire cages. Dominic Cai talks to the host in English, boasting about how he plans to be a key figure in China’s domestic beef industry. He explains his “patented methods” for a couple of minutes, which involves stating and restating that his farm is extremely clean and filled with only the best cattle.
“But what about bovine parasitic cancer?” the host asks. “Isn’t the risk greater in such a cramped space? If the government orders a quarantine, your whole farm…”
“As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is pure-bred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”
Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks around six months old… and now a request for steaks from cows that are sixteen to eighteen months old…
“So,” Lily says, leaning on the back of Helena’s chair. “Bovine parasitic cancer?”
“Judging by the timing, it probably hit them last month. It’s usually the older cows that get infected first. He’d have killed them to stop the spread… but if it’s the internal strain, the tumours would have made their meat unusable after excision. His first batch of cows was probably meant to be for the wedding dinner. What we’re printing is the cover-up.”
“But it’s not like steak’s a standard course in wedding dinners or anything, right? Can’t they just change it to roast duck or abalone or something?” Lily looks fairly puzzled, probably because she hasn’t been subjected to as many weddings as Helena has.
“Mr. Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”
“Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”
Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”
“All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”
The week before the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena’s been nothing but polite to Mr. Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr. Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.
“So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? We’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”
Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule… by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter cost a lot more than I thought.”
“Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”