The blender screamed every morning before sunrise.
Eli sat at the kitchen table scrolling through bug reports, half-listening as Matt measured powder into the pitcher. The smell was thick and sweet, like vanilla chalk.
“Perfect ratio,” Matt said, tapping the digital scale. “Macros dialed in.”
Eli looked up. “You realize you just called breakfast a ratio.”
Matt grinned. “Breakfast is inefficient. This is better.”
That had been the pitch when they moved into the Stuart Street house: Efficiency in all things. Five engineers, one spreadsheet tracking everything from REM cycles to stool quality. They called it a biohacker monastery. Groceries were chaos, so they replaced them with meal replacement shakes. Their favorite? Huel, Black Edition.
“Cheaper, cleaner, smarter,” Jonah had said the night they bulk-ordered six crates.
They toasted with their first shakes like founders celebrating funding.
Two weeks later, things started fraying.
Eli left his laptop on the porch overnight. Matt burned rice in the pressure cooker, then tried to scrape it out with a fork, muttering about thermodynamics. Jonah locked himself out of his own GitHub repo.
They all laughed it off.
“Too much caffeine,” someone said.
“Not enough salt,” someone else replied.
They added electrolytes to the spreadsheet and kept drinking.
By the third week, the taste had changed. A faint metallic edge crept in, like licking the inside of a battery. Eli noticed it first.
“Does this taste different to you?” he asked.
Matt shrugged. “Probably psychosomatic. Your taste receptors are adapting.”
“Adapting to what?”
“Progress.”
The word hung there, absurd and perfect.
That night, Eli tried to debug a piece of code and couldn’t remember how recursion worked. He sat there for ten minutes, staring at the screen, his reflection blurry in the glass.
When he finally typed, his fingers hit the wrong keys.
A few days later, Ben collapsed in the shower.
They found him on the tile, eyes wide, mumbling nonsense. Jonah called out, “Dude, you’re literally brain-dead right now,” trying to make it a joke. No one laughed.
Eli helped Ben sit up. His hands were trembling. “You good, man?”
Ben blinked slowly. “I… forgot how to say toothbrush.”
Matt stepped in, voice brisk. “He’s dehydrated. The body needs time to equilibrate.”
“Equilibrate from what?”
Matt didn’t answer.
The word “poison” popped into Eli’s head, sudden and uninvited, but he pushed it away. Too paranoid. Too irrational.
That night, the air in the house felt heavy, like the walls were exhaling metal dust. Eli lay awake and tried to remember the chemical symbol for lead. It wouldn’t come.
The headline hit on a Thursday: Consumer Watchdog Reports Dangerous Lead Levels in Huel Black Edition.
Jonah read it aloud at the kitchen table, voice flat. The blender sat nearby, crusted over.
Matt leaned forward, squinting. “Could be fake. Paid smear campaign. You know how—”
“It’s Consumer Reports,” Jonah said.
No one spoke.
Eli felt the words slide through him like cold water. Chronic exposure. Neurological impairment.
He looked around at the others. Jonah’s left eye twitched. Ben stared at his empty glass. Matt sat still, jaw clenched, like the logic engine in his brain had seized.
“We did this to ourselves,” Eli said quietly.
Matt shook his head. “Regulation wouldn’t have prevented it. Government oversight just slows innovation.”
Eli laughed. It came out sharp and wrong. “Guess we innovated our IQs out of existence.”
No one laughed.
Ben stood up and walked to the sink. The sludge in his bottle was the color of wet concrete. He poured it down slowly. One by one, the others followed.
The water hissed, the powder clinging to the drain before swirling away. When the sink was empty, the silence felt almost holy.
That afternoon, Eli walked down to the corner store. His head buzzed faintly, a soft electric hum he couldn’t shake.
Inside, he bought a burrito from the hot case. The foil burned his fingers a little. Outside, he sat on the curb and unwrapped it. Steam rose in ribbons. It smelled alive—cilantro, onions, something charred and real.
He took a bite. It tasted like cardboard.
He chewed anyway, slowly, methodically, as if taste might come back if he earned it.
A text buzzed on his phone: Matt: we’re going to sue.
Eli stared at the message, thumb hovering. He started typing a reply, but halfway through the sentence, he forgot what he’d meant to say.
He sat there for a long time, the sun hitting the foil, the burrito cooling in his hand. Then he tossed the phone into his backpack, finished the last bite without tasting it, and stood up.
When he arrived home, the blender was already running again.