The bread that came out of the oven was blue, as usual. She set it on the cooling rack and waited. It didn’t change. It never did anymore. When she’d first started the job, the bread came out normal. Golden, warm, comforting. The way it should. Then one morning, it had a faint tint. Barely noticeable. Her supervisor had nodded approvingly. “Good,” he’d said. “You’re adapting.” She hadn’t understood what he meant—until the color deepened. Batch by batch. Day by day. Now, it was unmistakably blue. “Phase complete,” the monitor chimed behind her. She turned slowly. The display showed her latest scan results—physiology, neural patterns, chemical composition. All of it shifting. Aligning. “Adaptation at ninety-eight percent,” the system continued. Her throat tightened. “What happens at one hundred?” No response. She didn’t need one. She looked back at the bread, at the impossible color that had once seemed like the anomaly. Now she understood. It had never been the bread changing. It had been her. She pulled off her gloves, staring at her hands. There was a faint tint to them now. Subtle, but unmistakable. The same blue. She swallowed hard, then grabbed her bag. The alarms didn’t sound as she left. No one tried to stop her. That, more than anything, made her move faster. Outside, the air felt different—sharper, brighter. Almost too bright. The bus was already waiting. The driver glanced at her hands, then at her face, and simply nodded. She sat down without a word. She waved as the bus pulled away, relieved she would never need to explain any of this.