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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.
I set out across the country with all my belongings in the back of my car and my desk cactus strapped into the passenger seat.
I did this once! Minus the cactus. Also, how big is this cactus that it can be strapped into the passenger seat?
The first week was amazing. Grouped with a dozen other newly Dextrous (as we were encouraged to call ourselves), I filled out health insurance forms and accepted a passel of phantasmal stock options and sat through recitations of the company’s short history.
Woof.
The programmers at General Dexterity were utterly unlike my colleagues at Crowley, who had been middle-aged and chilled-out, and who enjoyed nothing as much as a patient explanation. The Dextrous were in no way patient.
I've worked with the Crowley types mostly and am glad about it.
At Crowley Control Systems in Southfield, the message we received from Clark Crowley, delivered in an amble around the office every month or so, was: Keep up the fine work, folks! At General Dexterity in San Francisco, the message we received from Andrei, delivered in a quantitative business update every Tuesday and Thursday, was: We are on a mission to remake the conditions of human labor, so push harder, all of you.
Ughhhhh.
My apartment was small and dark, and I paid too much for it, and the internet was slow.
The internet being slow seems like the most tragic thing here, tbh. Fast internet should be the one upside of Silicon Valley job-based housing.
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.
If Vietnamese pho’s healing powers, physical and psychic, make traditional chicken noodle soup seem like dishwater—and they do—then this spicy soup, in turn, dishwatered pho. It was an elixir. The sandwich was spicier still, thin-sliced vegetables slathered with a fluorescent red sauce, the burn buffered by thick slabs of bread artfully toasted.
Love dishwater as a verb. Also ugh this sounds so goooood.
On the phone with Beoreg, I ordered my food with a rattling sigh, and when his brother arrived at my door, he carried something different: a more compact tub containing a fiery red broth and not one but two slabs of bread for dipping. “Secret spicy,” he whispered. The soup was so hot it burned the frustration out of me, and I went to bed feeling like a fresh plate, scalded and scraped clean.
The idea of cleansing heat is very much reminiscent of lines from The Guncle.
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.
What an odd location.
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.
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.
I don't think it's ever stated why they have six fingers, or even that they do outside of this one reference, really.
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.
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.
Armed with a dormitory meal plan, I consumed the equivalent of nine meals a day, all of them shaded brown, textured crispy. You would expect a vegetarian, perhaps, to eat vegetables; you would be disappointed. There was never on my tray a single tuft of green. I sat in various dorm rooms with my computer science cabal, plowing through problem sets, eating whole pizzas and so-called Spartan Sticks—named for the school’s mascot, and upon reflection, it may have been spelled Stix—which were just pizzas that omitted tomato sauce and compensated for its absence with more cheese and even more cheese
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I might not have been so eager to meet the Loises if I hadn’t been spending all day with the cold-eyed wraiths at General Dexterity. By comparison, hanging out with a bunch of middle-aged ladies with the same name as me sounded pretty alluring.
The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.
The hostess, whom I thought of as Hilltop Lois, had owned her house since 1972—an impossible span. She had once run a cheese shop at the base of the hill, and her taste had not grown less discriminating; she served us the stinkiest cheese I have ever been offered at a casual gathering.
But not the stinkiest cheese offered at non-casual gatherings?
Impeccable Lois, who possessed the kind of sartorial style that stops you on the street. She was wearing jodhpurs—with confidence—and above them an inky denim jacket that any of the cold-eyed wraiths would have killed her to acquire. Literally murdered her. “Don’t wear that down by the ballpark,” I warned.
Old Lois, who deserved a better nickname, but truly: she was old. Somewhere past ninety. Physically she seemed barely there, curled into herself, but her eyes were bright, and when I walked into the dining room and introduced myself, she crowed: “I didn’t know they were still making Loises!”
He was out there learning, in his words, “to bake without dry yeast, without desiccation, without death.” Well, sure. Nobody wants death bread.
A bread blade, to score the loaf (with a baker’s mark that, ideally, matched our wrist tattoo)
There were detailed instructions. I love detailed instructions. My whole career was detailed instructions. Precisely specified actions, executed in order. A serene confidence settled over me.
I had not signed my sloppy work, but there was nevertheless a clearly defined shape in the cracks and whorls of the crust. You couldn’t not see it. The loaf had a face. It was an illusion, of course. Jesus Christ in an English muffin. It’s called pareidolia. Humans see faces in everything. Even so, the illusion was … compelling.
With my bread knife (which CUSTOMERS WHO BOUGHT THIS ITEM ALSO BOUGHT),
looked around the kitchen, fixed my gaze on random objects: Cupboard. Faucet. Refrigerator. Did I see faces? I did not see faces. The power outlet looked like a little dude, but power outlets always look like little dudes.
IT’S ALWAYS NEW AND ASTONISHING when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks.
Cornelia was, if not quite as impressed with me as I was, still at least medium-impressed.
