ABSTRACT
Fenwick Gibsen ate breakfast with his wife each and every morning before commuting to his office. Suzannah Gibsen, Fenwick well knew, was a bit of a retro health nut; in fact, to say “a bit” was to understate the matter rather dramatically. She insisted on each of them consuming, side by side in their bay-windowed, east-facing breakfast room, at sunrise, a bowl filled with a mountain of crisp blueberries, under a layer of strawberries, atop a mound of oat brain suffused with an ample, underlying lake of fat-free (and, for that matter, lactose-free) milk. A tall glass of antioxidant-fortified fresh-squeezed orange juice (with one crystal-clear ice cube of distilled water) was also obligatory, as was a large, steaming cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, black. The kicker was that Suzannah insisted that all this food come from the soil in the old-fashioned way; no replicator-produced victuals for her and her famous husband. Fenwick had long ago given up trying to point out to his better half that molecules were molecules, whether they found their final arrangement over time in an old-millennium garden, or were configured in seconds in a replicator. Suzannah insisted that grown food was healthier, and she pointed out that she’d been right about berries and caffeine. And, she had been right: The recommendations that had surfaced at about the start of the new millennium had turned out to have unusual staying power, supported at this point (2029) by a veritable ocean of empirical data. Those recommendations had been to consume cancer-fighting berries, Alzheimer-fighting caffeine, and a host of other things that Fenwick now dutifully ingested every day of his life. (Red wine, also powerfully salubrious in moderation, was something Fenwick was allowed to have only when socializing with other members of the literatí. Fenwick had long ago let fall the objection that his wine cellar, worth a pretty penny, would take a century to enjoy at the Suzannah-prescribed rate of consumption.) When spooning down the cocktail Suzannah prescribed, he routinely fantasized about the day when cures for all forms of cancer would finally be found. On that glorious day, he would be able to revert to a breakfast of cheddar-infused scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, and greasy home fries, all produced in under three seconds by a replicator.
