Let's get one thing straight: I'm not an idiot. Sure, my libido operates like a jackrabbit that's mainlined a triple-shot of espresso, and my knowledge of this world's pop culture is roughly on par with a hermit who uses a rock for a TV. But I can read a goddamn room. Or, in this particular instance, the pressurized cabin of a family minivan hurtling through a dystopian city.
Mom and Vera weren't just sharing a cute anecdote about Aunt Lee Da-In's corporate woes for shits and giggles. This was a meticulously laid trap, baited with familial concern and seasoned with a heavy dose of unspoken expectation. They'd dangled the crisis in front of me like a piece of meat, and now they were waiting for me to pounce. They wanted me to pull a hit TV show out of my ass like a magician pulling a rabbit—only the rabbit was a multi-million-won corporate bailout, and the hat was my supposedly brilliant, internet-famous brain.
The problem? My relationship with Aunt Lee Da-In, filtered through the old Sael's dusty memories, was… lukewarm, at best. The recollections were hazy, tinted with the trademark angst of a teenager who thought the world revolved around his own misery.
I remembered her during her rare visits, perching on the edge of the couch next to me with a bowl of fruit she'd peeled and cut with surgical precision. She'd try, she'd always try.
"So, Sael," she'd say, her voice kind, patient. "How is school? Are the other students… nice?"
And the old me? Captain Charm himself? He'd grunt. "Fine."Shovel mango slice into mouth. Stare at wall.
"Are you reading any interesting books? Watching any shows?"
"Nope."Shovel, shovel. Stare harder. Wish for spontaneous combustion.
The last real interaction was a blurry mess right before he'd made the monumentally stupid decision to start those hormones—a Hail Mary pass to escape a government mandate that ended with him swallowing a bottle of pills instead of living his truth.
So yeah, not a stellar foundation. Aunt Lee Da-In was probably a goddamn saint—anyone who peels fruit for a surly little shit deserves a Nobel Peace Prize—but she almost certainly had no clue who I was now. 'Internet guy who makes funny videos' doesn't exactly inspire confidence in a Corporate CFO staring down a multi-billion-won sinkhole.
I needed to tread carefully. I couldn't just promise her the world on a platinum platter based on a vague hint and my own rampant ego.
I let out a long, theatrical sigh, the kind that suggested immense cognitive burdens were being shouldered. "Yikes. That's… a hell of a spot to be in," I said, shaking my head slowly. "SBC is a beast. Fixing that isn't like patching a bug in some indie game. You can't just turn it off and on again."
I paused, letting the gravity hang in the air between bags of groceries. "I'll… yeah. I'll noodle on it, okay? See if any synapses fire and form a coherent thought."
It was a masterclass in non-committal placation. But it worked. The tension in the van didn't just dissipate; it evaporated. I saw Mom's shoulders drop a good two inches from her ears.
"That's all we ask, honey," she said, her voice dripping with warm, syrupy relief. "Just noodle."
From the passenger seat, Vera chimed in, not even looking up from her phone. "Yeah, kiddo. No pressure." She paused for a beat, her thumb scrolling. "Just… you know. Think really hard."
The unspoken second half of that sentence hung in the air, clear as day: 'Or we will be Very, Very Disappointed.'
Message received.
"We're stopping for groceries," Mom announced, swinging the van into a cavernous, multi-level parking structure that smelled of exhaust and despair. A sign, glowing a sickly green, declared this place the 'Fresh-Fare Megamart.' The name was so aggressively generic it made my soul feel sterile.
Bella, who'd been conked out in the way-back, just mumbled something that sounded like "fuck off, sunlight" and slid further down behind her ridiculously oversized sunglasses.
Honestly? I was kinda psyched. A supermarket in a dystopian mega-city? The possibilities were endless. Maybe they'd have lab-grown, glow-in-the-dark steak. Or beer brewed from reclaimed sewer water. This was gonna be a trip.
That optimism was murdered execution-style the second the automatic doors hissed open.
WHOOSH
It was a supermarket.
It was just a fucking supermarket.
The same soul-crushing fluorescent lights that make everyone look like a corpse. The same tinny, obnoxiously cheerful muzak being piped through what sounded like a dozen broken speakers. The same overwhelming olfactory cocktail of lemon-scented disinfectant, day-old bread, and… was that ozone? The only difference was the sheer, claustrophobic pressure of it all. Aisles were so narrow you could smell what the person across from you had for breakfast. Shelves were crammed to bursting with garishly colored packages, and people moved with a frantic, predatory energy, their carts clattering like siege weapons.
"Okay, meet back here in thirty?" Vera said, already commandeering a shopping cart that had at least three wonky wheels.
