flesh1
Image:  Koren Shadmi
Tech

Flesh

If you think it’s impossible for the startup world to become any more absurd than it already is, well we have a tale for you.

If you think it’s impossible for the startup world to become any more absurd than it already is, well we have a tale for you. Sometimes a decent gauge of just how depraved a phenomenon has become is to finally take it to its extreme, and see just how far we may have yet to go. In this case, writer and tech worker Louis Evans’ story is both a delightful and disturbing satire—and, potentially, a rather useful measuring stick. You tell us. Enjoy, -the eds. 

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*

Pizza on the table, that’s how it started. Extra-virgin olive oil, mozzarella di bufala, prosciutto di parma–fancy pizza, for late-night lab grub.

Evan and Bobby were alone in the lab that night, and they toasted dixie cups filled with Safeway champagne and folded the pizza lengthwise and crosswise and forced it into gaping mouths, oil dripping from their grins. One table over, the synthetic mouse heart sat under glass. It went: tha thump, tha thump.

Until just hours ago it had lain still and silent under the glass. There was no visible lightning when they flipped the switch, but the heart seized, and it moved.

And so here they were getting joyously drunk.

The pizza was very good, so Evan said so.

“This is fucking good prosciutto,” he said, “Where do they get this stuff, do you think?”

Bobby had worked his third slice into his mouth like origami and now he spoke with his mouth full. 

“Some pig farm up in Napa Valley, probably,” mumbled Bobby.

“Think we could grow it?” Evan took another bite.

“No. You have to smoke prosciutto.”

“But we need to try another mammal, anyway.”

Bobby nodded. “We do have the spare growth matrices.”

“Might as well pick a delicious one,” Evan said, “and hell, we could even sell the stuff.”

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“I don’t think Whole Foods would stock it.”

“Around the office, I mean.”

Bobby shrugged.

“Let’s do it,” Evan said. “Let’s do it right now.”

“But what cell line can we use? The prosciutto’s dead.” Bobby peeled a strip off of the pizza, eyeballed it regretfully, and lowered it gently into his mouth.

“The prosciutto’s dead,” Evan agreed. “We need something alive.” He surveyed the room.

Evan looked at Bobby. Bobby looked at Evan.

Laughing, they took turns drawing each other’s blood. Evan punched Bobby’s shoulder as Bobby squeezed out pipettes, blood samples splattering like loogies against the slides. It was late and they were drunk and it was fun. They smiled, closed the door and left. 

What remained behind began to grow. 

Within a month they had a pound each. A pound of Evan and a pound of Bobby. One weekend, they opened the incubators, carved off hunks of meat, and brought them to Bobby’s house.

The smokehouse in Bobby’s backyard was hobbyist-small but it still took time to fill with smoke. Inside the wooden box their flesh began to cure. And after hours of impatience, they doused the fire and removed the hanging chops, slapping them down onto a cutting board. 

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The slices were still hot to the touch. You really should wait for meat to cool. Evan didn’t, and with one swift motion the slice of Bobby’s flesh was in his mouth.

This is what Bobby’s flesh was like in Evan’s mouth: salt, and fat, and smoke. An almost buttery sublimation of aromatic flames; the faintest tang of blood. In bliss, Evan closed his eyes.

“Fuck me,” said Evan, and if Bobby had, perhaps things would have ended otherwise, “but this is good.”

Unlike Evan, Bobby let his slice cool. Bobby liked barbecues, but he also liked tea ceremonies. Unlike Evan, Bobby knew how to carve a turkey, but also how to dress, plate, and serve a turkey once it had been carved. When his teeth eventually broke Evan’s flesh, his tongue and palate held it close. He looked at Evan and smiled.

“Yeah. It is.”

They ate half of the smoked flesh right there out on the lawn, taking turns, only ever eating slices of the other. They both agreed there was something too bloodlessly sickening about eating the self. 

The remaining meat they tossed in two separate Tupperwares, “Evan” and “Bobby” scrawled respectively on the lids, indicators not of ownership but of contents, and when the weekend was over they brought it back to the lab. 

When Evan and Bobby wandered over to the fridge for a late lunch that afternoon, they found one of their grad students, takeout chopsticks at the ready, halfway through the Bobby meat.

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“Oh, sorry for raiding your lunch, Bob,” she said, mouth full, “but this is delicious! Where on earth did you get it?”

Evan glanced desperately at Bobby. Bobby glanced hopelessly at Evan. Honesty and delicacy fought a brief and furious war within each of them, and then Bobby told her.

