Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  THE SLURRY TABLE

  WORK LOOKED LIKE THIS: me, sitting for twelve hours at my desk in the basement of a converted macaroni factory near the park where the Giants play. My company-issued laptop was hulking and loud, the roaring fan necessary to cool the superfast GPU within. At my desk, I hooked it into a pair of monitors, a keyboard, a tablet with stylus. No mouse. I’d learned the tablet trick from one of the patient programmers at Crowley, who recommended it as a ward against repetitive stress injury. Here at General Dexterity, the wraiths regarded it strangely. They could not yet imagine their bodies betraying them.

  ArmOS was comprised of two lobes.

  First there was Control, the code that told the arms how to move. It read their super-precise sensors, flexed their motor-muscles. The code was very compact and highly optimized, because any improvement to Control—a faster sensor reading, a firmer grip—applied to everything the arms did.

  Then there was Task, the code that told the arms why to move. Task was a thrilling jumble of heuristics and hacks. If Control was all about one thing—moving in space—then Task was about a thousand things. The module called Stacking gave the arms a theory of gravity, balance, and layers, and right next door there was the module called Glassware, a hard-coded cheat sheet containing the dimensions, to the micrometer, of the world’s ten thousand most common scientific flasks and vials.

  (In addition to Task and Control there was also Interface, the code that allowed users to control their arms and apply continuous ArmOS upgrades, all with a simple web app, but the other teams pitied Interface, because its work was so easy.)

  My manager, Peter, had recently been promoted to oversee all of Control. I worked on the submodule responsible for Proprioception, which is, I think, a beautiful word—pro-pri-o-cep-tion!—and also the process by which organisms judge the position of their own body parts in space. It’s a crucial sense; definitely more important than a few of the Big Five. When you walk, you look forward, not down at your feet, because you are confident they are where you expect them to be, obeying your commands. That’s a pretty cool feature.

  It was an unanticipated consequence of working on robot proprioception that I would often sit at my desk snaking my arms around in the air, trying to pay very close attention to what was happening. I’d close my eyes, extend a hand, lift it slowly while rotating it at the same time. What was I feeling? The weight of my own limb, yes; but also … a tendril of strange information. Not touch, exactly. Something else. Proprioception!

  I did this quite a bit, for reasons both technical and therapeutic, and once, I opened my eyes to find Peter standing there, silently watching me propriocept. I yelped.

  My persistent stomachache had been diagnosed after a consultation at General Dexterity’s in-house clinic (next to the dentist and the masseuse) as stress-related. The nurse plucked a brochure from a thick stack; its title, printed in Dextrous blue, was Taking Care of Yourself While You’re Changing the World.

  It was Peter who recommended switching to the liquid meal replacement that he and many of the other programmers preferred, and that seemed easier to digest under the circumstances, which were extreme and unrelenting.

  “Slurry,” he said. “It’s outstanding.”

  Slurry was a nutritive gel manufactured by an eponymous company even newer than General Dexterity. Dispensed in waxy green Tetra Paks, it had the consistency of a thick milkshake. It was nutritionally complete and rich with probiotics. It was fully dystopian.

  I signed up for a trial month using a coupon code obtained from Peter and had my subscription delivered directly to the office. I was not alone. On the day I picked it up in the mail room, there was an enormous ziggurat of green Tetra Paks waiting on a shipping pallet. The gel tasted like burnt almonds and it did sit better in my stomach than the regular food in the cafeteria; it also rescued me from the endless teeter-totter between salad bar and paella station.

  There was another benefit, which was social. At mealtimes, I sat in the Slurry corner of the cafeteria, where a not-insignificant fraction of the Dextrous gathered to furtively slurp our gray gel. The group around my table became my first shaky scaffolding of office friendship. Peter was our chieftain, and he was in fact sponsored by Slurry, his deluxe subscription provided free as long as he continued to place in the top five in his age group at approved athletic events (10K races, triathlons, caber tosses) and do so wearing bright green Slurry-branded spandex. His subscription was a bleeding-edge formulation with occasionally noxious side effects; he consumed it three times a day, seven days a week.

