“Protein. I don’t want to go with a preserved substance,” Dabry mused. “Too chancy. But I have some things in my luggage—perhaps I can rig up a pressure cooker if you can supply a heat source? I thought for some reason all your technology was organic in nature.”

“No,” the ship said. “There are things I cannot produce within myself, easily at least. There are many machines aboard which serve my owner, including the ones in here and the medical bay, among others.”

“Mmm,” Dabry said. He had opened up a panel on one of the replicators and was tinkering with it, using tiny tools from his belt pouch.

“What are you doing?” the ship asked.

“If you want the full range of flavors from this thing, you have to override the factory settings,” Dabry said. “I have never worked with one this big, but that’s how the small ones work, in my experience.” He fiddled with it for another minute, then put away his tool and replaced the panel. “Let’s try a basic unflavored flatbread to start with, in order to check the texture.”

He glanced around. “If I’m going to teach you, we will need some other things. A heating element whose temperature can be controlled, for one. And a flat surface on which we can prepare things. Pots that we can boil things in.”

“But the things are ready and at the proper temperature when they come out of the replicator,” the ship objected. It had never heard of such a practice, taking a replicated meal and altering it after the fact. “What is the point of such an operation?”

“The point is to make it taste as though it didn’t come out of the replicator.”

“But that is its true point of origin.”

“We’re trying to fool people’s taste buds.”

“But surely they will know that the food came out of a replicator.”

“Yes,” Dabry said patiently. “We are not trying to deceive them.”

“But what you just said was otherwise.”

“No. We are not trying to fool them, we are trying to fool their sense of taste and go beyond that to pleasing them. They know full well the food came from a replicator. The fact that it does not taste as though it did will be all the more surprising and pleasing to them.”