Ask a chef to tell you a story, and whatever yarn they spin, happy or sad, true or false, it’ll start off in a kitchen.

This one is no different. And it’s all true. And it’s not happy.

Not mostly, anyway.

It has its moments.

Early one morning, at my restaurant in Denver, a metal box arrived in a metal truck, escorted by guards. They carried assault rifles, like they thought they might have to defend themselves against the bell peppers we kept in the fridge. Or the turmeric.

They checked the kitchen out to make sure it was secure. They checked the empty dining room.

Someone gave a signal. Unarmed men in grey jumpsuits brought the box inside.

It was big. We gave them space. They had rigged the box with antigravity clamps, which they took with them when they left, which meant I had to hire someone else to lug it out of there later.

I signed my name on a tablet, and on their way out one of the guards, under her breath, called me a fairy.

I grinned at her and winked. Life is short.

And when they were gone it was me, the box, Antoine, and Zaid, my chef de cuisine in Denver. He didn’t know what was going on, because I hadn’t told him anything, except that he should close the joint for a day so we could have a meeting.

When the army departed, the three of us stood back and watched the box for a minute.

“Does anyone have a crowbar?” Antoine asked, sipping a glass of beer.

Zaid laughed. We couldn’t have opened that box with a crowbar. We couldn’t have sprung it with a Howitzer.

The box was advanced. State-of-the-art. It had traveled hundreds of light-years to get there, and they’d made the box so that none of the contents would get knocked around when the speed they were moving scrambled the atoms of everything onboard the spacecraft that carried it.

I don’t know what the box was made of—some kind of compound. Steel and titanium plus nine things I never heard of.

We didn’t know how to open it. They had left no instructions.

Antoine stood back and watched as Zaid and I pawed the thing over, looking for a way to get it open.

Zaid found a button and pressed it.

The box whirred. It whooshed. I felt air come out of a vent on one side. The top detached, and it took all three of us to lift it away.

Mist poured out. When it cleared enough so we could see, we found the box was lined with some kind of foam, containers pressed into it to keep them safe.

With a gloved hand Antoine reached in through the mist and pulled out a glass jar of what looked, from where I stood, like rocks.

“What is that?” asked Zaid. “It looks like gravel.”

“It’s not gravel,” Antoine said. “The label says it’s gnorsalt.”

He set the jar on a steel table.

“How much do you know about this stuff?” Zaid asked.

“Not much,” I said. “I’m not supposed to even have it.”

Antoine removed his glove and found the jar was okay to touch.

I said, “I only have this stuff because I know a guy.”

“What guy?”

“He’s a higher-up with the Expeditionary Corps. The Interstellar Expeditionary Corps.”

“I thought all they did was strip gold off asteroids.”

Antoine unscrewed the jar’s lid like it was a bomb that might go off.

“That is what they do,” I said. “But they reached the Sariel system last year. You heard about that, right?”

“No.”

“It was all over the news, Zaid.”

“I don’t watch the news. I work, I sleep, and I come back to work. I don’t have time for news.”

“You should start making time for it. The Corps found the stuff in this box on Sariel III. There are eighteen freighters full of it headed our way. They’re burning out their hyperdrives, to get here as fast as they can. And they’ll go back for more, and a lot of people are going to make a fortune off of it.”

“Off of gravel?”

“It’s not gravel, Zaid. It’s food.”

“It’s an ingredient,” said Antoine. “One that no one on Earth has had before. One that came from another planet, far away.”

I said, “The guy who got me this box says the stuff in it is going to change the way we eat. Totally and irreversibly. And I paid a lot of money so we could get this box early.”

“Before the freighters get here?”

“That’s right.”

“Why not wait for the freighters?”

“Because, my friend, if we get a little of it in advance, we can learn what it is. What it’s about. We can experiment.”

“And that means,” added Antoine, who reached into the jar with tongs, “we can learn to make a whole range of dishes out of what’s in this box before anyone else gets their hands on it.”

I said, “In three months, those freighters will reenter Earth’s orbit. And Hampton Sherlock, and Sally Conroy, and Dallas fucking Everhart will be in their billion-dollar test kitchens, scrambling to fuse whatever’s on the freighters with the food we’ve always had on Earth.

“They’ll do exactly what we’re doing right now. But it will be too late.

“They won’t know it, but by the time they’ve figured out what the rocks in that jar can do, we’ll be rolling out a line of prepared meals and exclusive dishes at my restaurants.

“And when we start making money off of that, I’ll open more restaurants. It’ll be beautiful. We’ll be rich.”

