randomeer: StaceyQ
It began, as most world‑tilting events do, with a promise that sounded too convenient to be true. A single white capsule, no bigger than a breath mint, marketed as The Efficiency Pill. “Streamline your biology,” the adverts said. “Reclaim your time.” No one expected it to rewrite civilisation.
Within a week of swallowing it, people realised the truth: they no longer needed to pee or poo. Not less often — never again. The digestive system simply… optimised itself. Food became pure energy. Waste became myth.
At first, the world celebrated. Commuters rejoiced at the disappearance of the “emergency loo dash”. Parents marvelled at nappies becoming obsolete overnight. Festivals became utopian landscapes free of queues and questionable portable toilets. Humanity felt lighter, cleaner, almost futuristic.
But the deeper changes came quietly.
Entire industries collapsed. Plumbers retrained en masse, some becoming urban gardeners, others philosophers with too much time on their hands. Public restrooms were repurposed into micro‑libraries, charging stations, confession booths, and tiny karaoke rooms where people sang to fill the silence left by their vanished bodily rituals.
Restaurants adapted too. Without the fear of digestive consequences, menus became reckless. Triple‑fried cheese towers. Midnight curry challenges. Desserts engineered purely for emotional impact. Eating became performance art.
Social norms shifted. Without bathroom breaks, workdays stretched unnervingly long until unions demanded “synthetic pauses” — mandatory moments of solitude to replace the old biological ones. People didn’t realise how much thinking they used to do in bathrooms until the thinking stopped.
And yet, beneath the convenience, a strange nostalgia lingered. Humanity had lost something intimate, something grounding. The quiet moments behind a locked door. The universal vulnerability. The shared, unspoken understanding.
Because in the end, a poo was humanity’s great leveller — the one experience that spared no one, humbled everyone, and reminded us that beneath all our ambitions, titles, and pretence, we were gloriously, undeniably human.
