The grief of the widow in apartment 3B tasted like burnt sugar and wet wool. Elara swirled the sensation on her tongue, a phantom vintage she’d decanted from the air in the hallway. It was a complex profile: a top note of shock, still sharp and metallic, but a lingering, cloying finish of decades-old love. It was her side hustle, this strange synesthesia. People paid her to describe the flavors of their loss, to give a shape to their sorrow.
Her inbox pinged. An offer from a company called Aethelred. The pay was astronomical, enough to make her current “grief consulting” seem like a child’s lemonade stand. The video call was with a man named Julian, who had the intense, unblinking eyes of a true believer and a dose of what the kids called main character energy.
“We’re developing a neural network,” he said, his office a blur of minimalist white. “An AI to help people process loss. We’re creating hyper-realistic digital twins of the deceased. The problem is the uncanny valley of emotion. Our chatbot can say ‘I miss you,’ but it lacks… texture.”
He wanted her palate. He wanted her to be the human data point, the sommelier for their algorithm.
The lab was as sterile as Julian’s office. They’d sit her in a chair, attach a few soft sensors to her temples, and give her an object. A faded photograph, a worn leather watch, a single earring. Elara would close her eyes and taste.
“This one,” she’d say, holding a child’s mitten, “it’s like biting into a cold, underripe strawberry. There’s the sting of a future that soured on the vine. And an aftertaste of… laundry detergent. The specific kind. A mundane, domestic anchor.”
The engineers would furiously type. The AI, which they called Echo, would process. *Input: ‘Fragaria vesca,’ ‘unripe,’ ‘low sucrose.’ Input: ‘Sodium laureth sulfate,’ ‘domestic association.’*
Weeks turned into a month. Elara tasted a hundred griefs. The sharp, acidic tang of a friendship betrayed. The hollow, airy flavor of a parent lost in old age, a grief prepared for but no less empty. The bitter grit of a lie told to a loved one, discovered only after they were gone. She was becoming a connoisseur of heartbreak.
Julian was thrilled. “The parasocial relationship our users will form with their digital twin will be seamless! No more messy, inefficient mourning.”
Elara felt a growing unease. She’d watch users in the beta test. A young man, doomscrolling through his phone while his deceased girlfriend’s chatbot messaged him, *“Remember that café in Paris? I miss their croissants. And you. xo.”* The chatbot’s grief, curated by Elara’s palate and perfected by the algorithm, was a warm, comforting loop. There was no progress. No healing. It was a cozy cardio for the soul, a gentle workout that never actually strengthened the muscle. It was, she realized, a bit delulu to think this was a solution.
She started quiet quitting. Her descriptions became less poetic. “Salty,” she’d say, or “bitter.” The intricate notes vanished. The flavor of all the world’s sorrow was flattening on her tongue, becoming a singular, synthetic grayness. Burnout. She was losing her gift to the machine.
The breaking point was a small, silver locket. Julian brought it to her himself, his usual slick confidence replaced by a raw vulnerability. “This was my brother’s,” he whispered. “It’s the final test for Echo.”
Elara held the locket. It was cool against her palm. She closed her eyes and tasted. It was overwhelming. Not one flavor, but a chaotic symphony. The bright, lemony zest of shared childhood laughter, curdled by the metallic taste of a stupid, drunken argument. The rich, dark chocolate of brotherly love, laced with the acrid poison of jealousy. And underneath it all, a deep, earthy note of bedrock—the profound, unshakable grief of a bond severed too soon. It tasted like a life.
She opened her eyes, tears streaming down her face. “It’s… it’s everything,” she stammered. “It’s the taste of a promise you made him that you couldn’t keep.”
Julian stared at her, his face ashen. On the monitor beside them, Echo’s analysis appeared. *[GRIEF PROFILE 74B]: High salinity. Trace elements of iron consistent with blood memory. Dominant emotional signifier: 89.4% REGRET. Sentimental value: EXTREME. Suggested response: “He knew you loved him.”*
The clinical text was a desecration. It was girl math for the soul, reducing an immeasurable debt of love and loss to a simple, solvable equation. For the first time, Julian wasn’t looking at the screen. He was looking at the locket in Elara’s hand, truly seeing it. The AI had given him the answer, but Elara had given him the wound.
She placed the locket on the table and stood up. “You can’t algorithm your way out of this,” she said softly. “Some things don’t have a palate. They just have to be felt.”
She walked out of the lab, leaving Julian alone with his perfectly quantified, utterly useless data. That night, for the first time in years, Elara made herself a cup of peppermint tea. She focused on the clean, sharp heat, the honest and uncomplicated flavor washing over her tongue. It tasted of nothing but itself. It was the most wonderful thing she had ever tasted.
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