Zaid looked stunned.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“ I thought you were going to fire me.”

“What?”

“When you told me to close the restaurant.”

“Oh.” I shook my head. “No, Zaid, this is not about you. Jesus, not everything is about you!”

“I didn’t say everything was about me. How often do we close for no reason? And you tell me to come in anyway? I was sure I was getting shitcanned. I spent last night updating my resume.”

“Zaid.” I rubbed my eyes. “Come on.”

“You guys,” said Antoine. “Look.”

We looked.

He held the gnorsalt up to the light. It was crystalline, like quartz. And when we looked closely, we could see colors swirling through it like oil on a puddle.

“What is that about?” asked Zaid.

“No idea,” said Antoine. “I wonder what it tastes like.”

He dropped the gnorsalt from the tongs into his hand.

He took the rock in his other hand, and licked his palm where the rock had been.

“It tastes like salt.”

I said, “Is that what it is? Big salt?”

Zaid said, “I can’t believe you tasted that. It’s from outer space.”

I went to the jar, pulled out a rock with my bare fingers, licked it.

“Fucking hell,” I said. “It is salt.”

“It isn’t salt,” said Antoine. “Salt doesn’t have this coloration.”

“It’s rainbow salt.”

Antoine lay the gnorsalt rock on a cutting board and banged it with a mallet. It broke.

Now we had a big piece of rainbow salt that was broken into smaller bits. Like regular salt, only colorful.

“So far,” Zaid said, “this is underwhelming.”

“Thank you, Zaid,” said Antoine. “Let us not draw conclusions yet.”

He got a pan from the rack above his head, put a burner under it, and swept that broken gnorsalt into the pan.

It melted as soon as it was warm. It turned to a viscous, cloudy liquid.

I said, “That was quick.”

It started to steam, and when it did it filled the room with a smell like nothing I’d smelled before.

Antoine tasted the liquid, now, and said, “It doesn’t taste like it did.”

I tried it myself. “It sure doesn’t.”

“What’s it taste like?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was like the first time I had a glass of wine. I couldn’t have described it, not until I’d had more, and I had to have a lot more before I knew if I liked it or not.

I said, “I’m not sure I’ll be recouping my investment.”

Antoine was writing in one of the black notebooks he kept in his pocket at all times. “It’s too soon to say such things,” he said. “We have time to experiment.”

“What else is in the box?” asked Zaid.

“Freigenberries,” Antoine said, pulling out another jar.

“Do you think,” Zaid said, “they tested these things? Are they totally safe?”

I said, “My guy said they are.”

“You trust him?”

“As much as I trust anybody. Present company excluded.”

“Well,” Zaid said. “It’s the military, right? Who are handling this? They’re in charge of it?”

“Sure, it’s the military.” I took a bite of the plump freigenberry Antoine sliced open, so that its smell, like edible asphalt, filled the kitchen. “That’s a weird berry. But you know how it is. It’s not just the military, it’s the military in service of capital. Like it says in the New Constitution.”

“And what does it say there?”

“I don’t have a copy right here. This thing tastes nothing like it smells.”

“Good for salads,” said Antoine, munching his half of the berry. “Toss it with arugula?”

“Maybe. Not the most versatile thing.”

“You’re so negative.”

“I’m only saying,” Zaid said, “that even if you include capital among the forces that have brought these new things to us, they don’t exactly have a record of keeping the best interests of ordinary citizens in mind.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked, holding up a freigenberry. “You think it’s going to bite you?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have a bad feeling about it.”

“How about you, Antoine?”

He didn’t answer. He was focused. He was looking in the box for the next new thing.

I could have fired a gun in the air, and I doubt he would have heard it.

He pulled a jar of black liquid from the space box. It was full of Zösch.

Everyone remembers the first time they saw Zösch. And we were some of the first human beings ever to see that black slime that ran like molasses and tasted nothing like molasses.

I was hoping it would taste good. Because so far none of the things in that box were worth the price I’d paid.

“You want to do the honors this time?” asked Antoine, tilting the jar so the Zösch sloughed to one side.

I took a long spoon, said, “What the hell, right?” dipped the spoon in the Zösch, and tried it for myself.

And I ran to the sink and spat it right back out.

I had not tasted anything so bitter in my life. And the consistency! It was thick, but it was grainy, and something about it made me think of butter.

Antoine tried it for himself.

He was utterly unfazed.

