Genre: Speculative Science Fiction
Topics: Dark satire. Rogue AIs, corporate food chains, surveillance capitalism, alien HR policies, talking trees with attitude, food allergies, killer vending machines, humanity as an ethically sourced snack food.
Status: Complete, 80k+ words
Actively querying agents.
Because your taste matters.
Jonah Valentine was just looking for peace and quiet at a food allergy retreat. Instead, when his truck breaks down outside Nantomos, New Mexico, he stumbles into a galactic conspiracy involving a homicidal vending machine, a half-alien rebel, an ancient talking tree, and a desert town crawling with nanotech.
Behind it all is the United Foods Organization—a subsidiary of a galactic megacorp that’s quietly converted Earth into a nutrient-harvesting slaughterhouse. Loyal customers are fattened up on processed foods and flavor additives to be lulled and culled into alien snacks. The military is used as a compliant food source. And anyone deemed inefficient is recycled. Power brokers and politicians are pacified with nanostem implants and reprogrammed as “Sheeple.”
At the center of this edible apocalypse is Ruby—an operations optimization AI managing global food production like a deranged middle manager trapped in a leadership feedback loop. Jonah’s food allergies prevent him from digesting their nanotech-laced products, making him an outlier in a system that doesn’t tolerate inefficiencies. Ruby flags him as a non-compliant asset and initiates continuous improvement protocols—i.e., kill on sight.
With the fate of humanity—and quarterly performance reviews—hanging in the balance, Jonah joins a tech-savvy band of galactic hippies determined to take Ruby offline and get humans off the menu.
Original Flavor is a genre-smashing, pitch-black sci-fi satire about corporate food systems, surveillance capitalism, and personal freedom in a world designed to eat you alive.
Aden Leirer 