I stood in the crowded parking lot for Ted's Endless Meat and thought about Ted—Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third—slicing off flesh, grinding it up, and serving it for free to the poor, and at a nominal cost for everyone else. I wanted to feel sick.

Instead, I felt hungry.

The billionaires were saving us all. That’s what they said, and they had enough money to make that propaganda stick in the brain even if no one believed it. And no one believed it, let’s be clear about that. How could you believe it when every other billionaire was taking off on a generation ship where they’d be the godhead CEO or setting up a Lagrange Point off-world colony?

Those billionaires left on Earth were not going anywhere. They all paid big bucks to keep out of the news and scour any mention of their name from the internet. They were the invisible class, partying amongst themselves and those who sucked at their teats, all the service workers who were the “right kind of people” and made the billionaires feel like billionaires without, you know, actually having to experience living among people.

I’ll admit it’s an exaggeration to say the billionaires were saving us all. The billionaires were quite vocal and direct in saying they were saving humanity, but the truth was that “humanity” meant something different to each of them. Some defined it through the discredited idea of IQ. Some by the outmoded view of race. Some through the lens of misogyny. And some via out-and-out classism, as if just to prove all the Marxists right out of spite.

All of this went through my mind as I stood outside Ted's Endless Meat, the fastest growing fast food chain in the world. I was there to write a review for a paper funded by another billionaire. I wasn’t a food critic. There were no food critics anymore. I was a freelance generalized non-amateur content provider and this was my assignment for the day. It was this or a story on the happiness of those living on the street after the recent housing buyouts by a private equity firm owned by still another billionaire.

Ted's Endless Meat looked exactly as if it was designed by a billionaire, which is to say, expensive, inhuman, and pointless. It was the idea of the future from someone who grew up in the twenties filtered through meth and coffee grounds, a brutalist cathedral dressed up for a children’s birthday party. The building was three stories tall, but those two extra stories were empty, floorless, just an oversized container to hold all the expected wonder of the masses, those masses visible outside through the floor-to-roof windows—single-pane, no supporting structure, built from SupraGlas. A children’s playground sat outside the building, ground level with the drive-thru lanes and nothing to fence them off. A line of spring riders on very tall springs leaned towards the waiting cars, frogs, dogs, and pigs wearing realistic smiling faces. A spaceship made out of wooden planks (actually disguised plastic) and rope (more plastic) went up two stories, slanting out over the playground as if taking off. The playground was empty of children.

Inside the restaurant, the vaulted ceilings echoed every sound into a warm cacophony. Millions had been spent on sound-sculpting alone, making sure the interiors of Ted's Endless Meat would always be pleasant to the ear, everything from a burp to a gunshot would sound comforting. A lot of money went into making the experience pitch perfect and enriching, according to the restaurant PR people. Before the restaurant opened to the public, there were even rumors that the windows were some version of augmented reality glass unavailable to the public, filtering out all objectionable material so diners won’t be disturbed by the real world they’ve temporarily escaped.

The restaurant was packed. Close to the doors, there was space to move around, but as one approached the counter to order, being part of the crowd felt like being a pig carcass stuffed into a meat locker. Ted's Endless Meat was popular, had been since it opened, and that could no longer be explained by the media blitz. Superbowl ads, podcast spots, celebrity endorsements, it flooded popular culture. Even the competing documentaries on how the restaurant came about fired up interest, though the craft there was too bald, all surface and corporate approved. Not enough meat on the bone, you might say.

Whatever I ended up writing for my review, it would slant positive. Billionaires have no interest in making other billionaires look bad. But I wasn’t going to engineer that slant myself. I had some pride in my work, and the proprietary journalist software the paper used to “edit” my writing would massage my words so they said what the owner wanted it to say anyway. I provided the raw material, that’s all.

The menu for Ted's Endless Meat stretched up the entire height of the building, pictures of food billboarded like movie stars. Burgers, of course. Hot dogs. Nuggets. For sides, just fries. Potatoes were still plentiful, after all, easily grown on the vast soil rafts taking over the oceans. A few dollars for as much as you could eat. And if you were poor enough, everything was free.