And yeah, she gagged—but she still scraped out the plastic container. 

“You know,” said Evan, when they were alone again, “I think we really have something here.”

*

They fed the remaining uncooked flesh a nutrient slurry, and it grew and grew. Evan sketched product packages, advertisement designs, marketing campaigns. He read books on the BART, with titles like Crossing the Chasm, Selling the Invisible. Bobby tore down the smokehouse in his backyard and rebuilt it bigger, large enough to crawl into, to stand in, until it was half the size of a sweat lodge.

Evan and Bobby planned, filed papers of incorporation, built pitch decks. Bobby shaved before meeting the investors. Evan stared at the mirror, practiced his “human meat is humane meat” line over and over and over until it sank into the uncanny valley and climbed back out the other side.

They pitched and pitched until suddenly, there was quite a lot of money. Evan and Bobby took twin sabbaticals from Berkeley, and they built their company.

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Men love to tell that sort of tale, of power, wealth and glory. “I was there at the beginning, in the garage!” they say. Less often do they like to talk about what comes after. 

By the end of the second year there was no new funding and no real profits, either. Evan and Bobby—mostly Evan—could sell human meat as an exotic experience. They could sell to the very goth—or Evan could, anyway. Evan  managed to sell a hundred pounds to PETA for a stunt. But there were no factories, no refrigerated train cars, no seven-figure orders.

So things got tight, and tighter. And while Evan scrambled to keep their heads above water, it became harder to ignore that Bobby sold nothing. He tinkered with the incubators, and there he sat, drawing the same seed-funding salary, holding the same cofounder stock. Going on and on about the transcendent wonders of science.

Evan looked at his friend, partner and co-parent to twelve hundred pounds and counting of grade-A human steak, and frowned.

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Pizza on the table, Evan and Bobby alone in the lab. Evan thought he was breaking the news gently. “Don’t you think,” he said, that it was “best for everyone.” He said the word “amicable” and thought he was being kind. 

Bobby took it better than most. He nodded and made conciliatory noises and signed the papers. Bobby walked away with cash, three incubators—for personal use, he said—and every ounce of flesh that came from his germline.

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And now Evan was in business alone, and the business was Evan. Every ounce of flesh left in the company had come from his own body.

Just two weeks later, he began negotiations with the Army. “The perfect food for the perfect soldier,” Evan said, and shook the hand of general upon general. When the deal closed, Evan was quite suddenly richer than any professor.

After that, business grew, as exponential as cultured cells.

Evan hunted a new crop of donors, found those at the slim nexus of delicious and healthful and photogenic, and a new wave of flesh poured onto the shelves. Advertisements appeared up and down the freeway, a chiseled man presenting a haunch, a slender woman her flank. 

Evan sat for interviews, gesturing expansively in an expensive chair. “It’s a whole new talent,” he said, “just imagine. Someone, out there, is the tastiest man in America.” 

Celebrities came next. “A taste of the stars.” Suddenly Evan was negotiating personally with two movie stars, an MVP linebacker, a point guard, a million-follower influencer. Then one afternoon a friend he had met skiing at Vail sent him a news article. He clicked idly.

“The New Spiritual Frontier?” read the headline. Underneath it was something he hadn’t seen in years: Bobby’s face.

#

Bobby had walked out from the company with cash, three incubators, and six hundred pounds of his own flesh. There are worse ways to leave a breakup. And a breakup it was. Bobby spent the two months after the end hip-deep in whiskey, ice cream. 

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Until one morning he rubbed sleep out of bleary eyes and realized it was time for a cleanse.

Bobby believed in cleanses. He believed, sort of, in chakras, and quite entirely in hallucinogens. 

While Evan sold flesh to the Army, Bobby drank only coconut water for a week and did hot yoga twice a day. He forswore all electronic devices. He dropped LSD, DMT, ecstasy, molly. He considered, and decided against, trepanning. He taught himself the traditional Japanese tea ceremony by watching YouTube videos, and conducted it privately before every meal. He fasted. He rose with the sun and howled at the moon. He went on an eight-week meditation retreat with a policy of total silence.

Afterwards, Bobby came home and went down into the basement to check on the incubators, and he found himself looking at enlightenment.

In that instant Bobby realized: the flesh wasn’t a business, it was a religion. It was sacred. Flesh-vat grown but true flesh-was the path to human connection. And Bobby owed it to the world to share it. To share flesh, his flesh, with everyone.