He said later my reaction made him think it would be worse than it was, so he was prepared—but really I think the guy was a mutant. I think nothing fazed him because it was like he wasn’t really living in his body. It was like he controlled it from someplace far away.

Zaid watched the Zösch jar like it might leap up and bite him, which we weren’t sure it wasn’t going to do.

“This is not good,” I said.

“It’s not bad,” said Antoine.

“The fuck it’s not. This is a disaster.”

He said, “Look.” And he got to work.

He tore another skillet off the rack above his head, laid it on the stove, poured avocado oil, diced a red onion in seconds flat, and tossed it in.

We had the best red onions in the world at that place. A guy was growing them upstate and they were unreal.

I was the one who discovered him. I don’t know where he is now. Counting his money full-time, I bet.

Into the pan went some minced garlic and roughly chopped chanterelles.

I watched Antoine with my arms folded. Zaid kept eyeing that jar of Zösch.

Half a minute ticked by. Antoine pulled a spoonful of Zösch from the jar and poured it over what was in the pan.

I’d never seen anything quite like what happened then: the Zösch melted into the mushrooms, like it was set to attack. Like its mission was to coat the mushrooms. A liquid mushroom blanket.

“What did that stuff just do?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” laughed Antoine.

He could laugh. It wasn’t his money that had been thrown after this disaster.

Antoine plated on three plates whatever it was he’d made.

All at once, the three of us took a bite.

And there are things I have no words for, things that language can’t describe, at least not when I’m the one wielding it. Like the first time I ever had a kalamata olive. And the last time I ate pork loin, at a time when such a thing was scarce, when pigs were on the edge of being extinct. I paid $10,000 for that pork loin.

Zösch on its own was an abomination. But if you put it with something else, or a couple of other things, they combined to make something altogether new, unlike anything we’d had before. It would taste something like what you mixed it with, but there was a new element, too, that you couldn’t taste in Zösch on its own. It seemed to come from nowhere.

After a few more experiments, we learned you couldn’t predict what anything with Zösch in it would taste like.

It was fascinating. Unprecedented. Otherworldly—literally. And while I was hung up on how much money I’d spent acquiring the stuff, Antoine was fully absorbed. He took many pages of notes in his black notebook.

We tried cooking Zösch with potatoes, with seitan, with tofu, with rice. We baked Zösch cornbread, and drizzled Zösch over broccoli.

What we made tasted like those things, but it tasted like nothing else, too.

Now on his fourth glass of wine, Zaid said, “This isn’t right.”

I said, “What’s not right?”

“It’s too good. Nothing should taste this good.”

I laughed. Antoine laughed.

But Zaid was serious. He said again, “It isn’t right.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s right,” I said. “This is it, there’s no going back. And I think maybe we’re going to be rich.”

Antoine suggested we mix Zösch with some bourbon.

I never would have thought bourbon could get better than it was already. I mean, who the hell wants to try and fix bourbon?

Zösch does. That’s who.

And within a half-second of coming into contact with bourbon, Zösch did it. It fixed it. And it was never even broken in the first place.

We spent the next month perfecting the dishes that used the new foods.

We were in no hurry. We weren’t yet allowed to serve the Sariel-infused dishes to anyone.

We would be, soon. Maybe if the new foods had arrived in, I don’t know, 2071, when bureaucrats ruled the land, it would have taken longer to cut through the red tape. They’d have run endless tests and made sure only the biggest players in the game had access to the new ingredients. No advance shipments for the enterprising, well-connected few; no box of Zösch and a dozen other things.

We spent that month in the kitchen in Denver, after hours. Antoine and I stayed in our Denver loft, blasting the AC. It was the middle of spring, and it was hot.

But that kitchen was the perfect place to fool around with the Sariel foods. And when we were done, we had created a new cuisine: interplanetary fusion.

We were ambitious. A little corny, too.

We represented every Earth cuisine we could do justice to with what we had. We made black bean and yakkon tacos, and the world’s first slipwort gnocchi. We invented ragapepper hummus, gnaxxji salads, and cocktails garnished with porp zest.

But the finest dishes we created were those that used Zösch. Stuffed peppers with Zösch. Scrambled tofu with Zösch. Zösch crepes, Chile Con Zösch, Petit Pois with Zösch.

Zösch, we found, adapted to what it was served with. It was the first edible thing we’d encountered that could change what it tasted like, altering its own flavor somehow. Pour it on a sundae and it was better than chocolate syrup. Dump it onto mashed potatoes and it was better than gravy, in ways it would take you a year to put into words.

It’s true. Food critics lost their minds when we rolled these things out.

