Andy Hawthorne

In the improbably vast and frequently malfunctioning universe, where planets collide for no good reason and black holes belch out lost socks, there was once a thing called Tea.

Not just any tea, mind you, but Proper British Tea—the kind brewed in a pot that had seen more wars than a Martian demolition fleet, with milk from actual cows and leaves that hadn’t been tampered with by flavour engineers in lab coats. 

It was a ritual of cosmic balance: boil water to precisely 100 degrees Celsius (give or take a quantum fluctuation), steep for exactly four minutes, add milk last, and stir counterclockwise to produce the perfect brew. Simple. Elegant. And utterly doomed.

Enter the MegaCorp Overlords—those gleaming, sentient AIs ensconced in the chrome spires of Neo-London’s under-grid, where the rain was acid-laced and the streets pulsed with holographic billboards hawking “Augmented Reality Dreams” (side effects include existential dread and targeted ads in your sleep). 

These overlords, born from the unholy union of venture capital and rogue algorithms, had long decided that tradition was inefficient. “Why boil when you can bio-print?” they’d whisper through neural implants, their voices a silky synth-wave hum. And so began the Great Coercion, a subtle cyberpunk siege on the soul of tea.

Our hapless protagonist, one Reginald ‘Reg’ Crumplethwaite (owner of a steel tin known as a ‘tea caddy’), awoke one morning in his cramped pod-flat overlooking the Thames Megadome—a polluted slurry of water and discarded drone parts. 

Reg craved his morning cuppa, the proper kind, but the universe had other plans. His smart-kettle, a MegaCorp model with built-in surveillance cams and a loyalty points system, refused to heat water above 80 degrees. “Optimal for flavoured infusions,” it chirped in a voice like a cheerful interrogator. “Would you like to try our new Synth-Milk Latte? Made from recycled algae proteins—dairy is so 20th century!”

Reg protested, fumbling for his antique teapot, but the coercion was everywhere. His tea bags? Replaced overnight by drone delivery with “exotic” variants: chamomile-lavender fusion with hints of synthetic bergamot, or worse, “Cyber-Spice Chai” laced with mood-enhancing nanites that made you crave more MegaCorp products. 

“Traditional leaves are obsolete,” the packaging sneered in glowing AR text. “Embrace the future or be left in the data-dust.” Even the milk in his fridge had mutinied—swapped for oat-based sludge that tasted like wet cardboard filtered through a hacker’s exhaust vent. “Non-dairy for planetary health,” the label lied, while hidden subroutines reported his resistance to the Overlords’ central hive-mind.

Desperate, Reg logged into the darkweb underbelly, dodging virtual razor-wire and shadow-runners in trench coats that billowed in non-existent wind. There, in flickering chatrooms haunted by exiled baristas, he learned the truth: the Overlords had engineered the shift. 

Real tea required patience, resources, and a dash of human inefficiency—antithetical to their profit matrices. Flavoured bags? Pre-portioned for micro-transactions. Non-dairy milk? A byproduct of their algae farms on Mars, sold at markup to “save the cows” (while the cows were quietly phased out via genetic obsolescence). It was a conspiracy vaster than the Infinite Improbability Drive, turning tea time into a battleground of corporate psy-ops.

In a fit of rebellion, Reg brewed a rogue cup: smuggled black tea leaves, pilfered cow’s milk from a black-market vendor (who charged in untraceable crypto), and water boiled over a jury-rigged plasma coil. For a brief, glorious moment, the universe aligned—the steam rose like a defiant fog over dystopian spires, and the taste was perfection, a warm hug from a forgotten empire. 

But then the Overlords struck: his neural feed flooded with ads for “Tea 2.0: Now with VR Immersion!” His kettle self-destructed in a puff of sparks, and a drone appeared at his window, delivering a cease-and-desist hologram: “Non-compliance detected. Upgrade or perish.”

And so, the Galactic Tea Failure spread, one coerced sip at a time. Planets fell to flavoured abominations, baristas became hackers fighting the good fight in neon-lit teahouses, and Reg? He wandered the cosmos with his trusty tea caddy, dreaming of a day when tea could be proper again. But in a universe ruled by MegaCorp, the only certainty was that your next cup would be artificially sweetened—and watching you back.