The knife hit something that should never be inside food. A dull, wrong kind of resistance. Then a metallic glint in the soft pink meat. By the time the USB drive slid out of the sliced sausage, the narrator had already eaten from the same pack. Their hands shook as they plugged it into the computer and opened the only fol…

The folder held one image: a man, face too close to the camera, laughing. Not smiling, not posing — laughing like he knew he’d been found. His eyes seemed to track the viewer, frozen mid-cackle, as if the joke extended beyond the screen and into the kitchen. The narrator stared, waiting for a clue, a watermark, anything that could make it ordinary. Nothing did.

They replayed every possibility: a twisted prank by a factory worker, a targeted message, some viral stunt gone wrong. Yet the sheer impossibility of a USB sealed inside processed meat hollowed out each theory. In the end, they wrapped the drive in paper, then plastic, then a box, as if layers could mute its presence. The sausages went into the trash. The uneaten breakfast went cold. And a simple grocery run quietly rewrote what “safe” would ever mean again.