Ted's Endless Meat was designed to end world hunger, though it was, as of yet, only located in America and other “developed” countries. But for the poor in those countries, it was a godsend. As I waited in line, dozens of people took plastic trays piled high with paper-wrapped food over to the dining area. The people eating here were from every walk of life. Those in ripped t-shirts and dirty jeans. The unhoused, overdressed in hoodies and jackets, folded blankets over their shoulders. The business casuals, partaking in the food because they could, not because they had to. Trying it out. A status symbol. And on many of those faces, a grim determination to their chewing, as if it was their duty to eat a billionaire, a way at getting back at the man.

The line moved quickly, putting me at the front before I was ready to order. A chipper young man locked his eyes with mine, his smile large, if a bit forced, on the edge of manic.

“Would you like to try the ribs, sir? It’s our new special. A limited supply only.”

That brought me up short. “Limited supply? I thought—”

“Limited today only, sir. There’ll be ribs tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.” The worker smiled. “Ribs are new. We want to build demand!”

He wasn’t trying to hurry me. The counter had eight people working the registers. Behind the counter, the industrial kitchen was visible just like you might find at a high-end restaurant where the chefs were part of the show, though here the show was simply the joy of watching a factory at work. The heat from the ovens was palpable from where I stood, though it didn’t make the restaurant itself uncomfortable. Those who worked the line extruded patties from tubes overhead, unpacked hot dogs from giant cardboard cartons where they were packed in like sardines. It was mesmerizing. It was disheartening. It looked like any other fast food kitchen, but faster, with more food.

“I’ll take one of everything, please.” At any other restaurant, such a request would out me as a critic, but here that order was normal enough. “And a bottle of water.”

The worker entered my order and swiped my card, then set about assembling all the food on a tray. The only strange thing about the kitchen I noticed were the ribs as they cooked on the grill. They looked too much like ribs, the bone peeking out from the ends. Fast food wasn’t supposed to look like real food. I could smell the ribs cooking. Despite myself, my mouth watered.

Ted's Endless Meat was only possible because of Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third’s pet obsession: regeneration. He was afraid of injury, being maimed, any sort of permanent scarring that would, in his view, change essentially who he was. Like many billionaires, having what amounted to infinite wealth made him all the more aware of being able to lose that wealth, and the power that came with it. Having everything, he enjoyed nothing, because it could all be taken away at any time. He admitted this himself in interviews, thinking it made him relatable, just another commoner, a man-of-the-people who feared a fate worse than death just like we all did. Of course, disfigurement was only really a burden on the poor. Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third had access to the best plastic surgeons, the most expensive and state-of-the-art prosthetics.

And yet, that fear.

With pouring billions into research, funding every possible model, the death vaccine was created. It wasn’t really a vaccine and it didn’t really prevent death, but the first reporter to break the story used that name and it stuck, and that reporter lost his job and any future job in news media. The company which discovered the death vaccine was OnUs Inc., though they were quickly buried under an avalanche of shell companies. Yes, Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third was all about transparency—what did a billionaire have to hide, anyway?—but still.

My food arrived without fanfare, the tray clean of even a stray drop of sauce or errant fry. I avoided looking at the food as I lifted the tray and walked back through the hungry crowd. The dining area was in another section of the restaurant, a wide annex that curved around the back of the building like the tail of a cat at rest. On the wall dividing the ordering area from the dining tables was a large picture of our billionaire benefactor. The man was at least fifty, but his face was baby smooth, bald on top and beardless. He didn’t have a second chin, but he looked well-fed and slightly, well, over-full, like a glass of water poured so high the water rises above the lip of the glass, threatening to spill over. He smiled with his lips closed and eyes squinched as if he’d learned exactly those facial movements to put people at ease. Underneath the picture was a hagiographic write-up of Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third and his grand desire to end world hunger, underlined by his most famous quote: We are all one world, one body. My body is your body is our body.

And this is what I was about to eat, what everyone around me was already chowing down on. His body. His flesh transformed, slapped on a bun, slathered in BBQ sauce, fried up with a flaky panko crust. The sounds of the crowd eating were almost as loud as the conversations. 

