Tell me, what did you eat last night?

"The electric tongue says the soup needs more salt."

"It got more salt!"

Mothers and daughters have been bickering about seasoning ever since the stone age. One person's "too salty!" is another person's "you call that flavour?!" It is amazing kitchen knives are only ever rarely used to dispatch a disobedient daughter-in-law or to remind a nagging matriarch that she's overstepping the mark.

The electric tongue was supposed to solve all of those petty disagreements. When it was first released, back in the '30s, the tongue was a tangle of sensors with poor accuracy and an unnerving habit of leaking battery acid and microplastics into whatever was being tasted. A fad that wouldn't last the decade, they all said. Nowadays, fat bundles of them can be found in every kitchen. The modern tongue was a disposable bunch of circuitry which you threw at the bottom of the pot and then threw away after cooking. Zap-to-taste. It is a hundred times more accurate than its predecessor and can discern ten thousand spices, flavours, and ingredients.

It didn't stop the arguing though.

"It won't be strong enough for your great-grandpa. You know his tongue never worked right after coming home from the war."

"Grandpa has his own eChopStix. He'll be fine. The rest of us have to eat this stuff as well, you know?"

Family legend said that great-grandpa once ate a half-dozen genetically-engineered chilli peppers in order to win a bet with a soldier from the other side. The two men taking it in turn to prove their masculinity by shovelling gigapepps into their mouths. Honour was duly satisfied and both men walked away knowing their regiment was proud of them. These days, the great-grandchildren could barely remember which side had won the war. All they knew was that the old man didn't use milk in his tea; he used whiskey.

The eChopStix hung permanently on great-grandpa's belt. They were washed once a week, whether they needed to be or not, and were recharged at the same time. The old man would shuffle to the dinner table and stick the sticks into any dish he liked the look of. The casing of the chopsticks glowed depending on the level of spice. Too little and they remained duck-egg blue. Acceptable levels turned them a light orange. If he wanted something tasty, he added hot sauce until the sticks turned bright red. They pulsed ominously to warn other family members not to eat his specially prepared food.

It was the anniversary of the end of the war - although the old man hated to think about it - and the TV had been blaring memorial news all day long. As the first dish came out, he struggled to his feet with the aid of a grand-daughter whose name he'd forgotten. He cleared his throat, spat on the ground, and gave an impromptu speech in the formal dialect of his youth.

"Mates! Innit though? They was all chonkie bois and yas-kweened their top life. Chat, if you've got signal after being un-alived, Prime is on me. Like and subscribe."

The family around the table stopped livestreaming long enough to solemnly give their likes-and-subscribes. They ate their meal in silence.

Great-grandpa's belly exploded in the night, killing him instantly and unexpectedly redecorating the room.

That's where we came in. The death of a war veteran - even one dishonourably discharged for fraternising with the enemy - warranted a full investigation. There were no shortage of witnesses to interrogate. Nowadays we don't bother locking people in windowless rooms and beating them with a rubber hose; it's a barbaric and unhelpful practice. We aren't even allowed to strap humans into the mind-machine and crank up the voltage until their secrets come tumbling out. Inhumane, apparently. Besides, humans lie and forget. So we go straight to the source - their domestic appliances.

The electric tongue wasn't very talkative. It stored a log of all the sensations it had detected over the last week. Someone had been under-seasoning the meat. Not a capital crime and nothing for us to investigate. The household was getting plenty of iodine in their meals, which is probably why the old bastard lived so long. Someone had been baking sweet treats which was usually a sign of smuggling, but the family would probably have just claimed to have been pooling all their sugar rations.

Besides, none of the other family members had exploded in the night. We upgraded the electric tongue to a newer model which could report any illicit sugar usage back to HQ and moved on.

The next obvious step was the chopsticks. They were vintage! He probably picked them up when he was distributing surplus memes to the enemy. Sure, most soldiers had a side-hustle, but this wide-boy was found with industrial quantities of weapons-grade hentai. His service record showed that he'd been flogged and chewed half his tongue off before he gave up the names of his suppliers and customers. He left with no medals, but obviously got his hands on a few keepsakes. The chopsticks' hardware only had a limited memory, enough for a few meals to be uploaded to a long-since obsolete social network. There was a record of the spice levels and how many 🌶 points he'd accumulated - but no indicators of poison.

