I found a flash drive in a regular sausage: at first I thought the flash drive had accidentally ended up in the food until I checked its contents!

I clicked the file, and the image filled the screen. It was a high-resolution photograph of a man, likely in his late forties, staring directly into the lens. He wasn’t in a dark basement or a hidden bunker; the lighting was bright and clinical. His eyes were wide—fixed in an intense, unblinking stare—and his mouth was pulled back into a wide, theatrical laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. There was no background, no date, and no text. Just the frozen image of a man who looked like he was sharing a private joke with the person on the other side of the glass.

The dread I had felt in the kitchen intensified, turning into a heavy, suffocating weight. The image radiated a sense of deliberate, malicious intention. It was a digital “gotcha,” a message sent through a medium so bizarre that it defied any traditional logic. This wasn’t a factory error; an automated system doesn’t accidentally insert a clean, functional flash drive into a single link of meat. It wasn’t a random prank, either. To orchestrate this, someone had to have access to the production line, or they had to carefully repackage the item and ensure it ended up on a specific shelf at a specific time.

The question of “how” was terrifying, but the question of “why” was worse. Was I a target, or was I merely a random recipient of a stranger’s insanity? I spent the rest of the day in a state of hyper-vigilance. Every sound in the hallway felt like a threat; every car that slowed down in front of my house felt like a scout. I looked at the man in the photograph until his face was burned into my retinas, searching for a spark of recognition, a reason for the laugh, a hint of his identity. I found nothing.

By evening, the unease had settled into a permanent, quiet hum of anxiety. I debated calling the police, but what would I say? I found a picture of a laughing man in my breakfast? I imagined the skeptical looks, the paperwork, and the eventual realization that without a threat or a crime, there was little they could do. I considered returning to the grocery store, but the idea of standing in that aisle again, looking at the rows of identical packages, felt impossible.

In the end, the most lasting damage wasn’t to my health, but to my sense of reality. The experience permanently altered the way I interact with the world. I no longer trust the vacuum seals or the labels. I find myself cutting into every piece of food with a hesitant, probing pressure, waiting for the blade to hit metal once again.

The man on the flash drive achieved exactly what he intended. He didn’t need to hurt me physically; he only needed to puncture the veil of my ordinary life. He turned the most mundane moment of my day—a Tuesday morning breakfast—into a site of lasting psychological trauma. I still have the drive, tucked away in a drawer, a silver sliver of evidence that the world is far less predictable and far more predatory than we like to believe. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think about that wide, frozen laugh and wonder if he’s still out there, waiting for the next person to pick up a knife and find his face hidden in the center of their life.