I found a table in the middle of the scrum with no one else at it, perhaps because the previous diners had left their trash spread over the tabletop like a desecrated corpse. Using my tray, I cleared a small space for myself, pushing the food scraps aside. It felt like I was entering a battlefield. Or a gladiatorial pit, and around me were the remains of all who’d tried before. I’d been a history major in college. I couldn’t help myself sometimes with the allusions. Besides, I was trying not to think about cannibalism. The ribs on my tray looked like ribs. There was no escaping it.

The death vaccine was inordinately expensive, not only to develop, but to produce. Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third took it upon himself to be the trial subject (after countless animals and, yes, even human experiments), testing his body with his ultimate fear: he sliced off the tip of his pinkie. Instantly, the pinkie grew back. He cut off the entire finger. Again, it sprung back into existence. His body, finally, was immune to being defaced.

But even as a billionaire, he realized how lucky he was, how treasured this ability and, as a result, what a burden it could be. With great power comes the desire for people to recognize that power and be thankful for that power, is the way one critic put it before she was silenced. He understood the meaning of sacrifice, and so suffered endless cuts and severings and slicings and chops in order to provide the world with what it needed. Food. Endless food. Free food. So no one would have to starve ever again, as long as they were within driving distance of a Ted's Endless Meat.

At a nearby table, a young girl complained that she wanted “chicken nuggets, not Teddy nuggets.”

Two older kids at the table ate burgers, closing their eyes in pleasure with each bite.

The father said, “You have to eat them, honey. I’ll get you chicken nuggets next week, we just can’t afford—”

“I want chicken nuggets!” the girl screamed, and made to throw her tray on the ground, the father only just grabbing it in time.

The father took a nugget and smiled grotesquely. It was meant to be encouraging, showing the deliciousness on offer. He nibbled the nugget and swallowed, making a big production of it all.

“If you don’t want them, I’ll eat them. They are delicious.”

The girl said, “But what will I eat, then?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

She pulled the nuggets close to her and leaned protectively over them, sniffing suspiciously. Then she bit into one and yipped in surprise, gobbling the rest up in no time.

I looked at the array of food before me. It looked as good as any other fast food, no better, no worse. It was a secret process the company used to take the raw material from Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third and transform it into something palatable, reasonably healthy, and free from disease. No outside observer had been privy to that process. And other than an occasional video from the billionaire where he demonstrated his sacrifice, and the efficacy of the death vaccine, there was no evidence for his miraculous discovery, either. No one had been able to reproduce it or, if they had, they’d been bought out or otherwise removed from the picture.

All around me, people ate. They ate until they were full. Were they happy? Were they sad? Were they simply surviving? I didn’t know and couldn’t really tell. It wasn’t my job to tell. My job was to eat this food and write about it.

The hot dog looked like a burnt toe. The nuggets looked nothing like chicken. The burger had a potato bread bun which was an acceptable disguise. I lifted it to my mouth and took a bite.

Some people online say that to eat at Ted's Endless Meat is simply to play into Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third’s kink. He wants people to eat him. He gets off on the pain. He has a savior complex. A god complex. He’s a masochist and now can indulge as much as he wants, in public, for a socially-acceptable reason. A laudable reason. A praiseworthy reason. But no one can deny that he’s feeding the hungry, and his fast food restaurants are saving the government money. Just like the robber barons of old, this fast food chain will be his museum, his library, his institution to make up for his accumulation of billions. This will be the one thing that will bleach clean his soiled soil.

Other people online say that the death vaccine exists, sure, and Theodore Rufus MacIntyre the Third did, at least once, cut off pieces of himself on camera, but that to provide food at this scale, he certainly can’t be doing it himself. There must be a factory, or factories, with people he’s given the vaccine to, people he’s harvesting to get all the food needed for Ted's Endless Meat. Sure, the regeneration is near instant, if videos are to be believed, but would a billionaire put himself through that much pain? Or would he simply pay others to suffer for him, and reap all the praise himself?

As for me, I chewed on the burger and—I hated myself for this—I found it delicious. I ate it all. Then the hot dog and the nuggets and, God help me, the ribs. He’s not a good man. It is not good food. But when the tray was empty and the last of the sauce licked up, finger smear by finger smear, I went back for more.