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Jack sighed and spun his chair, lab coat wrinkled and unbuttoned.
“We’ve already tested that dude.”
Legoshi shook his head.
“W-what about sea creatures?”
“Tested that too. Look,” Jack took a giant stack of papers from his desk and thrust them into the wolf’s hands. He began counting off his fingers.
“Reptiles, birds, mammals sea and land, amphibians, fish bony and otherwise, invertebrates, hell even insects and crustaceans. Not to mention a whole host of other tests we ran. Thousands of samples. Tens of thousands. Blind tests, control groups, biases, genetic makeup, preferences, cultures, languages, disabilities, never eaten one before, eaten too many, like them, don’t like them, inability to digest them, supplements, dilutions, scent-only, visual-only, touch-only, taste-only, and every combination in-between. Months and months of this shit. Over and over again!”
Jack stood up and threw a book at the wall.
“I’m sick of it! I’m sick of eggs! They’re just different! They are different! And we don’t know why!”
Legoshi stood there awkwardly, fingers flipping through the hundreds of pages of notes in his hands.
“You have no idea?”
Jack held his head in his hands and sighed, slumping back into his chair.
“No. We have no idea. Three million taxpayer dollars and two years of my fucking life and we have no idea…”
He looked up at the wolf through tired eyes.
“We ran every test you can think of. And I don’t just mean with animals. We broke those eggs down to the atom, pulled apart every piece of them. It just makes no sense. There is no explanation in the realm of physics or chemistry or biology for why these eggs taste differently. Why everything that perceives them, regardless of every variable we have the ability to account for, automatically thinks, and, even KNOWS, that those eggs taste better than normal eggs. Are better. In every way. It isn’t possible. We can’t explain it.”
“So… you’re saying…”
“I’m saying,” Jack leaned forward in his chair, clasping his hands between his knees, glasses slumping down to the end of his snout, “that science as we know it, as we are able to conduct it, cannot answer this question. We can observe the results, the effect of the cause, but we cannot measure or even determine the cause itself.”
The two canines stayed in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts.
There was a knock at the door and then Miguno burst in, his lab coat looking just as disheveled as Jack’s.
“Hey! Hey guys! I think we’ve figured it out!”
“What?! How?!” Jack yelped, leaping out of his chair.
“It’s the only option left, especially since we’ve somehow disproven the existence of a god,” Miguno said, frowning at the notes he was carrying.
“Whaaaa?” Legoshi said, completely lost.
“Oh yeah, that,” Jack said, waving his hand dismissively. “Old news. Wait till you see what we’re doing with philosophy these days.”
“Anyway,” Miguno continued. “It’s magic. It has to be.”
Jack’s excited expression deflated. “Magic? Really?”
Miguno shrugged. “It’s literally the only option left. The think-tank team and the stats team all ganged up and wrote a list of everything it could possibly be.”
He held up a tablet and began scrolling through a massive document full of thousands and thousands of lines of items, all crossed out.
“See? It’s literally the only option left. We disproved aliens this morning.”
Jack pulled a crumpled piece of paper out from under his long-cold coffee mug. “Oh yeah. I was a bit sad about that one actually…”
“M-magic?” Legoshi asked, wishing he’d come in to check on the egg-testing facility earlier.
“Yup,” Miguno said. “Number-crunching says it’s probably a coven of witches somewhere here in this city infusing eggs with magic in order to make them tastier and more appealing.”
“Those bastards!” Jack yelled, throwing another book at the wall. Legoshi watched it fall into a large pile of other bent and broken books. He hadn’t seen Jack even pick that last one up.
“We have to stop them,” Jack cursed, looking at Legoshi with fiery eyes.
“Already sent out a kill-team,” Miguno said smugly.
“Wait, what?!” Legoshi spluttered.
“Excellent,” Jack said, ignoring his friend and tapping the side of his head. “Glad those mind-readers are working as intended.”
Miguno tapped his own head and smirked triumphantly.
“Mind-readers?! Kill-team?” Legoshi blurted out. “What the hell is going on?!”
“Progress. Progress, Legoshi!” Jack said forcefully, grabbing his friend’s shoulders and fixing him with a maniacal stare. The sudden change in demeanor was frightening, not to mention totally out of character for Jack. “Finally, the answer to our question is within our grasp! Finally we can stop the plot! Finally society will be freed from the reins of delicious eggs! Finally no more subtle manipulation from the shadows! We shall be free!!”
Jack panted and took a couple staggering steps back. He suddenly looked weak and frail, almost feverish. But that did not take away from the mad light in his eyes or the determined set of his jaw.
“All it took was the infiltration of every level of government, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of animal-hours, thousands of staff, a few murders, the development of new technology the likes of which have never been seen or dreamt up before now…”
Legoshi couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Had everyone here lost their minds? Miguno was smiling and nodding along to Jack’s crazed mutterings. The wolf decided to start with the most basic problem with what he was hearing and just work from there.
“J-Jack, you said two years and three million dollars,” he said quietly.
Jack paused a moment and then burst out laughing.
“Lies! Lies, Legoshi!” he yelled. “Told to keep you quiet and complacent. You’re my friend. I would never make a robot to replace you! I told you those lies before the solution was apparent! Now though, now we can come out of hiding and into the light! Out into a bright new dawn, a world with no unnatural eggs, no devilish schemes to make carnivores enjoy eggs so much that they lose the taste for meat, no wretched pulling of the strings from the shadows! Once the kill team brings me the witches’ heads we can craft a new world, a better world, a brighter future for us all!”
Jack leapt up onto a desk, scattering books and papers and test tubes everywhere.
“Don’t you see, Legoshi?! This is it! A brand new dawn for us all! With myself at the helm, unrivaled, unquestioned, infallible, a benevolent leader for all animalkind! No more eggs, no more magic, just Jack. Just Jack and all the science we can stand! I’ll-“
Legoshi woke with a start, panting and sweating. He looked around, desperately trying to remember where he was. It was so dark. He reached out and ripped away a curtain, revealing his dorm room. He sighed in relief before his eyes fell on Jack sitting at the table, scribbling away at something under a dim desk-lamp.
“Bad dream, Legoshi?” Jack asked softly.
Legoshi blinked and tried to get his breathing under control.
“Uh… kind of…” he said. “Wh-what are you doing up?”
As his senses slowly woke up and became sharper, he smelled something familiar in the air. His eyes landed on an open package of egg sandwiches in front of Jack.
“Oh, I couldn’t sleep so I’m taking a look at your egg sandwiches,” Jack said with a smile. “You said they’re so much better on Fridays, so I’m trying to figure out why.”
Legoshi’s eyes grew wide and he stammered, babbling, trying to say something. Horror rushed through him.
“Legoshi?” Jack said, looking at the wolf with concern. “You ok dude?”