The Circus of the Inconspicuisine

Peering out from behind the primo-cube shelves, Fei fixed her focus on the brooch at the man’s chest. A pristine bronze mask with a spray of leaves and liquid erupting from the crown. Angled just so as to reveal the jaw and temple of a genderless face beneath.

Unmistakably, it was the mark of Inconspicuisine.

Moving in the crawlspace between aisles at the Cubic Consumables Compactorium, Fei—like all the other shop floor employees—spent most of her shift behind the walls, monitoring and repairing supply tubes.

“There’s two of them.” Jin had shuffled his way up to Fei, panting a little from all the effort and grinning triumphant as ever. “Aunty Ning saw the other one over by the hydro-cubes.”

Fei finally pulled her attention away from the ornament. “Another bronze?” “No… Gold.” They both paused for a moment as if Jin’s words had cast a spell.

With a sharp inhale, Fei snapped herself back to work, pressing a maintenance latch shut and releasing the pneumatic pressure gate. Cubes began to flow again. “Well, the Circus is definitely in Shanghai tonight.”

For nearly fifty years now, compactoriums have been propping up the global food industry. Today, they take produce on the cusp of expiry and reconfigure it. On the surface it’s as simple as recycling, but the technology behind it—or rather, beneath it—is a miracle of Broadscience.

Great, whirring phasehouses are built and buried under each and every outlet—the largest in the world sits right here beneath the Yangtze estuary in Shanghai_88. Hidden away and always operating, phasehouses lock matter between time. Separating a cell from its timeline doesn’t go over so well with living things, but the effects on produce have proven to be astonishing.

With just a little engineering, a full catty of fresh foodstuffs can be fashioned into ten units of never-expiring nutritional matter. The final form resembles tofu with a flavor that can be selected at the point of printing. It’s a surprisingly versatile process. Fei hasn’t handled phasefoods from any other countries, but everyone’s heard the stories of Germanic cylindogs, and the Nano-cous mini-foods of Marrakech.

At the rear of the store, inside the staff quarters, a tangle of supply pipes knot together and plunge down to the phasehouse like tree roots tearing fissures in terrain. Dangling her feet over the drop, Ning was in her usual spot —straddling one of the broader pipes, lumbar region propped awkwardly against a shelf-stack.

“How’s your back, Aunty—can I help at all?” Fei placed her heliotools down on a nearby pipe bank and worked hard to look disinterested. Ning hated concern.

“Never you mind my back, did Jin tell you about the Circus-folk?”

“He did, two of them. I saw the bronze myself-”

“The Gold, Fei. She’s important. And I’ll tell you now, she’s not here shopping for cubes.”

“You think she wants to give one of us the invite?”

Ning chuckled. “One of us, yes. But I’ve seen the Circus pass through _88 more times than I can remember. Whatever it is that earns their respect, I’ve long been too old to start doing it.”

Today, phasefoods account for 63% of global nutritional intake, with strict guidelines overseeing production and distribution. Compactoriums are accessible to almost 90% of the world’s citizens, and enjoy optimal output in nearly two-thirds of the active territories. This wasn’t always the case though. When they first arrived, compactoriums were marketed as a sure-fire solution to both food waste and food shortages, but very little effort was made to incentivize dietary transition on a personal level. As the underground phasehouses spooled up hot and ready, people… thoroughly ignored them. 

So it goes, doing what’s objectively good for the many holds little appeal when it isn’t sufficiently compelling for the individual. Phase-centric diet promotion was handed to local governments, who engaged in all manner of targeted efforts.

Societal-score reward schemes. 
Early-access coupons for beta flavors.
Celebrity chef reviews and endorsements.

The isolate-nation of Britain even elected a parliamentary MP constructed entirely out of phasestuff. He was quite popular there. None of this was enough to truly turn the tide for phasefoods, so the Broadscience institute intervened with a deeply uncharacteristic initiative:

They formed The Circus of Inconspicuisine.

A travelling troupe of veiled hosts delivering dinner occasions of extraordinary exclusivity. They promise an experience unlike anything else on earth, with two concrete caveats: absolute secrecy and total anonymity. Naturally, there are rumours about what goes on inside the big top, but not a single Circus-goer has ever spoken about their experience with Inconspicuisine.

Anti-gravity antipasti, non-euclidean barrels of truly bottomless beverages, and neural ices that extend one’s perceivable color spectrum for however long the brain freeze lasts. Imaginations have been running rampant. 

In truth, there’s only a single verified fact about the Circus: eligibility is informed by phasefood contribution. 

Almost overnight, the Circus captured our attention and convinced us to fundamentally rethink our consumption habits.

“Supervisor requested at feedback-kiosk three. Supervisor requested at—” Fei flicked the beacon off and sidled through the strip-door as the speaker fell quiet. The door sealed tight.

“Supervisor Fei, thank you for hushing that contraption.” The Gold sat comfortably in the feedback booth, the Bronze just at her side, standing. Both of them still veiled from head to toe—no one sees their faces.

“Sorry, it really echoes in these little booths, doesn’t it.”

“Truly. But there’s a time and place for every sound.”
The gold gestured to the empty chair in front of her.
Fei sat gingerly. “You’re ...not here to deliver store feedback, are you?”

“No, Fei. I’m here to deliver this.”

As if on cue, the Bronze parted his garb, revealing a document so bright that it lit the space like a tiny trapped firework. A moment later the kiosk was dim again and as Fei’s eyes readjusted the Bronze came forward to hand her the faintly incandescent artifact.

“The ticket is yours to use or share. Whichever you choose, you’ve earned our recognition as a friend of Broadscience. It isn’t my place to tell you why.”

Fei worked the paper between her thumb and forefinger; thick and coarse like something from another time.

“Now that you are a friend of Broadscience, we’ll contact you again on future visits to your city…

That is, as long as you can keep a secret.”

Like every one of her colleagues, Fei longed to witness the Circus with her own eyes. But as she allowed herself to imagine the unimaginable joys of Inconspicuisine, thoughts of Aunty Ning kept nagging at her. There was no way to know what she’d done to earn the ticket, but whatever it was she had many more years to repeat the process.

It was much more than a matter of time for Ning.

Fei remained seated in the kiosk as Gold and Bronze quietly motioned toward the soft strip-door exit.

“Do you know what the Circus is, Fei?” Gold paused just before the threshold, speaking without turning.

“Noise. Everyone hears it, so if we bury the right messages in there they tend to get through in the end.”