Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

I drove west through the narrow pass in the Rockies, crossed the dusty nothing of Nevada, and crashed into the verdant, vertical shock of California. I was agog. Southeastern Michigan is flat, almost concave; here was a world with a z-axis.

In my apartment on Cabrillo Street, I existed mostly in a state of catatonic recovery, brain flaccid, cells gasping. My parents were far away, locked in the frame of a video chat window. I didn’t have any friends in San Francisco aside from a handful of Dextrous, but they were just as traumatized as I was. My apartment was small and dark, and I paid too much for it, and the internet was slow.

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.

Soylent reference?

The teenage body is a miracle. How did it scrounge from those sticks of burnt starch enough vitamins and minerals to sustain me, and not just sustain me but make me grow, and grow absurdly, grow six inches, grow boobs and hips? It was a disgusting diet. I realize that now. I bow down before that body.

That loaf of bread was the first thing I’d ever prepared myself that did not come out of a box with instructions printed on the side. My apartment was suffused with its smell, the smell I knew and loved. I wanted to fish out my phone and dial the old number and cry out to Beoreg before he could put me on hold: I did it!

Cornelia’s car was her defining feature. I saw it approximately a hundred times more often than I saw her: a battered green Honda CR-V that was always parked directly in front of the house, except for when Cornelia was working, when she replaced it with four traffic cones. As I watched, she removed them from the trunk and plunked them down. The car’s windshield was bordered with the badges and shields of every extant on-demand delivery service, along with several that were now defunct. While she navigated us to the expedient big-box home-supply store just south of the city, she swiped through a long carousel of apps with one hand and, I sensed, ninety percent of her attention. “Nah,” she murmured. “Nah. Nah. Nah.” Cornelia was a highly strategic pawn in the on-demand delivery marketplace. Most hours of most days, she lounged at home in her sweatpants. But she was at all times monitoring the apps, and at the moments when demand burned blue-hot—Friday nights, often, but also random Tuesdays when the fog was at its thickest, suggesting to people that they ought to stay home and ponder their lives over delivered Burmese food—Cornelia would spring into action and earn a thousand dollars in a tire-screeching rally worthy of Bullitt. When it rained, she paid her rent in a day.

Forty dollars. I made more than that in fifteen minutes of programming, but this money felt special.

$320K?

Do you know how the markets work? No, of course you don’t. There’s an audition every month. Fancy judges. Mostly insufferable, but Lily Belasco is okay. If they like what you bring, they assign you to a market. Lake Merritt, if you’re lucky. Colma, if you’re not.

This grand structure on the city’s edge, perched on pylons, built a hundred years ago and in the middle of that century, not merely abandoned but actually walled off by a dark freeway that curled around the Embarcadero like a rampart. Then, an earthquake came and it was like something out of a fairy tale: the wall tumbles, the spell fades, and the townspeople realize what a gift they’ve possessed all along. The Ferry Building was rebuilt, reopened. It was better than ever, and best of all on Saturdays, when it unfurled itself into a farmers market that filled up the plazas, reached out onto the piers. Trucks converged from a hundred miles in every direction carrying fruits, nuts, vegetables, flowers, fresh meat; the whole bounty of California. The sun glittered on the bay and the big bridge to Oakland bracketed the scene like a picture frame.

For all his reality-bending intensity, our CEO was accessible and approachable. He ate his lunch in the cafeteria with the rest of us, sitting with a different group every day. You could tell where he was without looking because Andrei’s table always laughed a little too loud.

I WAS GETTING HEALTHY. My arms were stronger, from working the dough. My legs were thicker, from riding my bicycle. My butt showed a heretofore unimagined definition. Even with all the bread I was eating—and it was not a small amount—I lost ten pounds. I felt lean and purposeful. Scoping myself out in my stand-up mirror, I turned and gently twerked.

“On both sides, they’ve failed us,” the fish said. “Of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet.” Murmurs of agreement and apprehension at that. “But on the other side … the organic farms, the precious restaurants … these are toy supply chains. ‘Farm to table,’ they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out.” The crowd was silent. “I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it’s all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.”

I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

“In that cave, empires are rising and falling. There are battles under way. Wars. More soldiers on both sides than in all the wars of human history combined. And they are struggling. They are taking territory, making it safe. Building fortresses.” He lifted the wheel he’d chosen out of his basket and hefted it. “There is a saga in here to put our whole history to shame.”

I’m starting a new business, and I need your help. I want to learn how to use knives correctly, and which vegetables are which, and how to make my own spicy soup. (That’s not a euphemism.) (It could be a euphemism.) If you can teach me, I can teach the Vitruvian, and then those skills can be shared in a new way, thanks to my former employer. The world is going to change, I think—slowly at first, then faster than anyone expects. It’s going to be a weird time, but along the way I think I can get rich. We can get rich.

In California, it is well-known that a winemaker might from time to time send someone—a young friend?—to France for a vacation at a guesthouse near one of the grand old vineyards of the Gironde. A scenic place. Romantic. And the young friend might happen, on the last day of this vacation, to wander past the vineyard, and he might happen to have in his pocket a sharp knife. If those things were all true, he might then step off the path and sever a length of vine. Just ten inches. A foot. Not much. Perhaps two such lengths. And then, having found himself in possession of these cuttings, he might make haste to the guesthouse, wrap them in damp towels, layer them beneath socks and sweaters at the bottom of his luggage, and go without stopping to the airport. Then, at the gateway into the United States, when asked if he carries any biological material, if he’s been to any farms while abroad—well, it was all such happenstance, why would he say anything except, No, no, nothing like that, I was just on vacation?

ITALY. JIM IMAGINED PIAZZAS, palazzos, pizzerias—a country all roundness, warmth, and invitation. He imagined café tables set up on ancient tiles, music always filtering in from the next street. Instead, Turin’s soundtrack is the honking of small cars. The pedestrians have a gloomy look, eyes all downcast. It’s colder than he expected, and he has neglected to bring anything heavier than a T-shirt. He’s twenty-one. He’s from California. He doesn’t yet think of these things.