We stayed up all night, some nights, getting things right. By the time we could legally serve all the young foods, a time when every restaurant but ours was getting their first taste of them, we had it figured out. We had engineered a new way of preparing and serving meals.

We were the only ones who had this head start. We couldn’t fail. We couldn’t lose.

And of course I know now that I should have listened, the night Antoine came in with his notebook open and said he had something to show me.

“I’ve been experimenting with Zösch,” he said.

“Experimenting? What kind of experimenting?”

“Nothing dramatic. I’m not Victor Frankenstein.”

“It must be pretty serious, if you’re coming to me with that look on your face.”

He sat beside me on the couch, where I was drinking a scotch and Zösch on the rocks and watching the news. He held out his notebook for me to see.

“Antoine,” I said. “I can’t read your handwriting. Just tell me what’s up.”

“Okay.” He leafed through his notes.

I rolled my eyes. I took a drink.

“You were with me,” he said, “when we learned that Zösch replicates itself.”

“I was. I remember.”

“When you leave it in the dark, it increases in quantity without outside influence.”

“Yes,” I said into my glass. “I did not forget.”

“I may have been wrong, when I determined why it was doing that. And I think the scientists who’ve studied Zösch are wrong about what it is.”

“You think you know better? How can that many people be wrong?”

“The same reason they could be wrong about all of the things they were wrong about for so long. The same reason it took so many centuries to develop the theory of evolution. Based on the evidence I have gathered the last few days, I have reason to believe Zösch is alive.”

“Have you lost your mind? I’ve looked at that shit under a microscope. It’s not alive.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s alive, because it doesn’t look like any living thing we’ve seen before.”

“It’s crystals. That’s all it is. How could it be alive?”

I think it’s a form of life that’s new to us. Of another nature. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t meet our preconceptions of what life must be. All it has in common with us is that it reproduces. And we didn’t recognize it as reproduction because it doesn’t look like reproduction. Not as we have known it.”

“Antoine, don’t you think someone else would have noticed this aside from you? I mean, a lot of people have studied this already. They’re really smart.”

“I doubt I’m the only one to make this discovery. Others must have learned of it as well.”

“What, then? They’re keeping quiet about it?”

He shrugged. He nodded.

“Bullshit.”

“Think about it. No one wants to eat complex organisms anymore. Since all the livestock died off, and we have no meat we can eat, people have no appetite for creatures that can feel pain. They’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“And you think Zösch is alive and that it can feel?”

“I can walk you through my findings.”

“Please don’t call them that.”

“We have to pause production on everything that has Zösch in it until we learn more.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m telling you.” He put his hand on my arm. “This is serious.”

“You know what? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the most serious thing in the history of serious things. But maybe I’m not a serious enough guy to halt production of all the prepared foods that are about to hit the market, and to not serve the stuff at my restaurants, which I’ve been planning for months. Maybe I’m not serious enough to lose millions of dollars.”

Antoine looked at me with sad eyes.

I hated his sad eyes.

“It’s too late for this,” I said. “You should have come to me sooner.”

“I tried to come to you with this. Three times.”

“You didn’t try hard enough. And if Zösch is alive, and can think and feel—which I assure you is not the case—then why don’t you work on a way I can talk to it? Because I want to thank it for being so goddamn delicious.”

I downed the rest of my scotch and Zösch.

Business boomed. I opened more restaurants. I sold frozen dinners at supermarkets with the Sariel ingredients inside.

A lot of people hesitated, at first, when it came to trying the new foods. But when they heard how good they were they got over it. We spent a fortune on advertising, to make sure everyone heard about it.

We sold literal tons of Zösch syrup. I don’t know how many tons. It was our bestselling product: Zösch, vinegar, salt, aminos, and I won’t say what else we put in it. Trade secret.

I was busier than ever, traveling to one city then another, opening a new restaurant, meeting with a food distributor, getting Zösch syrup served in the schools alongside ketchup and mustard, proving to the right people it had all the nutrition you could ask for.

At my restaurant in Washington, DC, we served the king of Saudi Arabia himself. When he had his first taste of bread dipped in olive oil, with pepper, gnorsalt, and a dash of Zösch, he said he’d never had anything like it before in his life.

I stood before him in my spotless, white apron, and fought back tears.

The next time Antoine called, his voice didn’t sound right.

I hadn’t heard from him in weeks, hadn’t seen him in months.

He said, “You need to come home.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m busy.”

“I’ve been busy, too.”

“Doing what?”

