Lenny falls for Bea while working at the New Jersey end of a subterranean tunnel that transports Mission burritos from the Bay Area to New York City. The food travels 2,553 miles through a near-vacuum at just below the speed of sound, arriving in carbon-fibre pods on magnetic currents.
Three hours and twenty-one minutes before each delivery reaches Lenny, Bea handles the shipment at an East Bay facility. After a disaster above ground reduces the traffic to a single burrito at a time, Lenny begins wondering whether Bea might be thinking about him. His hopes grow when a note arrives with an “end-of-the-world burrito” and a message saying it is the best she has ever made.
The two workers soon use the burrito pods to exchange notes while they remain underground, with enough food to last for weeks. Lenny tries to interpret Bea’s comments and recipes as signs of affection, but his attempts to discuss his life leave him uncertain about how she feels.
Their exchange takes a darker, more abstract turn when Bea introduces a puzzle about an endlessly detailed map that contains a map of itself, and another map within that one. Lenny recognizes the paradox and asks whether the map-maker is also present inside every map, leaving their conversation suspended between romance and an increasingly unsettling question about reality.
“Somewhere over the transcontinental burrito tunnel” was published online by Nature on 30 October 2026 as part of its Nature Futures science-fiction series.
Sources: Nature.