#

Bobby built his retreat up in the North Bay, in redwood country, wine country, wheat country. Fertile country. In the summer the city of San Francisco is shrouded in fog and driving across the Golden Gate Bridge is like the passage to the next world, misty and indeterminate, and then suddenly you burst out in the sunshine and hills of Marin in an instant of clarity.

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Inside the retreat’s adobe duplex Bobby grew a rich, experimental polyculture. Each flesh was one of Bobby’s organs: brains, hearts, livers, all growing side by side, in a harmonious chorus of meat.

Bobby slept on a cot in the attic; there was no buyout money left for anything nicer.

He turned no one away. He smiled and embraced the yuppies, junkies and fanatics, and he brought them to the ritual. They bowed and shared intentions, and Bobby passed around thimbles of tea and wafers of flesh on a reed mat. They drank of his tea and they ate of his meat.

Journalists started to call on the retreat, and Bobby smiled at them the same smile he had for everyone, and he told them the story, the whole story. 

#

Evan finished reading, and he swore. This meant war. He sent a note to his lawyer: the link to the article about Bobby, with a single sentence message. “This makes us look bad” with no period. Now that he was wealthy he had no time for proper punctuation.

Evan tried to ignore it, tried to push it out of his mind. He booked double shifts with his personal trainer and triple shifts with his therapist, to whom he had never spoken Bobby’s name. He bought twenty-five billion acres of virtual land in the metaverse and an NFT of Monet’s Water Lilies mosaiced together out of sixty four million anime girl avatars. He went antiquing.

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It didn’t help. 

Evan’s lawyer wrote back, a four-hundred-page memo on various legal strategies.

“Realistically, however,” the memo said, “any benefit of litigation would be far outweighed by the damage to your reputation—”

Evan stopped reading. “sue him” he wrote back.

Bobby fought it in the courts. He appeared in person and wore a tie he hadn’t tried on for the better part of a decade. He dug up old contracts from forgotten berkeley.edu email accounts. He read legal blogs and got pro bono lawyers—freedom of speech, patent defense, freedom of religion. He had a good case: the severance contracts gave him noncommercial license to the incubators.

But on the other hand, Bobby did accept money from the retreat attendees, and when he was interviewed about the lawsuit, he said some intemperate things. Evan sent lawyer after fresh-faced lawyer, and motion by motion, month by month, they sank their teeth in down to the bone.

The full story of the lawsuit is a long one, and if you get a California patent attorney drunk they will have all sorts of opinions about how it was fought. But no matter what wasted lawyers whisper in your ear, the fact remains: Evan won.

#

Some of Bobby’s disciples proposed protests, sit-ins, or sabotage. Bobby sent them away with a downcast glance. When the repo men came for his incubators, Bobby wept, huddled by the cot in the stripped-bare attic. And then, like a gored boar, he rose uncertainly to his feet. 

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#

Evan sat, unaccompanied, at the head of the table. He wore a sports jacket; his shirt collar lay stylishly unbuttoned. Silk shirt, silk napkin. He was waiting for the chef to finish a special meal—one he had missed for a decade: Bobby.

And now, finally, after ten years, the plate was in front of Evan, a steak of his ex-partner’s flesh atop it. Seared. Rare. Naked; not even a single sprig of parsley. Blood pooling in the lip of the plate.

Evan dismissed the chef. Sometimes solitude is that last essential ingredient of fine dining.

Evan lifted his half-empty champagne flute, and toasted Bobby silently. He sank the fork into the flesh. The knife followed.

It was at just as Evan’s knife plunged downward that Bobby hoisted himself up and over the handrail and onto the dining room’s balcony. He stood outside, invisible, watching Evan eat. Evan’s stainless-steel knife rose and fell, rose and fell. His lips worked around Bobby’s gristle, his teeth tore through Bobby’s muscle. Bobby’s blood dribbled down his chin.

Bobby watched, and then with one final epiphany he understood. A decade of distance, of mistakes and regret, could be resolved by an instant of pure and reciprocal communion—and Evan had brought them halfway there.

A rock in Bobby’s hand, fire in his blood, the window in falling shards as Bobby stepped into the room. Evan, shock on his face, mouth half-open, full of fat, toppled backwards, his shirt open, his hands raised in fear, holding the fork, holding the knife.

And then Bobby was on top of Evan, and the knife was Bobby’s. Underneath him the bare breast heaved. The knife described a perfect butcher’s arc.

Even raw, Evan’s flesh had never tasted half as good.


Louis Evans has worked in startups for most of a decade. His writing has appeared in Nature: Futures, Interzone, Blood Knife, and more.