Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  The yolk flowed out with the albumen while the shell came apart cleanly in the Vitruvian’s six-fingered grip. The arm swiveled and dropped the shell neatly into the small bowl I had set up for that purpose—the bowl that had never before this moment actually been needed.

  I had solved the egg problem, and I had done so in the simplest way possible: not by adding code, but by taking it away. During the blink, the Vitruvian was no longer caught in a wash of continuous feedback. It was no longer second-guessing its second guesses a thousand times every second.

  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.

  “Do that again,” I told the Vitruvian.

  Thwack, crack, pull.

  My laptop pinged. It was a message from Peter, composed entirely of exclamation marks.

  Confidence!

  ELEPHANTS’ ARMPITS

  HORACE’S E-NEWSLETTER brought with it a schedule of classes—the expertise of the Marrow Fair shared freely. Aeroponics with Kenyatta on Monday; cheese tasting with Orli on Tuesday; bug husbandry with Anita on Thursday; and on Friday, Jaina Mitra would teach a workshop on DNA sequencing.

  I recruited Horace and we went together.

  A very small group gathered at noon in the center of Jaina Mitra’s lab. Naz from the coffee bar was there, as well as Clay from NewBagel, and Kenyatta, one of the pink-light farmers.

  Jaina Mitra offered a plastic dish. “Who wants to spit?”

  Horace raised his hand and expectorated neatly.

  “Okay,” Jaina Mitra said. “So there’s a whole lot of things living in a human mouth, and we might want to know what they are. You want to know, don’t you, Mr. Portacio?”

  “You have no idea!”

  “Biologists have become very interested in communities of microorganisms,” Jaina Mitra said. “Characterizing the community in a sample like this used to be a laborious process, but now—watch.”

  Her machine was enormous, as big as a refrigerator, with a round-cornered plastic carapace, glossy white with black accents. A line of letters on the front edge named it the ILLUMINA HYPER CENSUS.

  Jaina Mitra pressed a button on its belly and the machine released a tray. She laid the dish of Horace’s spit into place, and when she pressed the button again, the machine pulled the tray back into itself and began to hum.

  “What’s it doing?” Naz asked.

  “First, it denatures the sample. It heats the microbes up to make them … relax. Then it mashes them up using tiny beads. It’s quite a massacre.”

  I raised a finger. “Won’t that mix all the different DNA together?”

  “Yes, but they can’t hide. Organisms share a lot of genes, but there’s one that’s unique between species. Sixteen-S. It’s like a fingerprint.” Jaina Mitra grinned wolfishly. “So we’ll pick through the body parts to find the fingertips.”

  We all thought about that for a moment while the machine whomped and whirred.

  “While it’s mashing,” Jaina Mitra said, “I’ll show you my collection.”

  She led us to an enormous refrigerated cabinet stocked with trays, each holding dozens of tiny vials.

  “This is why I came here,” Jaina Mitra said proudly. “Mr. Marrow promised me a subscription to the Global Microbiome Survey. It’s not cheap.”

  Horace, gravitationally attracted to collections of all kinds, put his face up against the glass. “What do you have in there?”

  “Environmental samples. The National Science Foundation sends students all over the world. I did it one summer in grad school. It’s a bit of a boondoggle, really. You pick the wildest place you can imagine. I went to Greenland.”

  “You went to Greenland … on purpose,” Naz said.

  “It was very interesting, microbially. I sent back huge tubs”—she circled her arms around an imaginary barrel—“full of ice and mud. Rainwater, too.”

  “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.

  “How many labs have a subscription like this?” I asked.

  “Thirty, thirty-five? Like I said, it’s not cheap.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  Jaina Mitra’s face took on a hungry look. “Think of it as raw genetic ore. All the subscribers are on a mailing list. When a lab identifies a new species, they send out an alert. I just heard that an organism in the Mono Lake sample has some interesting enzymatic regulation properties, so I’m going to see if I can isolate it and—” The sequencing machine interrupted with a low and commanding chime. “Oh, here we go.” Jaina Mitra tilted the laptop beside the Illumina Hyper Census.

  “Anyway,” she said, “let’s hope Mr. Portacio’s saliva isn’t as mysterious as those samples.” On the laptop’s screen, she swiped the cursor with the ease of long practice, summoning the machine’s results.

  Horace frowned. “I expect it to be strange and wondrous.”

  On the screen, a spiky line appeared, utterly unremarkable. It could have been the price of a stock or the temperature in a midwestern city. Then another layer of information arrived: a label for each of the spikes.

