[Issue 2026.76]

“Titanium Chef”, Crystal Koo

Art © 2026 Joel Bisaillon

---

Sometimes you catch the show’s copydroids roaming the city before the season starts, testing their programming against the vagaries of the real world. They’re wide-eyed and tentative, like exotic animals reintroduced to the wild. I find photos of these titanium pseudo-humans online, lost in a pet shop or on a bicycle in the park, experiencing things in their memory for the first time, afraid it might be their last. A Titanium Chef that loses a round is deactivated, its borrowed consciousness wiped in front of thousands of real-time viewers. The last one standing returns to its lab and fights again next season.

They look at the camera warily, as if it might take their soul.

---

The copydroid’s face looks exactly like Radha’s: bird-like, at once hopeful and anxious. Its body is shellacked in naked, titanium sexlessness. I realize, years too late, that this is how Radha has always seen herself.

I cross the road to follow it, a taxi’s horn making me jump. A Radha copy brings up possibilities I don’t dare entertain until I’m sure.

In the coffee shop, the copy appreciatively watches the barista wrap a bagel in paper. But would the copy know how to smile the way Radha had: tight and closed-mouth but luminous, as if she had just told a joke she wasn’t supposed to?

I only see the real Radha in magazines now, where she places a blob of yoghurt on a steamed crab in a kitchen of dry ice, her chef’s apron a blinding white.

The copy turns around and sees me behind a wall of ancient hi-fis. Its face crinkles with surprise and apprehension.

It calls my name. It’s Radha’s voice, full of emotion. The sound of it makes my chest twist. I find myself wanting to offer the copy whatever it needs, just as I had with Radha.

Then the copydroid gives me Radha’s smile. We are once again two women who understand something fundamental about each other, like castaways on a hostile sea.

---

My wife Marta isn’t interested in Titanium Chef or cooking in particular. One of the reasons I had gotten together with her was because she was nothing like Radha. But Marta obliges when I suggest that evening that we watch an old episode of the show, the one with the asparagus theme.

Marta likes seeing people happy, especially people she loves. I’ve always felt guilty about that. I’m not at all like that, which she knows. I can be small and resentful. I have the stamina to hold on to things for too long. There are times I think Marta’s with me because she wants to feel superior or because she’s working through some other psychodramatic script of her own.

Tonight she gives me a hot mug of chocolate and we hold hands as mind-copied androids swan into our screen. Each of them has been installed with the face of a chef and a copy of the chef’s consciousness. They wear nothing but hats and aprons. Cleavers glint under studio lights. There’s asparagus everywhere.

I don’t tell Marta about the Radha copydroid.

---

I see the copydroid again a few days later on the skyrail.

The copy lets me touch its cheek. It’s warm. The copy leans into my hand. People are filming us.

“I know this is a little weird,” it says. Sadness and elation fighting across its face.

Reflexively I jump to reassure it. “You’ve done so well.” The tenderness in my voice surprises me. The break-up had grounded me down, made me feel as though I’d never known how to recognize love correctly. I had avoided all the restaurants Radha and I had ever gone to together. “I’ve heard you on podcasts. On livestreams too.”

“I haven’t,” it says wryly, channeling Radha’s inability to take a compliment. “I’ve never liked the sound of my voice.”

“You wanted this,” I say. “The copy thing.”

The copy laughs, a one-note sound with little mirth. “She did. She’s in my prep team.”

We’ve gone past my station. “Do you want to meet at the pasta place another time?” I ask suddenly.

The copydroid’s face glows with pleasure, as if I had just done it a big favor. I’m already feeling the same cloying, old bliss at having pleased Radha.

I hold the copy’s arm to say goodbye and feel the cold metal. I look up at Radha’s brown eyes.

---

The real Radha and I first met at a pasta restaurant where she pumped out plates of fettuccine. She had waited for me to finish my lunch to come over with the bill and a tub of free arancini.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she told me after I had visited her again afterward. She wanted to work in a more exciting kitchen that let her sear scallops and glaze them with pomegranate.

She had rolled her eyes when she saw me watching Titanium Chef. “Those poor things think they’re real,” she said. Every memory and opinion and passion from before kept intact, like—”

“They’re told what they are,” I pointed out. I was hurt because I hoped watching the show would bring us closer. “They know they’re not who they think they are.” But Radha shook her head as if I didn’t understand.

When she agreed to be my girlfriend, I only had a minute to feel the euphoria in my heart before she caveated out loud that if we didn’t work out, we’d end up with someone else who’d be a better fit eventually.