"You got it," Mom replied, already beelining for the produce section—a sad, wilting graveyard of lettuce that looked like it had given up on life and genetically identical apples that were probably all clones of the same sterile fruit.
I decided to go AWOL, embarking on a solo recon mission into the heart of culinary despair.
I drifted into the snack aisle, a shimmering, crinkly cathedral dedicated to empty calories and corporate deceit. It was a paradox of choice: a hundred different bags, all promising unique euphoria, yet all fundamentally the same depressing shit.
My hand drifted toward a bag of "Hot Chili's Potato Chip!" The exclamation point felt legally threatening. Who were they trying to convince? Me, or themselves?
Curiosity, or perhaps masochism, got the better of me. I turned the bag over and squinted at the ingredients list. It wasn't a list; it was a fucking chemical manifesto.
'Potato Derivative (27%), Modified Corn Starch, Artificial Hot Chili Flavor (Red No. 3, Yellow No. 6, Capsaicin Extract), Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Texturized Vegetable Protein (Non-Meat), Sodium Diacetate, Flavor Enhancers (621, 635), Anticaking Agent (551), Preservative (223).'
I blinked. "Potato derivative?" I muttered under my breath to no one in particular. "What the actual fuck does that mean? Did they dissolve a potato in acid and then spray the resulting vapor onto a cornflake? This isn't food. This is a science experiment that forgot its ethical guidelines."
A low, incredulous chuckle escaped me. "Pretty sure Red No. 3 is the least of our problems here, buddy," I said to the bag, tossing it back onto the shelf. It landed with an unsatisfying, crinkly thump.
The bleakness of it all was almost beautiful in its transparency. In this world, the concept of "food" had been completely divorced from "nutrition" or, God forbid, "nature." The rule seemed to be: if you can chew it, it won't kill you instantly, and you can manufacture it for pennies, then slap a happy cartoon mascot on it and call it a day.
The FDA, or whatever pathetic entity passed for it here, was probably just a single, overworked intern in a basement, rubber-stamping anything that came across his desk. 'This "cheese" is 5% oil, 94% plastic polymer, and 1% "cheese-like flavor"? Here's a fifty. Don't tell anyone. Approved.'
It was horrifying. Depressing. A culinary apocalypse.
But as I stood there, surrounded by the lies, a slow, wicked grin spread across my face. Because in a world this starved for anything genuine, anything real would hit people like a religious experience. It would be a fucking revelation. And revelations… that was my kind of business.
******************************
The plastic grocery bags, emblazoned with the aggressively cheerful "Fresh-Fare Megamart" logo, hung from my hands like dead weight, their handles digging red trenches into my palms. Each bag was a monument to mediocrity, filled with waxen fruits and vegetables that tasted like despair and had the nutritional value of cardboard. I tossed them into the back of the van with more force than necessary.
In the backseat, Bella was conked out, or doing a world-class impression of it. The engine of our beat-up van coughed, sputtered, and finally rumbled to life as Mom began the tedious, soul-sucking process of navigating out of the megamart's concrete parking labyrinth.
My mind, however, was miles away. The conversation with Aunt Lee Da-In was still rattling around in my skull like a pinball, lighting up new and depressing connections. The shitty, overpriced food. The brain-dead, corporately-sanctioned entertainment piped into every home. It was all one giant, suffocating ecosystem designed for one purpose: to keep people passive, compliant, and consuming.
But I wasn't just some consumer anymore. I was a goddamn land baron. I had Pussyville.
Thanks to Sunday's uncanny digital witchcraft, the paperwork wasn't just legitimate; it was a thing of bureaucratic beauty. Meteor Studio wasn't just a company anymore; it was the sovereign owner of a private land grant, a nation-state the size of a postage stamp with its own governance rights. We were our own little fucking city-state. A hedonistic haven. A blank slate just waiting for me to draw something gloriously inappropriate on it.
I took a deep breath of the van's recycled, vaguely cheeseburger-scented air. Time to plant a seed.
"You know," I started, my voice deliberately casual as I watched the grey, polluted blur of the city slide past the grimy window.
"Now that Pussyville is officially… well, a thing of mine… we've got a lot of options… I can't just have a game dev studio and a bunch of houses. I will need to build a real community. Services. ..Infrastructure."
Mom's eyes flicked up to meet mine in the rearview mirror. "What's ticking away in that head of yours, sweetie?"
I leaned forward, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial tone. "I'm thinking… you and Vera should open a restaurant."