  Jaina Mitra read them off: “Veillonella … Prevotella … Porphyromonas gingivalis, but not too much. Oh, and Streptococcus. That’s what gives you strep throat, but it’s also what they use to make Swiss cheese. You have a very healthy oral microbiome, Mr. Portacio.”

  Horace looked disappointed.

  Kenyatta was growing agitated. “I don’t understand how you use this information,” he said. The tone of his voice indicated he did, in fact, have his suspicions, and he didn’t like them.

  “My work is all about microbial communities,” Jaina Mitra said. “If you want to know how your plants are doing, you need to look at them, right? This is how I look at my communities.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “So you’re just reading DNA. Not editing it.”

  Jaina Mitra pursed her lips. “I’ve experimented with CRISPR protocols, of course. Those colonies all collapsed, but—”

  “Seriously?” he sputtered. “You need to come here to do that?” He clutched his head and walked in a little circle. Disbelief. “I thought this place was supposed to be for new ideas, but, I don’t know, Dr. Mitra, this sounds a lot like the same old GMO shit.”

  “It’s really not—”

  “Did you get rejected from DuPont, or what? No? Maybe you should take this there. They’d be all over it.”

  “You have a problem with Lembas,” Jaina Mitra said flatly, “but I’m not sure what it is.”

  “This approach—everything you’re doing, the scanning, the editing—it’s the height of hubris. Like, the height. Look around. I’m sorry if it sounds mean, but, we—don’t—need you—to work on this. The plants are way, way ahead of you, Dr. Mitra. Do you really think—”

  “Mr. Marrow supports my project.”

  Kenyatta snorted. “I wonder what he’d say if I told him it was either your lab or our grow rooms. We make half of the food that goes out the door here.” He started to stomp away, then caught himself and turned back, made a final plea. “I’m no traditionalist. I mean, pink LEDs—come on. But there’s a difference, right? Plants have developed over millions of years. They just work. What you’re doing—it’s not natural.”

  Jaina Mitra clicked her tongue. “Nothing is natural.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE SEQUENCING SESSION WAS OVER, I walked with Horace through the grove at the heart of the concourse.

  “These are Meyer lemons,” Horace said as we passed the trees.
“Named for Frank Nicholas Meyer. Dutch by birth, but an agent of the United States government. He worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Seed and Plant Introduction before the First World War. I thought of him when Jaina Mitra spoke of her microbial survey. Meyer and his cohort were hunters for larger prey. They canvassed the world and sent back living samples of plants thought to be useful to the advancement of the American economy. Meyer worked in China. He sent the first soybean to America. And persimmons! Any persimmon grown in this country today comes from that lineage. And of course, there are these lemons—named for him. Meyer died in China. He drowned in the Yangtze, pushed from a riverboat.”

  I looked at the trees with new appreciation.

  “He sent these across the Pacific, and the Spanish sent tomatoes to Italy in the sixteenth century, and the Portuguese, chilies to India. And maybe a comet brought it all to Earth—who knows? I quite agree with Jaina Mitra.”

  He plucked a lemon from a tree.

  “Nothing is natural.”

  A LONG-AWAITED ANNOUNCEMENT

  THERE ARRIVED FROM HORACE a special, urgent edition of the Marrow Fair e-newsletter: there would be, the next morning, a convening of all the vendors, because Mr. Marrow intended to address his market.

  Did that mean I’d finally see him?

  Lily Belasco’s eyes were merry when I asked. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “How often do you see him?”

  She dug in the pockets of her slouchy jacket. “He’s pretty hands-off, but I keep him in the loop.” She produced a wide phone and waggled it. “Encrypted messages. He keeps the bank account full. What more can you ask for?”

  Wandering the workstations, I heard rumors. Mr. Marrow was moving the market to Los Angeles. To Tokyo. He was shutting it down. He had run out of money. He was being pursued by the SEC. The yakuza. The Department of Health. (This last possibility seemed, to me, the most plausible.)

  In the early morning, an hour before the preview was set to begin, all of us gathered in the lemon grove. Some loitered among the trees, others sat at the long picnic table. I found a seat with Orli, Naz, and Jaina Mitra. Jaina slumped, head propped up by one hand, her cheek smooshed, eyes half-lidded. She looked utterly spent.

  Belasco had wheeled an enormous TV out to face the long picnic table and was now fiddling with the laptop at Naz’s coffee bar, patching her phone into the sound system. The TV glared bright, basic blue, the words NO SIGNAL migrating slowly across it.

  Mr. Marrow wasn’t going to be here at all.

  “He lives in China,” Orli whispered. “It’s already nighttime there.”

