Page 1 of 41
Tamsin Hale, a skilled Field Chef in Hearthline, leads a small team through a live, ritualized cooking performance at the Confluence. When a cascading algorithmic storm threatens the event, she must use timing, heat, and coordinated skill to stabilize the virtual hearth—turning craft into decisive action amid public scrutiny.
The node-kitchen smelled of copper and lemon peel even before the HUD painted its tiny blue tick over the single porthole window. Tamsin moved through the compact space with the kind of efficient choreography that had kept her fed and paid for three years inside Hearthline’s less glamorous tiers. Her avatar’s hips twisted as she angled a magnetized scraper under a scoring ring; the scrape made a dry, satisfying squeak in both audio feed and tactile feedback. Ember Control glowed as a soft, amber bar across her vision, pulsing with a low heartbeat that matched the stove’s coil. The bar suggested micro-adjustments, and she followed with firm thumbs. She was, as ever, precise.
Outside the thin glass of the market node the weather app was doing its afternoon fake-rain, a soft mist of sensory droplets that smelled faintly of bergamot and old book glue. It wasn’t the kind of world weather did; it was the kind of weather that the city’s cultural committee commissioned when they wanted people to linger at market stalls. That detail—market drizzle with a citrus note—had nothing to do with the Confluence invitation blinking in the corner of Tamsin’s vision, but it slowed a vendor’s footfall and made faces look softer in passing.
The HUD pinged a sequence: a sponsored offer from a corporate seasoning vendor, SyntheticSeason, floated with a little coin icon and the promise—guaranteed success on any public display for a flat fee. Another ping arrived, different: an invitation icon in the shape of a communal table, an orange pulse labeled CONFLUENCE: Fifth Course— trial invitation. The sponsor guarantee translated directly into real credits. The Confluence invitation translated into visibility, risk, and a thin hope of something that might outlast a day’s coins.
Tamsin let her fingers hover over both options. A pan on the counter muttered a tiny AI apology—her old pan had a personality patch from a startup and offered passive commentary when scraped. "You could take the coin," the pan said in a tone too smug for a cooking implement. "We’d be comfortable for two weeks." It was meant to comfort, and it irritated her in the way old friends did.
"Comfortable does not suit a course," Tamsin told the pan, but the words were to herself as much as to the metal. She thumbed accept on Confluence and thumbed decline on the sponsorship. The interface asked her to confirm: Accept CONFLUENCE trial? Confirmations blinked like polite fireflies. She tapped yes. The world didn’t change immediately; the market drizzle still perfumed the air. But a line of light stitched itself across her HUD—A candidate slot secured— and a new message landed, smaller, from Lysa Voren, a spice-trader in the marketplace she'd known by whispers: small credit offered; preparatory run tomorrow. The cursor blinked, polite and insistent, and Tamsin reached for her jacket.