  The rest of us ate Slurry only two or three days a week. The other days, we slunk into the lunch line to select our preferred fried chicken parts under Chef Kate’s woeful gaze.

  Besides Peter, there was Garrett, a pale and intense programmer on the internationalization team; Benjamin, a security specialist who worked to ensure that the robot arms couldn’t be hacked; Anton, a sales associate burdened with a deeply unfortunate Bluetooth earpiece; and Arjun, a sprightly interface designer, also from Michigan, who became the first of the Dextrous I dared to call my friend. In addition to our interactions at the Slurry table, Arjun and I sometimes migrated to a bar farther down Townsend Street after leaving the office for ten p.m. beers and cheese fries. Peter did not approve.

  During a lull in the conversation around the table—they were many; we were awkward—I told my comrades in slurpage the sad news about Clement Street Soup and Sourdough.

  “I don’t eat bread,” Peter said preemptively.

  “Didn’t it hurt your stomach?” asked Garrett.

  It had not. “The soup was really spicy, but it was balanced somehow. And I really liked the guys who made it.” My cheeks felt tight, and I knew I was emitting a pulse of emotion that was too much for this crowd, so I said, “Back to Slurry for dinner!” and took a gurgling slurp from the Tetra Pak.

  * * *

  I COULDN’T FACE Proprioception or ArmOS or any of it, so I walked across Townsend Street to the Task Acquisition Center.

  All the arms faced different scenarios erected on workbenches wheeled and locked into place: one was an array of test tubes, as in a lab; another, a disassembled phone, as in a factory; another, an open cardboard box, as in a warehouse; and on and on. Arms had vacuums, arms had drills, arms had nothing but their bare six-fingered hands. The training floor clicked and whirred and whined and thwacked. Above the din, the occasional human curse.

  At each bench there was an instructor, moving an arm through a sequence of motions, demonstrating how a procedure unfolded: the lift and shake of a test tube; the pick and place of a phone assembly; the pack and seal of a box, which was a job for two arms together, punctuated by the skritchhh of tape.

  The trainers were contractors, very well compensated—but only temporarily. Each lab technician or factory worker or logistics specialist would teach one robot arm how to perform one task impeccably, under many different conditions, variously adverse. When the task had been mastered, it would be integrated into ArmOS, and in that moment, every General Dexterity arm on the planet would become that much more capable.

  There were trainers outside this building, too. In addition to all the built-in capabilities of ArmOS, there was a marketplace for skill extensions—things more niche than we could ever imagine. How to swirl a petri dish containing a particular strain of bacteria. How to insert a fuel rod safely into a nuclear reactor. How to sew the laces into a football. Whole companies had formed around some of these tasks. The fuel rod people had just three customers, and they were rich.

  I paused for a moment to watch the arms at work, and in their subtlest motions I could see my contribution. When they swiveled in two dimensions at once, the motion was smoother than it had been a few months ago. I’d spent a lot of time poring over the PKD 2891 Stepper Motor data sheet to figure that out.

  One arm, working under the supervision of a burly, bearded trainer, faced a mock kitchen countertop, bare except for a mixing bowl and a carton
of eggs. Oh no. I pitied it.

  The arm plucked an egg, brought it to the bowl, tapped it against the rim: once, gently (too gently); again, harder (still not enough); and a third time, too hard (much too hard), shell exploding against the bowl, yolk falling in orange ribbons through its fingers down both sides of the bowl, pooling on the countertop.

  I was glad not to be working on Force Feedback. Even after years of work, ArmOS struggled with its gentlest touch. We would solve everything else before we solved the egg problem.

  * * *

  THAT DAY, I left General Dexterity earlier than I ever had before, with the sun still shining on the sidewalk outside. I activated the standard suite of office chaff: left a data sheet on my desk, opened to its third page, seemingly mid-consultation, and draped my jacket artfully across the back of my chair, indicating that I hadn’t left the office—never that—but was only attending a meeting or crying in a bathroom. Normal stuff.

  In fact, I hopped aboard the Muni train bound for downtown. Riding across the city, I had a knotty feeling in my chest that I briefly worried might be cardiac, but by the time the 5 bus arrived in the Richmond District, I understood it was simply sorrow.