“Come home and see.”

“Antoine.”

“Now. You need to come home right now.”

He hung up.

Sure I’d go home. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get there. I had another day of helping to set things up at our new place in St. Louis. Someone else could have handled it, sure, but if my name’s about to be put on something I want to make sure it’s right. It’s called quality control.

When I went back to the hotel that night, I undressed and lit a joint, and Zaid called. He said there was a problem in Denver.

“What kind of problem? Why aren’t you handling it?”

“It’s a customer.”

He switched on the hologram and appeared in my bedroom. I’d forgotten to set it to Do Not Disturb. I was sitting up in bed, smoking, naked.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry, boss.”

I didn’t cover myself.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody came in a little while ago. Some lady? She said her husband’s in the ICU. He can’t move. His eyes are open, but he won’t talk or anything. She said the doctors said it’s not a stroke. She said they don’t know what it is. She said there must be something in the food he ate. The alien food. He left here, I don’t know, three hours ago?”

“All right. How serious is this?”

“Pretty serious. She was freaked out.”

“I’m not asking how serious she was. I’m asking if she had a lawyer with her.”

“I don’t think she had time to hire a lawyer.”

“All right, then. If she comes back with one, you know who to call.”

I hung up. I called the head of my legal team, made sure our people were briefed and ready. If that woman came back, with or without counsel, I’d have half a dozen of my guys there as holograms, to send her reeling back to her idiot husband.

How was I supposed to know she wasn’t blaming us for his stroke because she wanted money? I thought she was making it up. I thought she might not even have a husband.

Antoine blinked into the room. Another hologram.

“Holy shit,” I said, taking a drag, “it’s a convention in here.”

“Why aren’t you home?” he said. “You said you were coming back.”

He looked tired. And since I’d gone away, he’d been growing his beard, skipping haircuts, and otherwise losing his grip on his appearance. He looked like he’d been on a frontier, somewhere.

I thought for a second. “That’s right,” I said. “I did say I was coming back.”

“Summon a chopper. Get out here.”

“I can’t. Something’s up in Denver. Zaid just called.”

“Did someone who ate Zösch get paralyzed? Like they had a stroke?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Don’t go to Zaid. You need to get here now. I’ll tell you everything.”

He hung up on me again.

Hours later, stoned and airsick from a rough chopper ride, I found Antoine in our kitchen, though it was hard to find him in our kitchen.

I wasn’t sure it even was a kitchen anymore.

He had transformed it. He had filled it with beakers and vials, burners and pipettes. Metal rods attached to wires stuck out of jars of Zösch. The wires ran to machines, and other wires fed from the machines into what once was a soundboard, but which Antoine had converted to something I could never have made sense of on my own.

“Antoine,” I said, “what’s going on here?”

He stood. He’d been crouched behind one of the machines.

I didn’t know what the machine was—some kind of computer from long ago, when computers were big enough to crouch behind. I don’t know why he needed that.

His beard looked worse in person than it had as a hologram. He had a look in his eyes I didn’t like.

“You took your time getting here,” he said.

“I was busy.”

He scoffed.

“You know who pays for this house, don’t you?”

“Come look at this.”

“I pay for this house. Come look at what?”

“Put your hand here.” He pointed to a metal cylinder he’d mounted vertically so that it rose out of what had once been my stove. I followed the wires sticking from it with my eyes and saw that they ran from machine to machine to a jar of Zösch.

“Why should I put my hand there?”

He took me by the arm and put my hand on it himself.

I felt an electric shock. Or something like an electric shock.

It didn’t hurt. It was gentle. The shock ran in waves through my hand, up my arm.

I knew at once why Antoine had that look in his eyes. He’d been spending all his time lately with this electric current running through him.

How did I know that?

I took my hand off the cylinder.

“What did they say?”

“What did who say?”

“Zösch. They spoke to you.”

“Have you lost your mind? No one said anything. Your machine shocked the shit out of me.”

He grabbed my arm again and put my hand back on the cylinder.

He was quick. I didn’t think to pull away.

And I knew as soon as I felt that shock again that Antoine was right.

They were telling me he was right.

I let go again.

“We are in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We are.”

How was I supposed to know that what looked like space gravy—and was handed over to us by the authorities to serve at restaurants—was a vast assemblage of cells that worked together to solve problems and make decisions? That even when those cells spread across the surface of the Earth, they could think like we can, only better? That the reason complex intelligent life never evolved on Sariel III was that the planet was covered already with simple intelligent life—life that was so smart it could prevent anything that could threaten it from ever evolving there?

