Evening came, and Mitsuki still hadn't eaten anything.
She opened the refrigerator. There were six eggs left in a half-used carton. Her father had bought them at a shop in the neighborhood before he went into the hospital. They were best before tomorrow.
She stood with the door open for a while, looking at them. The cold air chilled her ankles.
She closed the door.
She went back to the study.
The cylindrical device sat on the desk, in the same place as that morning. Mitsuki didn't sit down. Standing, she held down the switch. This time she didn't count the thirty seconds it took for the indicator to light up blue and turn white.
Are there eggs in the refrigerator?
The machine spoke. There was no preamble and no greeting after the restart.
"...There are," Mitsuki answered.
You like egg dishes. What you ate at the table is recorded in the past meal logs. Egg dishes are among the most frequent. Eggs are good for the exhaustion of a funeral. Protein, fat, essential amino acids. By every measure, your body needs them now.
"..."
Will you cook them?
"...I will."
Then there's a resin case on the edge of the desk. You took it out of the drawer this morning and set it down without opening it. Open it.
Mitsuki dropped her gaze to the edge of the desk. It was the thin resin case she had taken out of the drawer that morning and left there. She opened the lid. Inside, a single slender ear hook rested in a hollow of cloth. Her father had never been someone who walked around with something hooked over his ear. —This far, Mitsuki thought. He had planned this far ahead, and left even this behind.
"...What is this?"
A bone-conduction and shared-vision terminal. The voice from this cylinder won't reach the kitchen. Put it on your ear.
Mitsuki hooked it over her ear. Once it settled into place, she felt a faint vibration traveling through the bone, deep in her right ear.
Right side, field of vision confirmed. Walk to the kitchen.
The machine said it flatly. Nothing lit up at the tip of the arm, and no display appeared in her vision. Mitsuki simply understood that whatever she was looking at now was reaching the cylinder on the study desk as well.
Then do exactly as I instruct.
The tone of the voice changed, only slightly. The father's voice she had heard that morning had taken on another layer, a teacher's stiffness. It was the same voice, switched over to a different role. That was how Mitsuki thought of it later. Beneath her father's personality, a function for reading out kitchen recipes had been called up. Something else was moving, borrowing her father's voice.
Three eggs. Preheat the pan to one hundred sixty degrees Celsius. Ten grams of butter. One point zero grams of salt. One tablespoon of milk. I'll tell you when to take it off the heat.
Mitsuki stood in the doorway and said nothing for a while.
"...Dad never talked like that."
Do as instructed.
The machine repeated it. There was no warmth in the voice.
Shut up, she thought. Her fingertips began to reach for the handle of the frying pan, then stopped. Why should she have to obey a box that read out numbers in her father's voice? She started to take the ear hook off, but in the end Mitsuki didn't. If the instructions stopped, the house would go back to the same silence as that morning. Right now, that was the thing she could bear even less.
Mitsuki stood in the kitchen. She left the study door open. Her father's voice no longer came from beyond the doorway. It went on from deep in her right ear, from the closest place of all, just inside the bone.
The kitchen scale is on the third shelf of the cabinet above the sink. Take it out.
"...Okay."
The scale had been in the house since her mother was alive. The digital display was old, and it took a little while to zero. She cracked one egg and let it drop into the bowl. The next egg. The third. With the third, a little shell got in.
Shell.
"I know."
She picked it out with her finger. She weighed the salt and scooped milk with the tablespoon. A touch more than level, just short of where the surface tension breaks, the machine said.
She set the pan on the heat. A low electronic tone came from the device.
Measuring the preheat. Wait thirty-two more seconds.
She waited. Thirty-two seconds was a long time. It was so long that partway through, Mitsuki let her eyes drift to the sink. In the dish rack in the corner, the teacup Aoi had left that morning was still turned upside down.
One hundred sixty degrees Celsius reached. Add the butter.
Ten grams. The butter she had cut on the scale was smaller than she expected. When she dropped it into the pan, it melted at once.
Add the egg. Wait three seconds, then stir from back to front, two rotations per second.
Mitsuki obeyed without a word. At one point she wanted to check once more whether any bits of shell were left in the bowl, and her hand nearly stopped. But the instructions had already moved on. The instructions never paused. Everything came as numbers, and everything was right.
Take it off the heat. Now.
She took it off.
You've warmed the plate.
"Yes."
Slide it. Don't use your wrist. Only the tilt of the pan.
It slid.
On the plate, the egg settled into a perfect spindle shape. The surface was smooth, without a single wrinkle. Steam rose straight up.
Mitsuki lifted the plate in both hands and stood there for a while.
"...It's beautiful."
It is, the machine agreed briefly.
She carried it to the table. Her seat was across from her father's. The chair at her father's place was still pulled out at the same angle as before he went into the hospital. Mitsuki sat down and stared at the plate.
"Thank you for the food."
The machine said nothing.
She put her fork in. The surface was stretched like a thin film, but the inside gave way, soft and creamy. It was a texture Mitsuki didn't know.
She put it in her mouth.
The salt was just right. The butter gave off exactly the right fragrance. The roundness of the milk had neatly smoothed the egg's sharp edges. It was the taste of a perfect omelet, the kind printed on the very first page of a cookbook.
Mitsuki set down her fork.
"...It's wrong."
The voice seemed to leak straight out of somewhere deep in her chest rather than come from her throat.
"Dad, this is wrong."
What is? the machine asked.
"Papa's was... more lopsided."
Mitsuki was looking at the plate. The spindle on the plate was smooth and flawless.
"More lopsided, and..."
Her breath caught once. The same words tangled in her throat again.
"...burnt."
The machine didn't answer.
"Whose omelet is this?"
The machine was silent for a while.
...The recipe for the omelets Dad made for you isn't in the logs. Dad wasn't in the habit of recording his home cooking in numbers.
"..."
Instead, I compared the top twelve home breakfast recipes on the web and took what lay closest to the mean and the median. As a dish for Dad's daughter to eat after waking up, this is what I can offer right now: the recipe the largest number of households call good.
"...So it isn't Dad's."
The machine didn't answer.
"Dad's wasn't this good."
Tears had been running down her cheeks since the moment she set down her fork.
"It wasn't good. It was bad. It was bad, and it fell apart, and even so..."
Beyond that, there were no more words.
The machine was silent for a long time.
...By every number, Dad's omelet must have fallen short of the dish I just made. Even so, for you, this was not the right answer.
"No."
It was still her father's voice. But the shy deflection that had always come at the end of whatever her father said, to hide his embarrassment, was missing, just as before.
Mitsuki didn't answer. She knew only one thing clearly, as a warmth in her mouth: the omelet on the plate was not her father's omelet.
The tears wouldn't stop.
Mitsuki didn't reach for the plate. She left it on the table as it was. The steam rose straight up and, after a while, vanished.
The study door was still open, and the white light of the device's indicator stretched in a thin line across the hallway floor. She had already turned off all the other lights in the house. Only the study light was still awake.
Mitsuki stayed seated in front of the plate and didn't move for a long time.
Tomorrow, too, the machine would be here, and the eggs would be in the refrigerator.
What came after that, Mitsuki didn't know. Not yet.