The story began mundanely enough. I had gone to the local grocery store and picked up a regular, mid-range sausage—nothing exotic, just something simple for a couple of quick sandwiches. At home, I sliced off a few pieces, ate them, and wrapped the remainder before tucking it into the refrigerator. It was an entirely normal transaction, a routine part of dinner preparation.
The next morning, however, the routine fractured. While preparing my breakfast, I pulled the sausage out of the fridge and took up the knife. As I began to cut, I immediately noticed a strange resistance. The knife dragged oddly, as if encountering something unusually hard inside the meat. Initially, I dismissed it, thinking perhaps the sausage had frozen unevenly or that the factory had used a particularly dense casing.
I pressed the knife down again, intending to cut another slice, but this time the blade stopped abruptly, wedged fast. Intrigued and slightly annoyed, I peered closer at the obstruction. That’s when I froze, a shiver running down my spine: deep in the center of the sausage, something was unmistakably metallic and shiny.
My mind raced, jumping to common, if unpleasant, possibilities. A piece of shrapnel from the processing machinery? A stray metal fragment? Disgust churned in my stomach, magnified by the memory that I had already consumed several slices from this very product the night before. I carefully began to pick at the surrounding meat, trying to extract the foreign object.
What I pulled out wasn’t a piece of metal, nor was it any recognizable industrial component. It was a USB flash drive. A small, completely ordinary storage device, likely holding just a few gigabytes of data, yet its presence was utterly bizarre. The reality of the situation—finding a piece of consumer electronics sealed inside a factory-made food product—was both repulsive and baffling. How could this happen, especially in a product that wasn’t cheap or carelessly produced?
However, the raw curiosity of the situation swiftly overcame my initial revulsion. I couldn’t simply throw it away without knowing what bizarre secret it held. I carried the drive to my computer, my hands trembling slightly, and inserted it into the port. I watched the screen, waiting for the drive to load, my heartbeat accelerating with every slow rotation of the cursor.
When the file explorer finally popped up, I froze again. The contents were incredibly sparse, but utterly deliberate. There was only one single folder, labeled cryptically in capital letters: “OPEN ME.”
Hesitantly, I double-clicked the folder. Inside was not a manifesto, nor were there lists of coded numbers, or any kind of threatening documents I half-expected. It contained only one item: a single, high-resolution photograph.
I clicked on the image. It showed the face of a man, mid-to-late thirties, well-groomed, with a disturbingly unsettling smile. He was staring directly into the camera lens, his expression one of confident, silent laughter.
The image wasn’t a mugshot; it wasn’t threatening in a traditional, obvious sense. But the context—the smile, the intentional placement of the drive inside the sausage, the unnerving command to “OPEN ME”—created an atmosphere of profound dread. I dropped the mouse and physically recoiled from the screen.
I stared at the image, trying to rationalize the situation. Was this some kind of twisted, elaborate prank? A ridiculous test of fate? But why the extreme effort to embed it in food? The intentionality was chilling. This wasn’t an accident. This was a message, placed where it was guaranteed to be found by someone who had already begun consuming the vehicle of the secret.
The fear wasn’t just about the drive; it was about the sickening realization that someone, somewhere, had deliberately tampered with food and introduced a piece of disturbing, personalized communication. It implied a malicious intent, a total disregard for consumer safety, and an act of psychological manipulation directed at a random individual.
Now, I am caught in a terrifying dilemma. Should I immediately contact the police? This is a clear case of product tampering, a potential threat to public health, and possibly a piece of evidence in a much larger, darker mystery. I could initiate a formal investigation, submit the drive and the remaining contaminated sausage, and potentially uncover a criminal operation.
But the alternative beckons strongly: the urge to simply discard the cursed sausage, wipe the flash drive, and try to forget the entire episode as a bizarre, isolated, and deeply unsettling moment of bad luck. The thought of getting involved in a potential criminal investigation, dealing with police bureaucracy, and having my life upended by this grotesque discovery is almost as repulsive as the thought of the embedded USB drive itself. The man’s smiling face on the screen, a silent, mocking witness to my fear, urges me toward secrecy and silence. I am paralyzed between the duty to report a crime and the intense, visceral desire for self-preservation and peace.