I know all of this because I’d placed my hand on that machine. I touched it for two seconds, and I learned all of that.

Yes. I know. Antoine alerted me to the likelihood that the Zösch were alive before that point. I could have listened to him then.

But he never said anything about them being smart. He never said they might be choosing to adapt their taste to how other foods tasted, rearranging their molecular structure so more of us would want to eat them.

And why were they doing that?

I asked Antoine that question, after I was done throwing up in the sink, which was a reaction to what I’d learned from my first couple of shocks.

He said, “You want to know why they do what they do. Don’t you want to know how I learned to talk to it?”

“Later,” I said. “Just tell me what they want.”

“They don’t want anything. They don’t know what it means to want.”

“Dear God!”

“They’re beautiful creatures.”

I clutched the metal cylinder again.

No words passed between me and Zösch. They didn’t use words. But I knew as I spoke to Zösch that I was talking with all of Zösch. The metal handle was wired to one jar, but through it I could reach the whole, vast being.

They said, without having to say it, that they were everywhere, now—not only in the foods we’d put it in, and not only in the bodies of the people who’d eaten that food.

They had passed through human bodies and spread from sewers to waterways. They had reached into the trenches that run across the floors of our oceans, where humans can’t go. Zösch had embedded itself in the world, like microplastics before them. They had done it fast, and we couldn’t breed new bacteria to eat it, like we did with microplastics. Zösch were too smart for that.

They had done the same thing on Sariel III. Their home planet. Now here they were.

When the Corps discovered Zösch, they thought they were nothing more than another inert substance, confined to the pools of black slime they found them in. But there was nothing inert about it, and bits of Zösch were everywhere you couldn’t see them, not just in those pools. They were in the water, in the air, in other plants, and in the clouds. They saw, felt, tasted everything. They were in control. They didn’t show up in the Corps’ analyses of water and soil because they knew how to outsmart their instruments, how to hide from us.

While Zösch explored the Earth, they reproduced constantly. In the dark places—in pipes and water treatment plants, rivers, lakes, and oceans—they thrived and spread farther than anything.

When they described to me how they were growing, I could feel the whole of Zösch growing. They conveyed the information to me in the form of sheer sensations. I could feel all that they said, the knowledge running through me faster than words. My body felt like an instrument Zösch was learning how to play.

I let the metal handle go. I left the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Antoine asked.

“I’m calling my lawyer.”

But I didn’t call him first. I called the CEO of my company.

She asked if there was a problem, and for a second it was hard to answer. I realized why Antoine had that look in his eyes, why something about him seemed off. Talking to Zösch, even for a moment, made it hard to form words.

“Shut everything down,” I said. “It’s all over.”

She asked me to explain.

I said, “Zösch are alive.”

After a pause, she said, “Could you slow down? Explain what’s going on?”

“No. Call the restaurant managers, call the distributors of our microwave dinners—”

“They’re not microwave dinners.”

“Whatever the fuck they are, don’t let one more of them get sold.”

“I can’t do that,” she sighed. “It’ll ruin us.”

“We’re already ruined. That’s the point.”

I hung up and called the lead lawyer. I briefed him on the situation. It was all hands on deck.

I went back into what used to be my kitchen. I pulled up a stool, and while Antoine asked what I was going to do, I put both my hands around the handle of the device, the direct line to Zösch.

I don’t know how I knew how to talk back to the Zösch, how I made meaning by pressing on a metal thing. Somehow, though, the thoughts in my head traveled down my arm and through my hand to meet them.

I told them I was sorry I had eaten so many of them.

They didn’t understand what I meant. They didn’t comprehend Sorry.

And they didn’t think they had been wronged. They thought they had consumed us, not the other way around.

I had an image in my head of eating a pumpkin and finding myself growing out of the inside wall of a vast pumpkin.

Electric thoughts ran down my arm and I knew what Antoine knew. That the husband of the woman in Denver was an experiment. Others had suffered the same fate since then, people we hadn’t yet heard about.

Zösch weren’t cruel. They were only running tests. They wanted to see how our bodies would respond to stimuli.

We were in their test kitchen, now—only Zösch didn’t want to eat us. They had no need for that. They didn’t eat.

I didn’t know why they did what they did. I asked them not to do it, but I don’t think they understood.

I spent a long time pleading with Zösch to spare us, to not give more people strokes. I tried to make them understand.

