They’d warned me the mods were permanent, but being 25 years old and broke makes you agree to pretty much anything. The recruiter called it enhanced taste receptors. I called it a pay cheque.
What they didn’t tell you is that once you can detect microbial toxins at six parts per billion, food stops being food.
My daughter is 30 now. I haven’t seen her since she was 12, before ‘5 years off-world’ became 18 under relativistic time dilation. She’s eating macaroni in the Outpost Seven canteen like it’s the best thing she’s ever had, and I’m watching cheese powder collect on her chin while trying not to taste the fungal bloom in every bite.
“It’s good, right?” she says.
The Aspergillus contamination sits at the back of my throat like congealed milk. My modification gave me 17,000 taste receptor cells per square centimetre. Baseline humans have only a few thousand per square centimetre at most. Right now I’d trade every extra receptor to taste this macaroni the way she does.
“Yeah. Really good.”
She takes another bite, then stops. Looks at my plate. Looks at me.
“You’re not eating yours.”
“Not that hungry.”
“Mum.” She puts her fork down. “The whole point of you coming here was so we could have dinner.”
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Around us, colonists eat and complain like food is just another opinion to have. I fork up some macaroni and put it in my mouth. The fungal undertone blooms stronger, mixing with degraded protein and the sour note of bacterial growth someone should have caught three shipments ago.
I swallow, then take another bite because she’s watching.
“I can see your face. How bad is it?” she asks quietly.
I put the fork down. “Not that bad. No one would notice.”
“But you do. Every meal?”
“Yeah.”
She sits back in her chair, studying me like I’m one of her soil samples. When she finally speaks, her voice is very quiet.
“Do you remember when we made pancakes and I used salt instead of sugar?”
I do. She was seven. We both spat them out laughing, back when bad food was funny and I could taste things the way people are meant to.
I nod.
“Could you tell now? Before you swallowed?”
“Yeah.”
She picks up her fork and turns it over in her hands, watching the light catch on cheap recycled metal.
“I was going to cook for you tomorrow. Tomatoes from my garden. I’ve been growing them for eight months. Real tomatoes, Mum. Not printed.” She looks up at me. “But you’d just taste the soil contamination. Every single thing wrong with it.”
“Probably.”
“That’s shit.” She’s not angry. Just sad in this flat, tired way that makes my chest hurt. “You came all this way and we can’t even have a meal together.”
“Pays well,” I say.
She laughs, sharp and bitter. “God, that’s bleak.”
Then she does something I don’t expect. She picks up her fork, scoops up a bite of the macaroni and eats it. She chews, swallows and takes another bite without breaking eye contact.
“What are you doing?”
“Eating,” she says. “Same as you should be.”
“But you know it’s —”