  THE CLEMENT STREET STARTER

  I HAD MOURNED MY LOSS and slurped my Slurry and was buffering a dark serial drama through my slow internet connection when I heard a knock on the door, light and confident. I knew that knock.

  It was Chaiman, for the first time unencumbered by his motorcycle helmet. His hair was sandy brown.

  “Number one eater!” he cried.

  Another figure was standing behind him, farther down the steps. This man had the same sweet face and the same sandy hair, but his skin was darker and he was thicker around the middle.

  Chaiman turned to him. “Beoreg, you are too shy. Come on.”

  The voice on the phone! Beoreg. Chef and baker, master of the double spicy, author of my comfort. I felt like I should bow.

  “We are leaving now,” Chaiman said. There was a brown taxi idling in the street behind them. “But Beo had the idea to give you a gift.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said.

  Beoreg smiled, but his gaze was fixed somewhere around my shins. He offered an object wrapped in a scratchy kitchen towel. It was a ceramic crock, about as big as a family-size jar of peanut butter, dark green with a matching lid, the glaze shimmering iridescent.

  “What is it?” It looked like the kind of vessel that might contain an ancestor’s ashes, which I definitely did not want.

  “It’s our culture,” Beoreg said softly.

  Nope, I definitely did not—

  “I mean ‘starter,’” Beoreg corrected himself. “For making sourdough bread, you know? I brought it so you could bake your own.”

  I had no idea what to do with a starter.

  Chaiman sensed my unease. “Beo will show you,” he said. He craned his neck to peer into my apartment. “If you have a kitchen?”

  I had a kitchen. I led them inside.

  “It’s very clean,” Beoreg said. His English was flawless, with a faint clip like something from a BBC show—a new one, not a historical drama.

  “I never cook,” I confessed.

  “Because you are the number one eater!” Chaiman hooted. He pointed gleefully at their menu, still stuck to the refrigerator.

  “Do you have flour?” Beoreg asked softly.

  I almost laughed. “No flour,” I said. “Really. I never cook.”

  He nodded sharply. “No problem. I’ll give you everything you need.” He jogged to the door.

  Chaiman had opened the refrigerator without asking and was rooting around inside. He pulled out a waxy Tetra Pak of Slurry and looked at it like it was a dead mouse.

  Beoreg returned a moment later dragging an enormous wooden trunk, scarred and stickered, something from another era of travel. He unhooked its clasps and threw back the lid; inside, arrayed in a jumble, were all the accoutrements of a kitchen.

  There were small long-handled cups and broad, flat pans. I saw a thick clutch of wooden spoons, their edges stained and charred, and a collection of mixing bowls nested one inside the other, padded with newspaper. There were murky glass vessels holding baby Xenomorphs (possibly they were pickles) and bright colorful boxes with labels in Arabic and Hebrew and other scripts I didn’t recognize. There were tiny unmarked jars holding red and yellow powders; precursor ingredients, no doubt, to the “secret spicy.” There was a cutting board upright along the back of the trunk, its surface mottled with spills and streaks and deep-notched evidence of cleaver work.

  While he rummaged, Beoreg asked, “So, do you know how bread is made?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Basically.” I knew there was flour involved. “Not really.” I was an eater, not a baker.

  “There’s a living thing, a culture. I guess it’s more American to say ‘starter.’ You mix the starter with the flour, along with water and salt, and it makes gas, which makes the dough rise. It gives it a certain flavor, too.” Beoreg stood, holding a selection of tools. “You’ve had pets?”

  I shook my head ruefully. The only living thing I had ever managed to support was myself, and then only barely, except for—

  “Maybe a plant?”

  “Yes!” I said. “I have a desk cactus.”

  “Okay! This culture—starter, sorry—it’s like that. It’s alive.” He lifted the crock’s lid. “See?”

  The gray slime inside looked distinctly not alive. It looked like an enemy of aliveness. Like something alive things crossed the street to avoid.

  “Smell,” he commanded, and offered the crock, tilting it toward me. “Can you detect it?”