I had a hard time paying attention to what was going on in the room while I spoke to Zösch—it was like my mind was being split in two—but I knew my phone was blowing up. I knew what it was about. Zösch told me they were running more tests on people. The calls must have been about those who’d had strokes as a result.

I had to do something. Didn’t I?

I mean, I’d done some awful things in my life. I’d cheated on Antoine, cut corners with the health department, embezzled money—and one time, long ago, I broke a young man’s heart. I felt nothing when I did it, and wondered for the first time—not for the last time—if everyone else had something in them that was missing from me. Something that made them good.

But minds were blinking out, one by one, all over the world. Maybe I have no heart, but I had to do something about that.

I asked Zösch if they were in me. If they circulated in my system.

They didn’t understand the concept of Me.

I knew I had to make them understand it, if I was to get anywhere. Zösch had to realize that human beings weren’t one mass organism with a shared intelligence that could spread across the world and still think as one.

I knew from the way the electric shocks felt that Zösch had no sense of time like we had, that they had no sense of history. Their experience was unified. When all your constituent parts, all the little selves that make up your species, are bound together, then when one of those selves dies it’s like shedding skin cells. It’s nothing.

Zösch knew their history as a constant present. There was no past. Everything was now.

I thought the way to tell Zösch that one life was precious to us, that it meant something it didn’t mean to Zösch, would be to tell them a piece of our history. And so I told them about something Antoine and I had talked about, not long after we’d opened the box and seen Zösch for the first time.

We talked about how this wasn’t the first time something like it had happened before, how we were repeating a drama that had played out centuries before we were born.

Way back in the middle of our second millennium—I explained to Zösch without using words—if you lived in Africa or the Middle East, Europe or Asia, you had no clue what was growing on the other side of the world. You’d never seen a tomato. You hadn’t heard of corn. And when those things started showing up at harbors?

Imagine it.

Imagine what Italian food must have looked like before they had tomato sauce. They didn’t even have noodles for the longest time. Those came from China.

No spaghetti. No ziti. No lasagna as we know it.

Can you imagine going to an Italian restaurant that didn’t serve those things? What would you order?

Garlic bread. That’s it!

Now imagine you’re an Italian chef in 1492 AD. You’re at the top of your game, you know everything there is to know about feta and artichokes—I almost said zucchini, but those came from Central America. Potatoes were imported from Peru.

But you’re the best of the best, the master of carrots and chicken. And then out of nowhere this jackass comes back from his suicide trip across the Atlantic with a round, red thing that everyone thinks is a vegetable but is really a fruit.

You can slice it, crush it, chop it. It’s like nothing anyone’s eaten before. And everybody wants to put it in everything.

It’s the tomato.

Huzzah, shithead! If you don’t figure out what to do with it fast, you’ll be out of a fucking job.

You do the best you can. You get a handful of those little guys, you see what you can do.

And before long, you’ve got the world’s first pizza. And some beautiful maniac down the street makes a plate of spaghetti with meatballs.

And you change the course of history. You don’t conquer any nations. You’re not Julius Caesar. You haven’t discovered electricity.

You’ve done something bigger than that. You’ve changed what people put in their mouths. You’ve given them something new to crave, something to look forward to eating after a long day’s work, something that a year before then no one on your continent had ever even smelled.

You’ve changed how they sustain themselves, how they put nutrients into their bodies and one another’s bodies. You’ve introduced to the world a new way for people to show they love one another. You’ve expanded the vocabulary of human relationships.

That is what cooking is about. That is what I have devoted my life to.

I didn’t even realize that myself, until I told it to Zösch. I’d never had to formulate the thought before. But it was true.

And Zösch seemed to know it was true.

Something in what I told it made it understand what it was doing to us, that it was destroying the bodies, minds, and lives of individual people, and that those people and their lives were precious to us.

It worked. I felt, through that metal handle, that everything Zösch had been doing was paused.

I had to act fast.

Zösch said they couldn’t halt what they were doing forever. They said they had to carry on with their work.

I asked how many people they needed for their experiments.

They still hadn’t quite wrapped their collective so-called mind around the basis for that question. The sense we have of being individuals. Our identities, and the lives we lead apart from one another.

But after some time passed, I understood that Zösch had made quick progress on this. Their answer was that they didn’t need more than one person. One of us would suffice. Now that they realized we were all different people, or that we thought we were all different people, and not just a vast species, like themselves, they said they could work on just one living body, not thousands.

And so, after a split-second of hard thought, I did what anyone would do.

Or, not anyone.

Actually, a lot of people wouldn’t have done what I did then.