On some nights, she slipped out of bed to clink away in the kitchen.

“It’s not worth it, morally,” she started saying. “People get into relationships only because they want something from the other person.” It was consumerism, she told me.

When we broke up, I watched her chart her course to where she had always wanted to be without me. These days she endorses pans and air-fryers on holostreams. She’s head chef in a glorious new bistro downtown.

Marta has warmth like the sun and a strength that lives in her arms and her back. Radha had a nervous energy, the obsessive kind that catapults someone to greatness, and had been easily startled by hugs. It made you want to comfort her in some way. When we had fallen apart, she had only peered at me, angry and helpless, as if our fight was being conducted in another language.

I met Marta not long after.

---

I spend the next week being ravenous for Marta in bed. She laughs and asks me what’s gotten into me and if there’s any way to replicate this for the rest of our lives. Afterwards, I drowse in her arms and think of how nice this is, how nice she is.

The Radha copydroid waits for me outside the old pasta restaurant, dressed in a cardigan and jeans. Only its modular hands show metal.

“The prep team gave me clothes when I said I was meeting someone,” the copy says shyly. “They’re very nice to me.”

Then it puts its arms around my waist.

I turn absolutely still. It smells of linen and new electronics. Then I move my face away so it doesn’t see my confusion.

It certainly isn’t Radha anymore. I don’t know if they’re programmed to be a little different or they’re made to learn from new experiences but this isn’t the Radha I knew years ago, who disliked Titanium Chef and didn’t seem particularly inclined to touch me unless I asked. Whose vulnerabilities I had only ever seen in brief and unexpected glimpses before she returned to being ironic and in control.

There’s new neon tubing all over the walls of the pasta restaurant. It was here that Radha had admitted to me that she was a chef who couldn’t take the heat of chili. And that she didn’t like flowers or chocolates either and found dating a complete puzzle.

I had found all this captivatingly candid. Later I thought how a more intuitive person might have read the signs, but among women I always become slow and self-absorbed.

The copydroid stares at me. “I’ve missed you.”

I pretend to look at the menu before I say something I’ve never dared say to Radha before. “I always loved you more.”

The actuators in the copydroid’s skull pull tiny wires under its face, filling it with sadness. “That was never true.”

I’m drawn into a spiral of what could have been. I look at the copy with new eyes. It gazes at me back, unflinching at the face of my emotion.

I tell it how when Radha and I had kissed, I had found myself deadening my own desire, keeping it from cresting at a certain height because I could tell she couldn’t match it. I know Radha had indulged me in bed out of a sense of duty, like we were pictures on a manual, and I had grown afraid of touching her.

The copy lets me talk. Then it comes over to my side of the table, taking my hand and squeezing it.

“I only have two months left before the show,” the copy whispers to me.

---

Marta wakes me by bringing coffee to the bedside table and diving back into the sheets, snaking her hands around my belly. It’s my favorite part of the day. But this morning, I suddenly can’t stop thinking about how the episode with the asparagus ends.

The deactivation room isn’t so much a room as it’s a chair with a white sheet behind it. A camera zooms into the copydroid’s face. Blue eyes, a shaved head, the beginnings of a tattoo on its pale, flesh-colored neck before it disappears into layers of titanium metallic white.

It shakes its head when it’s asked if it has anything it wanted to say to the viewers. Its eyes keep darting to someone off-camera.

Blue-gloved hands fiddle with the nape of its neck. The copydroid’s eyelids close, its body falling back softly against the chair as its consciousness is wiped. The end titles run and a bell pepper rises from the floor in a burst of orchestral ecstasy.

---

I buy books on copydroids. I find myself in interesting places online, repositories of erotic fiction written about copydroids, long arguments about the ethics of robosexuality.

“You’ve been reading a lot,” says Marta, smiling, though she looks uncertain.

I smile back, trying not to instinctively shut the laptop out of guilt.

I had never told her about Radha. I didn’t trust myself to talk reasonably about it. It had been easier to say I was single during those years. I had framed it as badly-needed time to find myself, which Marta said was a healthy thing to have committed to.

At a loud teahouse, where piping hot bowls of noodles are on an unpredictable trajectory, the copydroid bites through a dumpling. Clarity pierces through its face and it remembers what it is. I mischievously push chili sauce towards it when the rice rolls come and it winces at the sight of it. “Okay,” it says and I laugh.

The copy traces an invisible artery in my neck, its finger pad squeaking against my skin. Then its cold, caressing finger climbs up to my ear.