  I took a guarded sniff, allowing no more than two or three molecules from the decrepit vessel into my nose. I equivocated. “What is it supposed to smell like?”

  “Bananas, a bit. It’s a very nice smell.”

  I sniffed again, still detected nothing, but nodded my head agreeably. “You’re right. That is nice.” It was the same strategy I employed at wine tastings.

  Beoreg beamed. “But you have to feed it, okay? Keep it going. I’ll show you how.”

  He plopped his selection of tools onto the countertop. First was a stout, thick-papered sack of flour, the top neatly folded and chip-clipped. “Whole flour,” he said. “It has to be whole.” Next came a small mixing bowl and a long-handled cup. “Measure twenty grams—just this much.” He lowered the cup into the sack, leveled it with his finger. “See?” He dumped the flour into the mixing bowl, then filled the same long-handled cup with water from the tap. “The same amount.” He added the water to the bowl, snatched up the last of his tools, a short wooden spoon, and started to stir.

  Chaiman had been fishing around in the trunk, and he stood holding a CD jewel case. “You must play the music of the Mazg, too!” he declared.

  I dug out my hulking General Dexterity laptop and felt along its edge for the CD tray I had never once used. Inside Chaiman’s jewel case there was a plain disc with its title handwritten in the mystery script of the menu. I dropped it into the tray. The laptop cleared its throat, whining and clicking, and sound began to flow from its speakers. It was the brothers’ hold music, sad and inimitable, crooned in that unfamiliar language. The language of the Mazg. As it played, Beoreg and Chaiman seemed to slow down and synchronize. Chaiman’s posture relaxed and Beoreg’s eyes softened as he stirred.

  “This is the starter’s food—see?” Beoreg said, showing me how the water and flour had combined into a pale paste. “It’s important to feed it every day. If you skip a day, it will be okay, but not any longer than that.”

  This was seeming like more and more of a commitment.

  Beoreg looked me in the eye for the first time, his gaze suddenly searching. “You’ll keep it alive?”

  I should have backed out. I should have thanked the brothers one last time for all the combos (double spicy) and escorted them back to their taxi waiting in the street. Instead, I said: “Of course I will.�
�

  Beoreg beamed. “Good! And you can bake with it. That’s great.” His eyes flickered down. He handed me the mixing bowl with its pasty contents. “Here, you can feed the starter now. Your first time.”

  I scooped up the floury paste with the spoon, held it for a moment over the shimmering maw of the crock, then plopped it in.

  “Do I stir it together?”

  “Yes, until it’s all mixed.”

  The pasty food marbled into the dark starter, and then the combined mixture faded to an even gray. I kept stirring, and stirring, until Beoreg said gently, “That’s enough.” He took the spoon, washed it quickly under the tap, then laid it neatly beside the mixing bowl and the long-handled cup. “All of these, you can keep.”

  He set the crock’s lid into place with the gentleness of a parent tucking a child into bed.

  I wondered what else was inside that trunk. “What about the spicy soup? Can I make that, too?”

  Beoreg looked sheepish. “It’s more complicated. I can write it down, maybe. Here.” He scrounged for a pen, crouched in front of the refrigerator, and wrote an email address along the bottom edge of their menu. It was the same dark, sure script; that was Beoreg’s handwriting. “Send me a message.”

  The brothers shuffled out of my apartment and into the taxi, still waving as its door clomped shut. The taxi’s tires squeaked as it leapt forward into the night, carrying them to the airport or the bus station or, who knows, maybe to a boat waiting at some lonely pier.

  Back in the apartment, the CD was still playing, sweet and sad.

  SPARTAN STIX

  LET ME JUST ESTABLISH where I was at with the whole cooking situation.

  When I was a child, my family had no distinguishable cuisine. I remember Happy Meal hamburgers and Hungry-Man fried chicken. I remember the Denny’s menu; we knew that backward and forward. I remember tubs of popcorn at the movies. Tubs of popcorn for dinner.

  We possessed no stock of recipes, no traditions, no ancestral affinities. There was a lot of migration and drama in our history; our line had been broken not once but many times, like one of those gruesome accident reports, the bone shattered in six places. When they put my family back together, they left out the food.