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.

Repetition was the enemy of creativity, he said. Repetition belonged to robots.

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.

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.

I sat and listened and smiled and genuinely enjoyed myself, though afterward, as I padded down the Farnsworth Steps, I worried that I’d been too quiet—too boring. The other Loises had sharp opinions. They took up space.

I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.

He, like me, had never before considered where bread came from, or why it looked the way it did. This was us, our time and place: we could wrestle sophisticated robots into submission, but were confounded by the most basic processes of life.

you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to more interesting things. Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

Some mornings, the repetition felt Zen-like; others, Sisyphean. But in either case, it felt good to use my arms, not my fingertips. My nose, not my eyes.

I was preternaturally productive in those hours. At first I theorized it was something about the rhythm of baking, the quick bursts of attention alternating with mandatory pauses, but then I decided it was probably something simpler: I was happy.

I walked out of the robot factory into bright sunlight with my belongings in a small box. My tablet and stylus; my picture of my parents; Kubrick the cactus. It was the middle of the day and I’d deployed no office chaff. Odd parts of me, my chin and my heels and the soft backs of my arms, felt tingling and buoyant. I was light.

There had to be a scale somewhere—the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings—upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.