Робин Слоун: Sourdough

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?”