The silence in the car was immediate and absolute. You could have heard a pin drop, if pins weren't also probably synthetic and shitty in this godforsaken city. The only sounds were the monotonous hum of the tires on the permacrete and Bella's soft, oblivious snoring from the back.
I saw Vera's head slowly swivel from the passenger seat, her eyes wide as dinner plates. Mom's knuckles went white where she gripped the steering wheel.
They didn't say no. They didn't say anything. They just stared, their expressions caught somewhere between 'he's lost his mind' and 'please, God, let him be serious.' They were waiting for me to continue, to explain this glorious, insane idea.
I slid forward, resting my arms on the backs of their seats, putting myself right in the middle of their conversation space.
"I'm dead serious," I said, looking first at Mom.
"Cathy, you've been a supervisor at that supermarket for what, a decade? And every single time a promotion dangles like a carrot, some jackass with half your experience but a better-connected uncle swoop in and grabs it... You manage people, you manage shift, you run that entire floor. You're smarter than all of those pencil-pushing fucks combined…. You shouldn't be working for them; you should be running your own goddamn show."
I saw her breath catch in her throat. Bullseye. I'd just vocalized a decade of her quiet, seething frustration.
I turned my gaze on Vera.
"And you. Let's be real, Vera…. You are the 'Sunrise Diner.' Old Man Henderson just owns the building and the rat problem… You're the one everyone comes to see. You run the kitchen, you manage the inventory, you deal with the sketchy suppliers. And what does he pay you? A cook's wage for a head chef's, a manager's, and a therapist's job. That's a special kind of bullshit. You're already a chef…. A damn good one. You should have your own kitchen. Your own name on the fucking door."
Vera opened her mouth, a reflexive denial on her lips, then snapped it shut. She looked down at her hands—competent, capable hands that were always slightly red and smelled of grease and onions. I could see the yearning there, plain as day, buried under twenty years of just getting by.
"We're moving," I said, my voice firm but gentle.
"All of us… To a new place, good place, that I'm building for us. I want us to stay together. But listen…" I made sure to hold each of their gazes.
"I don't want to be some… some patriarch asshole who expects you to just stay home and tend the goddamn petunias. I know you…. I know you take pride in your work. I know you want to work, to build something yourselves. So, let's do it. Let's stop just surviving this shitshow and start actually living. Let's get an upgrade."
The dam broke. Cathy's eyes welled up, a few tears escaping to trace paths through a day's worth of weariness. She quickly wiped them away with the back of her hand, a wobbly, beautiful smile breaking out on her face.
Vera let out a wet, choked laugh, sniffling loudly. "You little shit," she said, her voice thick with an emotion she'd never openly admit to. "When the hell did you get so damn perceptive? And so… persuasive?"
A grin spread across my face. "So… is that a, yes? Do we have a deal?"
Mom reached a hand back without looking, and I took it. She squeezed it so tight I thought my bones might fuse together. "It's a yes, honey," she said, her voice cracking just a little. "It's a hell yes."
Vera nodded, using her sleeve to unceremoniously wipe her eyes. "Abso-fucking-lutely. I'm already thinking of menu ideas. I'm gonna need a bigger deep fryer. And a walk-in fridge. And a—
"—A liquor license," I finished for her, grinning. "A big one."
I sank back into my seat, a warm, satisfied feeling spreading through my chest. This was it. This was how you built an empire—not alone, but with your family.
"Okay, look," I said, the businessman in me taking the wheel.
"Opening a restaurant isn't easy…. It's a nightmare of logistics, health codes, and customer bullshit. But we have advantages nobody out here has." I gestured vaguely at the bleak, corporatized hellscape outside our window.
"We'll have access to real ingredients…. We'll grow our own, we'll source locally, we'll import the good thing... And we'll have recipes nobody on this rock has ever fucking dreamed of."
I was already mentally rifling through the culinary heritage of my old Earth. Dishes that were simple comfort food to me would be revolutionary here. A proper, slow-cooked Bolognese that simmered for hours.
Authentic tacos al pastor, sliced right off the spit. A fucking croissant, buttery and flaky and a million miles from the stale, sad pastries in those grocery bags. The possibilities were literally endless.
"And the best part?" I said, a predatory glint in my eye.
"We attach the 'Meteor Studio' and 'Organic' labels to it. We make it exclusive…. We make it an experience; The slop they serve in this city is nutrient paste with delusions of grandeur. We'll be serving nostalgia. We'll be serving soul… It's not just a restaurant; it's a goddamn statement…. And it's gonna print us money."
The two most important women in my life were looking at me now. Not as a son, not as a nephew, but as a partner. A co-conspirator. A visionary, albeit a slightly unhinged one. It was a hell of a feeling.