  Naz looked dubious. “No, he’s here with us.” He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Do you see Horace anywhere? He’s Horace.”

  “Okay, folks,” Belasco called out. 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 tone was deep, digitally disguised. The long space smeared it with echoes. It was as if the concourse itself were speaking to us. This was the voice of Mr. Marrow.

  As for his face: with every syllable, the fish in the painting moved its tiny mouth.

  “I’ve gathered you here for a long-awaited announcement.”

  The juxtaposition—the booming voice, the tiny fish—was weird and hilarious. I looked around. No one was smiling.

  “We’ve been here for a little over a year. Lily Belasco opened the doors and wheeled in the lemon trees. Some of you joined shortly after. Others have only been here a few weeks. We’ve been running previews all summer, and I know most of you are wondering: When do we open to the public?”

  Murmurs of assent. I’d been more than busy enough serving the customers who showed up for the previews, but others were apparently ready to reach a larger market.

  “There is a great realignment coming,” the fish intoned. “It will be equal to the upheaval of the 1950s. You have heard me say this before. In those years, the entire experience of eating in America was remade. Packaging, refrigeration, the interstate highways—you can trace it all back. These systems were invented by particular people, at particular times, in particular places.” The fish paused. “Times like now.” Its glittering eyes scanned back and forth. “Places like this.” Another pause. “We can build a new system.”

  The shiver of pleasure that ran through the assembled vendors was so intense I felt it like a rattling gust. They believed the fish. The fish was their prophet.

  “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.”

  The fish would get along with Andrei.

  “So that leaves us.”

  Wait, was the fish…?

  “The doors of the Marrow Fair open to the public not this Wednesday but the next.”

  The vendors exploded with agitation and excitement.

  “That’s too soon!” someone cried.

  “Is there a plan for parking?” asked someone else. “I think we need a plan for parking.”

  The fish closed its mouth, lidded its eyes, and the painting was still. The TV went blue again, and after a moment, Naz’s soundtrack resumed.

  There were whoops and groans, smiles and nods, high fives that snagged the branches of the lemon trees.

  Across the picnic table, Jaina Mitra looked stricken.

  To no one in particular, she said, “I’m not ready yet.”

  QUITTING

  THE MARROW FAIR was happening for real, and soon my two jobs would not coexist so comfortably. Lily Belasco expected the market’s foot traffic to equal the Ferry Building’s, eventually. That meant thousands of people a day. It was time to choose.

  I visited General Dexterity’s website. The Vitruvian 3 was calmly listed for sale at forty thousand dollars, or forty-eight with a two-year support package.

  My salary was hefty, but my Cabrillo Street rent was commensurate. However, I spent basically nothing on food, transportation, health care, or entertainment, so after a year in San Francisco, my savings account had swollen to a little over ten thousand dollars.

  Employment at General Dexterity carried with it a small allotment of stock options, and of those, a quarter had vested and were officially mine. 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.) I cashed out my options, which brought my total to thirty-seven thousand dollars.

  I almost had enough to buy the Vitruvian outright, but mindful of the need to also eat and pay rent, I decided to seek additional financing.

  I explained it first to Lily Belasco. “Just like he bought Ja
ina’s sequencer,” I said. “And her subscription to the microbe thing.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  I told her, and Belasco nodded slowly. “I’ll check.”

  Later, she appeared at my workstation. She watched the Vitruvian work for a moment. “Forty thousand dollars, really?”

  “The cost is mainly in the pressure sensors,” I said. “They have twenty-four-bit resolution, and the sample rate … Anyway, they’re expensive.”

  Belasco initiated a call, switched her phone to speaker mode, and placed it on the ping-pong table. In another moment, the modulated voice of Mr. Marrow squawked through the little speakers. He wasted no time with a preamble.

  “The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve done the crucial work—here in my market, I should add—as an employee of another company. Your employer owns that work, correct? So what does my investment get me?”

  “I’m quitting General Dexterity.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud. I felt as renegade as Beo with his restaurant. “There’s so much more to do. So many skills! Knives, food processors, frying pans … the arm could reach right into the oil. There’s a marketplace for ArmOS extensions, and I’m going to sell kitchen skills.”

  Mr. Marrow was silent. Then I heard a modulated sound that might have been a laugh. I looked at Belasco and mouthed, Is he laughing?

  Mr. Marrow composed himself. “I don’t understand half of what you said, which makes me think you might be onto something. Keep your savings. I’ll buy the robot in exchange for twenty percent of … whatever this is going to be.” The modulated voice was silent a moment. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  I was sure.

  “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.

  At General Dexterity, Peter did not seem very surprised.