Chef copydroids aren’t equipped with heat-producing nodes. They’re not built to be lovers. But Radha would never have dared. She’d push me away if I tried to kiss her on the mouth somewhere well-lit.

We go to a copse below a skyrail line like we’re teenagers. I kiss the copy on the chin and it pulls me closer. Its lips are firm and rubbery, tasting of wax. It kisses me with curiosity, not hunger, but with an urgency I had never felt from Radha. The coldness of its fingers slips below the band of my jeans.

I bury myself in its neck, where flesh meets metal. The copy’s hands find their way between the buttons of my shirt and its mouth covers mine. The angle is uncomfortable; the friction burns my skin. I take its clothes off.

---

Marta thinks I’m having trouble sleeping because I’ve been out running too late in the evening.

The copy and I stay in cheap hotels. We are careful. We avoid going outside when we can, except when we venture out because it wants to try a food cart on the street or ride bicycles across a solarfarm. The copy doesn’t have a lot of time left.

Secretly, I buy a seat for a live studio filming of Titanium Chef. I don’t tell the copy about it. It doesn’t like to talk about the show and how we might never see each other again. I don’t ask what it thinks of being wiped.

I start calling it radha. It looks at me with gratitude because it’s called by a number in the lab so no one confuses it with Source Radha. Source Radha goes along with it and tries very hard not to be left alone with her copy. It sounds very much like her.

Whenever radha goes back to the lab, I watch old episodes of Titanium Chef, desperate to unearth anything that might help it win. The Titanium Chef website says copydroids are repurposed into productivity, with new faces and capabilities. There are photos of copydroids as nuclear engineers, nurses in care homes. Parts might be recycled, they say in small font.

Sometimes radha and I can’t help holding hands on the train. It always holds my hand as if it’s doing it for the first time, digging deep between my fingers, when Source Radha had always waited for me to hold her hand.

“What did you mean,” I ask radha one time, “when we got together and you told me you’d find someone else if we didn’t work out?”

radha parses the meaning of this silently, searching for information online. Which means Radha had likely never thought about it. This hurts more.

“There are a few possible reasons why someone would say something so unkind to your face,” it finally says. “Want me to tell you about them?”

I shake my head.

“I’m sorry I said that before,” it says.

“It wasn’t you,” I say and lean in to kiss it.

---

It’s on radha’s last day when Marta finds out.

I come out of the bathroom to my wife holding her phone, the screen filled with photos of me and radha from an online forum about copydroids. Marta’s face is filled with a dangerous blankness, but I am too far gone, too worried about what will happen to radha soon, to convince my wife that it means nothing, which isn’t true. Marta packs a bag and leaves.

That night, radha and I sit in one corner of the pasta restaurant, backs against the wall, holding hands. We guess the toppings of the pizzas coming out of the kitchen. radha lets me win a few times.

Then it’s gone.

I have always depended on Marta’s presence for a sense of clarity and substance. Without her, there is no witness to my life. My evenings are difficult.

I deliberately miss the opening of Titanium Chef, when copies march in with the banners of their chef’s restaurants and introduce themselves. I can’t bear seeing radha’s competitors, how it might be felled by one of them. I tune in on the third hour for the mushroom round.

They show radha studiously working over a stove. It chops, sprinkles, brings it all out into a pan. There’s a competence in its movements I’ve never seen before.

It’s a miracle, I think, with a surge of manic, hopeful energy. radha may be able to win after all.

I mute the screen when other copydroids are led to the deactivation room and I turn away. I can’t bear the fear on their faces.

---

In the studio, the seats rise ten feet above the enormous soundstage. radha is at the left corner of the studio, scrutinizing a crust on its spatula. I wonder if I should wave, but it won’t be able to see me from where my seat is.

I keep my eyes desperately on radha, as if it might lose if I don’t.

The themed ingredient for this round, we are told, is chili.

Radha had always been serious about substituting chili in her dishes. She didn’t want to cook something she couldn’t taste so she resorted to mustard seeds and smoked paprika, a squeeze of lime in the final moments, a dash of vinegar to lift the sauce.

Now radha chars its chilis and chops them, scraping them off the board into a bowl with the roasted eggplants. It unseeds chili peppers, fries them with red flakes and crushed Sichuan peppercorns with oil, and pours them over a pile of cabbage and cream cheese.

It refuses to taste what it makes, which can’t be good. I watch it grind twenty bird’s eye chilis into a fiery paste.

I’m not able to sleep when I return home at dawn. I give up and finally get out of bed at noon to find out radha has been eliminated.

