Matter of taste
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Illustration: Jacey
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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