Too Modern to Taste, don’t forget the Crumbs!

Sylvie Snedden was the kind of person that had been dubbed ‘Aunty’ once a decade before, and hadn’t let go of the endearment. She was also the kind of person who ate her breakfast while surfing the web for her next large purchase.

She wasn’t the kind to simply buy it on account of her having looked it up, but she did do this almost daily with whatever she’d decided could manage early morning digestion alongside her coffee. (This often left her keyboards with a severely limited shelf-life, but those weren’t meant to live long anyway, right?)

That week it had been a “Brazil-nut & Kiwi ‘nebula’ yeast cake with a ‘Cloudy’ Tang Glaze” with the largest parentheses being everything she’d had to change from the badly translated recipe.

Aunty didn’t know what to expect from any single experiment of Lori’s, but when an older woman’s much younger friend comes over with seven different translations of an obscure if new Russian recipe, she’d known that it was going to be a disaster.

Considering that the resulting bread was at least interesting, she’d have been tempted to say it was a success. The fact that they needed to course correct on almost everything in order to make it edible for either of them was a mark against it.

Which honestly, fair enough.

Allergic reactions to nuts of all kinds were statistically common, so that was at least a common fix, it was simply embarrassing to explain it when the nut in question was already a rare addition to any recipe, let alone a coffeecake that was meant to be good.

Who uses Brazil Nuts when Pecans, Walnuts, Almonds, and Macadamia Nuts were so much more common in desserts and beyond her own limitations, just so much better in flavor profile?

Granted, Brazil nuts were less fatty than Macadamia nuts, but they aren’t nearly as Iconic.

At least for the right reasons.

And really, who in their right mind limits the fat content on something meant to pull-off Tang frosting? It should be as fatty as a cheesecake if not more starchy, though she couldn’t blame the bazaar sorts that frequented recipe sites for being a bit touchy when it came to the nutritional content of their baked goods, it was still ill-advised to simply pick the oddest nut in the lineup and use it.

Then again, that might’ve been the ritual that kept being mentioned.

Picking out the worst ingredients possible sounded as arcane as anything if she were honest.

Lori complaining that the finished bread was speaking to her was an interesting addition to that day, but it was hardly something to remark upon considering the translation work she’d done the week before on that very recipe.

(Or the dark circles that she had to make up the difference on Auntie’s couch the night before.)

Sleep did that to people, and Sylvie wasn’t getting paid to criticize that.

And maybe something similar was happening to her too. After all, she’d been bombarded with unattributable ads all week and it was becoming truly insensible for her to respond. At least before her computer crashed.

It reloaded a little while after, as good as new after the hard-drive had cooled, though the clock remained settled at 12:03 for the rest of the day.

She wasn’t all that surprised the day after that when the clock remained invariable. 12:03, was the static number on her screen, and really it felt fine to use, even quicker than normal.

That is with the occasional hiccup.

At which point the clock would switch to 14:96 if she caught it. Her computer would then open a tab that lead to a recruitment ad on the webpage of a not so local cult supposedly based in Siberia.

Her computer had become much faster after that first shutdown, but the thing would be a rock on the table for about forty minutes while it skimmed the page and searched for related topics before finding the wiki on toilet humor.

Her computer had developed a personality now that it was five years out of date, and with her limited sensitivity she could surmise that it was either challenged or had a somewhat inconvenient agenda.

That being, the pulling of Sylvie off her computer for an hour while it made off with her limited bandwidth to rhythmically search cult diatribes and scatological humor.

That changed a little later, but that was only because she’d gotten a video link in her email.

It was from her nephew, who had a propensity for similarly childish humor, though he preferred venues with a less plain presentation.

That being comedy videos on YouTube as produced by oversized if supposedly new media companies.

She was quickly bored by the video he’d sent, but she still watched forward as more similar works played. It was only after that when she learned what her computer was managing.

It wasn’t in the videos, but in the ads that it did its work.

YouTube ads being at times unavoidable as in unskippable, unpausable, or simply vulgar in comparison to most of the content that got ad revenue, she wasn’t expecting the skips and blips to amount to actual remarks.

But her computer, with a clock set to 16:03 had decided to converse with her.

The fact that it was little more than babyish birdsong as scrabbled from the even less coherent ramblings of an ex-political* Commentator left little to be understood.

That didn’t stop her from feeling a sudden need for guidance, it isn’t generally advisable to leave one’s computer to be inarticulate.

Which was when she started clicking on free language videos in hopes that her computer would take the hint.

It was then that she got a call from Lori, she and a few ex-nuns were worried about her computer, or more completely they wanted to exercise the spirit they’d summoned with their mangled recipe.

It had apparently arisen from its crumby form and possessed her computer using her wireless keyboard, and while she found it a bit silly, it was still more sensible than most possible explanations.

Though to be frank, it seemed fair enough that it was being educated while it was inconveniencing her, so really, Aunty decided to just leave things be.