I spend an hour over the toilet vomiting. I don’t want to watch the stream and see radha in the deactivation room, its eyes closed, its head between the two gloved hands.

Marta has found her fury and she sends me strings of text. I turn my phone off.

I have a blinding headache and my bedroom feels filthy. When I finally sleep, I dream of being among the crushed blades of grass below the skyrail and radha telling me how wonderful scallops taste.

I only start crying the next day. I imagine how radha would have felt, coming into life with its pre-installed memories, as if it’s been asleep all this time and now thrust into a world that demanded so much from it.

By now its body is recycled into a rig manager or a solarcraft pilot copydroid. Even if I can find where it’s been sent, it won’t recognize me. It won’t remember anything about me.

---

I holo Titanium Chef’s production company. I wade through recordings and finally find a live person seated on a cramped desk, his face encased with receivers. “You want to nominate someone for a spot in next year’s season,” he says, bored, before I can start.

“I want to find one of the contestants of the show. The one who didn’t make it in the chili round.”

“It’s been wiped.”

“And the body?”

“We call it the shell,” he says.

“Please. Don’t you make a save before the wipe?

“A copy of the copy,” he chuckles. “No.”

“Why not?”

“For privacy reasons.”

“But you want everything else documented, every single zoomed-in pore, every fucking carrot peel that drops on the floor. I was there at the filming. I saw her.”

I don’t want to break down in front of this man. He doesn’t want it either because then he asks, “Are you the source chef?”

“Why? Would I get a copy?”

“Your team made imagefiles of its drive during prep, didn’t they?” The man makes a gesture that I don’t understand. Then he tells me he has to take another call.

---

Radha’s new apartment is on a hillside overlooking the city. The place smells of lemon floor cleaner and the leather couch is stuffed with colorful pillows. I catch a glimpse of the enormous, steely insides of Radha’s kitchen when she fetches wine.

Now that Radha’s handed me a glass, she’s on the other end of the couch where I’m seated. I’m incredibly aware of how her chest moves as she breathes in and out because radha did not have this feature.

Like muscle memory, I can tell Radha needs a drink of water, a bit of quiet in the toilet, but I’m indifferent to this information. It’s flavoring, the old instinct of knowing someone’s needs from the shadow on their face, not a study of someone you love.

On the coffee table between us is a flashdrive. The last save point had been the evening before the show had started, four days before radha was wiped.

“They don’t let us save any of its experience in the show,” Radha says. “If we had won, we’d have to borrow their own films to prep for the next season.”

“I thought you never liked Titanium Chef.”

She looks into her glass. “The PR team thought it was a good idea.”

Radha’s line of trophies on the mantel is guarded by a fat bronze chef on one end and a gold-handled ceramic vase on the other. Had she pitied me for always being the one to want more? I bury the question as deeply as I could. It doesn’t matter what she had thought, only that both of us had found ourselves in a relationship that neither of us had truly wanted.

“I watched all the videos the prep team sent me before I went to bed,” she says. “All its memories with you.”

“Did you find it flattering?”

The joke goes over her head. “I’m not sure what you mean. I was watching my copy do a better job than me as a girlfriend.” She chuckles.

“You never wanted a relationship,” I say.

“No,” she says wistfully. “Sex and dating and all that stuff—I’ve never really understood any of it. But you wanted one and I wanted to try. For you.”

I look at the flashdrive.

“It enjoyed its time with you,” says Radha. She’s referring to the copydroid. She looks out the window into a dark canopy of trees. “I don’t think I had ever seen you that happy with me.”

“Thank you for doing this,” I say.

“I’ve always liked doing things for people.” She puts her glass down. “I’ve got leftovers of a pilaf I made yesterday. I can heat it up in the stove and we can have some of it, if you want.”

“I’d love to bring it home with me.”

“Plans with someone else?” she asks with a little smile. Her eyes fall on the flashdrive.

“It’s a long way back.”

She goes to the kitchen and I take the flashdrive. It’s a light little thing, almost made of air. Radha returns with a paper bag.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, touching my arm, a movement so unexpected I nearly jump.

Outside I crunch on leaves as I cross the road, Radha’s fragrant rice clutched to my chest. There will only be audio and video on the flashdrive, dividing the things radha had seen and heard by hourly segments. I see Radha’s figure by her window, an exposed nerve in golden light, before she pulls away.

The flashdrive is warm, clutched in my hand. I want to hear its voice again.

© 2026 Crystal Koo

[Issue 2026.76]

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