Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

He boomed his greeting in a heavy, hard-to-place accent: “Good evening, my friend!” Greatest among us are those who can deploy “my friend” to total strangers in a way that is not hollow, but somehow real and deeply felt; those who can make you, within seconds of first contact, believe it.

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.

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.

Stix—which were just pizzas that omitted tomato sauce and compensated for its absence with more cheese and even more cheese and a flaky garlic powder that carried a hot chemical burn.

I did finally realize that something had gone wrong; that the teenage machine had broken down, and that my body—desperate, pushed beyond any reasonable nutritional tolerances—was simply building new parts out of salt. I tried to improve my diet, but only in the most marginal and clueless ways.

It is only barely anthropomorphization to say it looked happy.

We are both always trying to impress her and not disappoint her, which can be a tricky combination.

I spotted the baker’s starter sitting on the countertop in a widemouthed plastic tub. Its name was written on a band of peeling tape: CLINT YEASTWOOD.