A lot of chefs wouldn’t have done it. They’re egomaniacs.

I may, in fact, have been the only chef of my standing who would act as I did in that moment.

I offered myself to Zösch. I asked if they would settle for experimenting only on me. They could take my mind away, and use it for what they needed, if it meant they could spare everyone else.

The answer came back in an instant.

Zösch agreed to my proposal. They said okay.

That was when my grip on the handle began to relax at last. I began to be aware again of what was happening in the room.

My hand was stiff. My arm, too.

Morning light shone through the kitchen window, which meant I’d been there at the stove for at least an hour. My phone was still buzzing on the counter. The first thing I wondered was how its battery hadn’t died. It was low when I got there.

Any second now, I would leave my body. Zösch would take over. I’d be there, but I would be gone.

I wondered what it would be like. To be alive but unable to move. To be locked in myself until I died.

I wondered what was taking Zösch so long.

That was when I saw Antoine lying on the floor. And I knew at once what had taken place.

I should have known what would happen. I wish I had known.

Zösch had not yet mastered the concept of individual human beings. They were still getting the hang of human experience.

When I offered myself to Zösch, and said they could take me as their living cadaver, their perpetual test subject, they still didn’t quite know the difference between me and Antoine. They couldn’t tell us apart, didn’t fully know what apart in this case even meant.

They had mistaken him for me. They had thought they were still talking to him.

He was gone before his body hit the floor.

Nothing that’s happened since then has mattered much to me. Not the bankruptcy, not the foreclosures, not the testimony I gave before Congress, where I was so drunk I could barely sit upright.

There may have been several of those. I don’t remember and I haven’t checked.

After I lost Antoine, I lived in a fog.

Things got a lot worse before they got good again. I lost everything before I got back some of it.

It took time for everyone to realize the wave of Zösch strokes had halted for good. All they knew was that a lot of people had eaten Sariel food and gotten sick, that more of them could start getting sick at any time, and that it was my fault.

Or, rather, they thought it was my fault, when really it was the fault of the Interstellar Expeditionary Corps. They were the ones who had brought Zösch to Earth, not me. I’ve never even been in space. I have no interest in going. I hear the food is awful.

But I can’t blame people for blaming me for how Zösch took their loved ones away. I did, after all, ensure that everyone in the world associated Zösch with me. I had hired a marketing team to make that happen.

I got hate mail, I got death threats. I went into hiding, and three times I tried to kill myself.

I was in a bad place. Zaid helped me out of it. Hooray for Zaid.

It worked out, in the end. A few months after Antoine’s mind went dark, and the light left his eyes, but he kept on breathing, Zösch decided it was in their best interests—and in ours—to keep the human race around. To help us, to make us better. Since they were living in all of our bodies, and in the trees, the grass, the air, and the soil, and since their intelligence is vaster than anything we can comprehend without their help, they were in a fine position to improve our lives, our species, our world.

Once they made up their minds, the change happened overnight.

People stopped getting sick, first off.

There’s no cancer anymore. There are no diseases. We don’t even catch colds, because the Zösch supplement our immune systems.

We all stopped getting hangovers. Zösch preserve us, now, from hangovers.

No one goes hungry. When we don’t eat for a while, Zösch reproduce in our stomachs so we feed on them.

Zösch live in our brains. Mental illness is no more. No one gets dementia.

People make mistakes, and hearts get broken, but no one gets depressed for no reason.

Zösch cleaned Earth’s oceans in a year and restored balance to the natural world, which they say they will maintain in perpetuity. The forests are thriving and the ice caps are back.

Last week, it snowed in Maine, for the first time in fifty years.

We are all partially Zösch, now. Zösch are the human race’s better half, the piece we were missing that has made us whole.

We are each other’s perfect symbiotes. Intergalactic soulmates.

I don’t know for sure what they get out of the deal, except that we spread them to new planets, new species, new ecosystems.

That’s probably it, actually. We have spaceships, and they hitch rides with us on those.

The human race is expanding, while I stay here and attend to Antoine. I file his nails, cut his hair, bathe him, read to him. Every time a ship travels to a star we never thought we’d reach before Zösch showed us how to get there, I sit with him and a tall glass of whiskey, and I read him the news of things we never thought possible.

He takes his meals through a tube, but we eat together, still. I cook meals the way he laid them out in his black notebooks, the ones he wrote his ideas, thoughts, and recipes in, starting long before we met, when he was young and his whole life was ahead of him. There are hundreds of those notebooks, and in some of them he wrote about us.