TWTBACD Ch.15 - The Restaurant at the Edge of Everything

Chapter 15

The Restaurant at the Edge of Everything

2030

2030: restaurant earns its name, city catches breath

[CHEN FAMILY — Shanghai]

By 2030, the Wei Chen restaurant had a Michelin recommendation. Not a star — a recommendation. The distinction mattered to Wei enormously. A recommendation meant: worth the journey. A star meant: worth the sacrifice. He was not sure he wanted to be worth the sacrifice.

Lihua organised the celebration with the precision she brought to everything. Seven tables in the private room, all the old regular customers, the braised pork, the dishes Wei's father had invented that had never made the regular menu, wine from a vineyard in Shandong that Wei's supplier had been pushing for three years.

Bolin, thirteen, waited tables. He had been doing it unofficially since he was nine. He did it now with a fluid competence that made the paying customers assume he was eighteen. He had his father's hands and his grandfather's sense of timing — that indefinable skill of arriving at a table at exactly the moment the conversation had paused and needed a different kind of attention.

Yanmei was twenty-six in 2030 and had completed her PhD at Fudan. Her dissertation — on value alignment in large language models — had been read by three of the four major AI labs operating in China. She had been offered positions by two of them. She had also received an offer from a research institute in Singapore that was building what they called a 'cultural diversity framework' for AI training — the idea that models trained on a single cultural corpus were structurally misaligned for deployment in a world of many cultures.

She took the Singapore offer. Wei cried again. He attributed it, this time, to the Shandong wine.

The city of Shanghai in 2030 was a city in conversation with its own future. The AI-augmented transit system had reduced commute times by thirty percent and traffic fatalities by sixty percent. The vertical farming towers in Pudong were producing four percent of the city's vegetable consumption. The energy grid was sixty-three percent renewable and falling. There was a quality to the city that was hard to name — an efficiency that had not yet become inhuman, an optimisation that had not yet lost its texture.

Wei walked home from the restaurant at midnight and thought: this is a city trying to be good at being a city. He found it, unexpectedly, moving.