Newer versions of the chopsticks had a firmware update feature which meant they could detect biological nasties like salmonella, e-coli-max, and norovirus-76. Too late for him, obviously.

Super Toilets were supposed to last all summer long. That's what the marketing promised. Only having to upgrade your potty's hardware twice a year was a major selling point, especially in large families. This brick-shithouse was installed barely three months ago and should have been pristine. In theory it was monitoring the waste output of every family member for disease and disharmony. An instant Bluetooth alert if your piss tasted of cancer or your poo smelled of heart disease. Your smart-toilet would alert the public health authorities and they could quarantine you before you had a chance to spread anything infectious to your community.

One of the great-grand-kids, probably the terrified looking one, had hijacked the firmware. My guess is that he didn't want it to report back to the central bureaucracy just how much ultra-weed he was smoking. The boffins didn't care about that; a docile population is a peaceful population. But no one had managed to breed the paranoia out of the pot that freely circulated the enclave. So dope-heads fried the circuits of their shitters until the whole family's bowel movements were replaced with generic synthetic data. The whole lot of them may have been riddled with worms, on the verge of diabetes, or developing allergies to the mandatory vaccines and no one would have a clue. Grandpa's bowel bomb could have sat there for ages waiting to go off.

The lights didn't reveal anything. The washing machine's lint trap was an amalgam of half the street's washing. The TV camera showed the old man mostly dozing in front of ancient TikToks. For some inexplicable reasons, they still had a dumb-toaster! Who can live without Internet-connected bread?

Who watches the watches? We do. The wristwatch was blown to smithereens by the explosion, but its data was uploaded every hour to an encrypted server located somewhere outside our jurisdiction. Naturally, we recorded every packet entering or leaving the territory, just in case. Luckily, the format of the communication was entirely predictable so the obfuscation was functionally useless. His blood pressure started spiking about a week ago, around the same time as his heart rate became erratic. He was even sweating more than usual. Suspicious. Of course, there was no reason recorded - but it began to paint a picture of a man not entirely calm and collected.

The last interrogation was the smoke detector.

Oh ho! This was interesting.

The smoke detector had been sniffing farts for years. Officially, it was only meant to be detecting smoke particles so it could alert the fire brigade, insurance companies, and documentary crews. But, evidently, someone in the manufacturing team had a fetish! A dozen years ago, a university research team had received a government grant to study digestion. There had been general outcry when the university had produced an open-data release of flatulence. Noises, moisture levels, smells - this database had it all! The head researcher had been demonised in the press and was probably working down a reclamation mine somewhere in the DMZ. I made a note to pay that professor a visit to let her know she helped solve a murder.

Great-Grandpa's farts were legendary in his family. They probably should have been bottled to fling at the enemy. A noxious combination of chemicals and amino acids with names I couldn't even pronounce emanated from his arse at regular intervals in the night. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't choke to death every evening. He was made of strong stuff. Well, except for his stomach.

The digital nose had recorded a subtle change a few weeks ago. Whereas once his nighttime emanations had been entirely organic (though brewed in the fiery pits of Satan's own hellhole) they were suddenly filled with synthetic compounds. Weird plastics and reconstituted hydrocarbons were leaking out of him. Hints of ozone and tetrachlorides that shouldn't be produced in a normal human body were suddenly part of the nightly symphony. Evidently, something unnatural was inside him and wanted to come out.

Someone, as the old folks say, had set him up the bomb.

An old soldier makes many enemies. While hostilities have officially been on hiatus for several decades, the wounds of war linger on. It would have been unlikely that the other side had him as a priority target. He was never particularly highly ranked and hadn't committed any particularly egregious war crimes. The smuggling buddies he'd given up under torture were as low-level as it gets. No one on their side cared about the old man enough to waste him.

That left our side.

Shit. This investigation was about to get complicated…

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"