It was one o’clock in the morning, and my day had already begun.
That had been my life every day for the better part of fifteen years. I’d get up at one in the morning, and taking care not to wake Cecily and the kids from their peaceful slumber, I’d gulp down a quick cup of tea with a few bites of whatever was left in the fridge from the night before. I needed to be at the shop by two. Such is the life of a humble baker.
My favourite loaf was always a good granary, but my focaccia had become a popular hit after a local sports legend had commented on it favourably during an interview. I had to make a large batch of that fluffy white, crispy coated goodness every morning to meet the demand, which would invariably be gone by eleven. People would queue down the street for it before I had even opened the doors.
Sometimes people would get there too late. The look of disappointment on their faces was palpable. “Can’t you just make more?” they’d say, as if it were really that easy. If they’d ever tried to make it, they’d understand.
It’s a common misconception about bread, I find, that it just pops out of the oven fully formed. It’s a cognitive failing we all share about processes, that you mentally skip to the desired final result without considering the many intermediary stages that have to be completed before you can progress to the next.
I’d start by carefully measuring out the flour, yeast and coarse sea salt, mixing it with olive oil and warm water.
Next it would be folded and kneaded for around 5-7 minutes—it’s vital to get this stage right. Overdo it and the gluten strands become too tightly packed making the final product tough and chewy. Underdo it and the texture becomes uneven and sticky. There’s a certain elasticity you need to aim for, a bounce to it. I knew it by feel.
Next it would be coated in oil, covered, and left to rise for an hour or two until it doubled in size. The environment needs to be warm, but not too warm. 24 to 29 degrees is ideal, so that was my working room temperature.
Next, the oven is heated to 220 degrees, and a baking sheet prepared with a coating of olive oil. On goes the dough, and you use your fingers to press it down into an even layer to ensure consistent cooking, making small indentations as you go. Another drizzle of olive oil to cover the entire surface, a sprinkling of salt and fresh rosemary, and it’s ready for the oven.
Once it’s baked to a golden brown, around 20-25 minutes, it’s ready to be cooled, and ready to be sold.
It’s a long process, and every one of these steps is vital. Get any one of them wrong, and you may as well start over. I couldn’t claim to have invented the recipe, of course. Each stage had been fine-tuned and perfected over countless iterations by countless generations of bakers before me. I’d tweaked the recipes myself too, but you don’t want to stray too far from the established ways, or you won’t be happy with what you end up with.
Every morning was the same. It was a hard life, but I did what I needed to do to keep my family fed, and a roof over our heads. The threat of starving while freezing to death on the streets was a powerful motivator. You did what you had to do.
And that’s why its arrival changed everything!

The ‘DingDo’ they called it, a Particle Synthesis device partially developed by advanced AI ‘for a better world.’ It was a new technology, free for everyone, an end to the very concept of scarcity, the overcoming of which had been the driving force behind every prior generation.
Earlier prototypes that were demonstrated on a popular tech show by eager developers but not available to the public were fairly rudimentary in function. You take raw materials such as meats and vegetables, program a recipe, and it would break down and synthesise the particles into a tasty meal.
It didn’t stop there though. Later iterations became increasingly sophisticated. First they dispensed with the necessity to provide raw materials, as it could pull particles out of the air. After that, recipes could be automatically generated by AI in response to voice commands.
“Make me a sandwich,” you would tell it, and with a ding, one would materialise right in front of you from thin air, fully formed. It would be a good sandwich too, because the machine would learn your preferences and anticipate what specific flavour profile would best suit your mood at any given moment. When finished, it would clear up after you, returning whatever crumbs were scattered back to the ether.
It wasn’t just limited to food. It could make parts, tools, and even additional DingDos just as easily. Anything self-contained up to the size of a family car. It also ran off a built-in nuclear battery that would last for at least a century of constant use.
‘A DingDo in every home,’ promised the inventors at Unicorntekk, one of the great philanthropic organisations of the era. And they were good to their word.
One designated morning, after much anticipation, we opened our doors to see a DingDo on every doorstep. The excitement was intoxicating, and why wouldn’t it be? This would change everything about the way we lived!
I didn’t get up at one that morning—I never would again! I didn’t need to worry about feeding my family or keeping a roof over our heads anymore, so why condemn myself to that harsh worklife? Why not enjoy the fruits of our technological progress?
It seemed I wasn’t alone. At eleven, I took a casual stroll along the local high street, and not a single shop was open. They hadn’t even bothered to shutter them up. It was as if they’d been abandoned.
The roads were filled with what would have been thought of as expensive sports cars that for some reason looked remarkably drab. Perhaps it was the sheer quantity. The Lamborginis and Ferraris in bright colours looked no better than the old Skoda Estelles you’d be embarrassed to be seen in. Something just felt slightly off about them, like they were cheap knockoffs. Even the classic Cameros seemed to lack a certain lustre, not to mention the absence of the classic V8 rumble.
Conspicuously absent were buses, taxis, lorries and vans. There were no garbage trucks either—there hadn’t been a morning collection it seemed, as evidenced by rubbish piled up all along the edge of the road. Many bags had been ripped open by crows, their contents spewing across the pavement.
