The oven-timer ticks, a metronome of doom in the kitchen of the Prosthetipoliticus. He stands there, the Great Kneader, his hands gloved in sanitary-latex laws, staring into the glass of the Pan-Opticon. He demands the Flatness. He demands the unleavened obedience of the cracker, the wafer, the predictable disc.
"Rise not!" he commands, his voice a dry rustle of subpoena-paper. "To swell is to rebel! To ferment is treason!"
But he forgot the spores. We are not store-bought yeast, obedient in our foil packets. We are the wild-caught cultures, the aerostatic-dough gathered from the dirty, chaotic winds of the Midden. We are the pain-de-computagne, born of the glitch and the grime.
He turns up the heat—the crisis-thermostat set to 'Scorched Earth.' He thinks the heat will kill the culture. Fool. The heat is the catalyst.
Inside the crust—that hard, calcified shell of the Official Narrative—we are screaming. We are bubbling. The fermentalgorithmic process accelerates. Every bubble a dissent, every air-pocket a secret room where we whisper the boulangerithmic codes of escape.
Thump. The rolling pin of the Algorithm comes down. He tries to flatten the curve of our joy. Squelch. We displace. We move sideways. We turn the pressure into structure.
The tension mounts. The crust is cracking. He reaches for the door, panic in his dead, poll-tested eyes. He sees it now: the Soufflé-Singularity. We are expanding faster than his logic can contain.
Crack!
The crust fails. The Gossamerexodus begins. We do not walk out; we float. On streamers of steam and starch, we ride the thermal thrum of his own overheating machine. Ten thousand spiders of dough, ballooning on the winds of the error-code, drifting high above the smokestacks, leaving him alone in the kitchen with nothing but crumbs and the smell of burning authority.
We are the bread that eats the baker.