Medium-impressed is something I would 100% say
Garrett relished the sourdough most of all. The sounds he made were borderline NSFW. “You made this?” he said, mouth agape. “Like, from a kit? Does it come frozen?”
In a panic, I threw together a batch of the flour-water starter food. It felt like I ought to drip it in slowly, just a bit at a time, as if I were bottle-feeding an ailing kitten. (I have never bottle-fed an ailing kitten.) (I did once coax Kubrick back to life with a spray bottle.) (You have to work pretty hard to push a cactus to the brink of death.)
Later that day, I carried it to her, warm from the office printer. Forty dollars. I made more than that in fifteen minutes of programming, but this money felt special.
I’D NEVER SEEN SO MANY PICKLES in my life. We were lined up, a hundred of us, all with our samples like offerings for a queen or a newborn prophet.
The loaf I had baked that morning had cooled completely, and suddenly I wished I’d carried it in some kind of insulating sleeve. But then, I supposed, it might have turned soggy. How do you store and transport bread? I didn’t know anything.
This is a great question and I would love to know the answer.
I looked it up on Global Gluten—the depot had very fast wireless internet, network name: CRUCIFEROUS—and discovered that the oven was considered a boring but reliable workhorse of industrial bakeries.
Great wifi name!
The woman was passing around a platter stacked with blocks of apparently edible matter. Each was wrapped in silvery-green paper, but the matter itself was as white as a grub. The blocks resembled ghostly Rice Krispies Treats.
Aren't rice krispie(s) treats (which imo is not plural on krispie) already basically this color?
“I think of them as microbial cathedrals,” Jaina Mitra said. I wondered if that comparison made her the architect or the deity.
The lights above snapped off. We’d sat talking for too long. “Does that happen often?” “A fair amount, yes,” Horace said. “I don’t mind. It gives me a minute to think.” We stayed quiet. Thinking.
“A friend of mine. Horace, he’s a—” “Portacio. Of course.”
In my head his name is Horatio Portacio
I bundled my new module into a pull request and sent it upstream, straight into the master branch of ArmOS. I didn’t even write a commit message. The module’s name would suffice. I waited for the emails. My heart was pounding.
Very inside baseball here.
“So this is a catalog of puddles,” Horace said. His breath was fogging up the glass. “Among other things. There’s a bit of the Great Lakes in there. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Swamps. Volcanoes. There are samples scraped out of caves, and birds’ nests, and elephants’ armpits. New samples are coming in constantly. I just got one from an Arby’s in Clearwater, Florida.” We all shuddered.
The depot’s soundtrack went quiet and was replaced with the buzz of a phone line. At the same time, the TV showed a painted still life: a feast set up on a pockmarked table with a deep blue curtain hanging inexplicably behind it. On the table were a heel of bread and a bowl of plums. A curved knife protruded from a rump of cheese. On a bright platter there was a whole fish, its mouth frozen in an eternal yawp. Everything in the scene gleamed as if lacquered. A voice boomed out over the speakers. “I haven’t met all of you,” the voice said, “but I’ve tasted everything you have to offer.” Its
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This is incredible.
“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.
THE MARROW FAIR was happening for real, and soon my two jobs would not coexist so comfortably.
Wow this is a completely different sentence than in the audiobook. My question was: how TF was she splitting her day between two jobs before, considering how many hours GD required..?
"[...] and soon there wouldn't be enough day to split between jobs" is how the audiobook ends this sentence.
The company was still privately held, almost entirely by Andrei, so I couldn’t sell them directly, but there was a standing offer to impatient Dextrous from a Qatari prince who would buy our options at a slight discount. (When I first heard about this, it seemed breathtakingly exotic, possibly illegal, but the cold-eyed wraiths all shrugged. Apparently every tech company had a prince waiting in the wings.)
Is this real? Boy I hope not.
“Belasco, cut the check. Lois—make it work.” The phone went silent. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I cared about the opinion of an anonymous benefactor who sometimes inhabited the body of a painted fish. But I did.
“Garrett’s in love with you.” “Arjun’s in love with you.” 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.
I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestler, or an all-expenses-paid trip to Gary, Indiana.
I hefted the Clement Street starter in its crock and held it out to Agrippa for inspection. He eyed it, then me. “Oh, I can’t do anything about that.” “What?” “You think I’m a sourdough mechanic, and you just drop it off? No, ma’am. I will tell you what I know.
“Culture,” he said. “The word meant this—making cheese—before it meant that—art and opera. And before it meant anything, it just meant working the land. That’s a better definition. That’s who we are. Not our music, our books. Psh, books. They’re all dead. We’re alive. We eat, we grow. But, but but but, here’s the thing! We’re amateurs.”
The cheese is not the thing, he told me. The cheese is just the territory, the battleground. The bacteria are the thing. They are the actors on a milky stage.