I passed the police station—that was closed too. The hospital only had a skeleton staff, mostly of doctors. There was nobody in reception, and only a small smattering of nurses, most of whom looked ready to retire. The patients were overflowing onto the street, and would likely have a very long wait to be seen.
It made sense to me that people would want to take a day to celebrate, but I felt certain things would settle down after a day or two as we all adjusted to the new normal.
How very wrong I was.
The next day was the same, only worse. I took another eleven o’clock jaunt down the high street, and many of the shops had now been broken into. It didn’t appear that anything had been stolen, more like random acts of vandalisation, a way of coping with change perhaps, or maybe a return to a more primitive state. There was graffiti on the windows, and even that lacked the level of pride and effort normally put into such pursuits—just gang tags and aspersions as to the sexual preferences of one M Kahn (sic.) The trash still hadn’t been collected, and the stench of faecal matter had started to add a slight sting to the air.
There were far fewer cars on the road by now. I guessed the novelty must have worn off, but was surprised at how quickly it came and went.
It took nearly a week for the electricity grid to go down, and we’d lost clean tap water after just three days.
I’d started drinking heavily in the evenings, because what else was there to do? Bread was all I knew, and now that I didn’t need to make it anymore, I came to realise I had hated it for years. It wasn’t long before I was drinking heavily in the mornings too. At first, I was savouring the finest single malt whiskies from the Scottish Isles, but before I knew it, I was gulping down cheap Dominican rum because it just seemed more fitting.
Cecily took the kids out of school, because what were they going to do with an education—become a washed up alcoholic like their father? It wasn’t like any teachers bothered to show up anyway.
Before I knew it, she had taken them out of the house too and moved to who knew where. I’d never spent any real time with them before due to my ludicrous work hours, and as it turned out, they rather preferred it that way. I was useful to them when they needed my money to live off, but now… The drinking and the downward spiral into depression was really just the final nail in a very secure coffin.
I never bothered to leave the house most days, because the apathetic stupor was so overwhelming. When I did venture out, the streets were empty, and stunk to high heaven. Who’d want to spend time in that? My toilet was blocked, and I didn’t have the first clue what to do about it. I couldn’t even look it up on the internet because that had gone down with the electricity grid. I’d taken to shitting in a bucket and dumping it in the street five doors down. I could have just DingDod it away, but that seemed like too much trouble.
One day I woke up to find a racoon in my bedroom. Even that seemed to lack drive, as it was probably used to handouts of the finest food such an animal could ever enjoy as it wandered from house to house. I summoned up some berries, apples, corn, and sweet potatoes and after a hearty breakfast, it sauntered away never to return.
Even organised crime took it hard. Before the DingDo, they were only one step removed from legitimate businesses, but now they just didn’t know what to do with themselves as there was nothing left to profit from. They quickly reverted to old patterns—violence, and gratuitous violence at that. They didn’t even need to stick to the shadows. The DingDo, as it turned out, was perfect for hiding bodies without a trace, not that anyone would ever investigate. No body, no crime, no police, no problem for them.
We actually have a lot to thank these organised crime syndicates for.
After six months of hell, things finally came to a head. An angry mob of angry mobsters smashed down the Unicorntekk doors and forced the inventors—people who were evidently passionate about their work—to remotely disable the machines. Or else! And just like that, they were returned to their simplest configuration, a standard food processor that would end up at the back of the cupboard behind that dusty air fryer that Aunt Mavis got you for Christmas back in 2018.
But things would not return to the way they were before. That ship had long since sailed.

What had all gone to hell by eleven o’clock that very first morning, took thirty years to recover from. That was how long it had taken for some sense of normality to resume.
We had mostly reliable electricity again and running water, but drinking it was not recommended. The internet never returned, and the entire sum of human knowledge was gone with it. Every public record, every news article, every piece of poorly penned independent fiction, every video, every photograph was lost to history in what would come to be known as the Second Dark Age.
I wondered if I would even recognise my kids if I ever saw them again. I couldn’t remember their faces as children, and I wouldn’t know where to start looking.
I never returned to baking—every memory I had of focaccia made me feel nauseous. I had instead gotten a part time job at a supermarket collecting discarded trolleys, which paid just enough for my bedsit and to support an alcohol habit. There was never any food in the fridge, so I lived off whatever expired sandwiches they had flagged for disposal. Most of my coworkers did the same—nothing ever went to waste—and when there wasn’t enough to go round, we’d find a way to share.
In a lot of ways, I appreciated the simplicity. People were vaguely civil to each other again, like we were all in it together.
But with the great rebuilding came a new generation of bright-eyed idealists. Having learned about the untapped potential of the DingDo that could still be found in the backs of cupboards behind dusty air fryers, they felt it was time we gave them another chance. We’d surely learned our lessons, they’d say, and with people like them in charge, we’d definitely get it right next time for sure.
They say that youth is wasted on the young, but I always felt that wisdom was wasted on the old. If the young had lived to see how fragile a modern society really is, and what a powerful motivator the threat of starvation was, they might actually learn something from history rather than doom themselves to repeat it. Unicorntekk had promised that in a post-scarcity world, nobody would ever need to do a job that they weren’t passionate about. Of course, they were thinking about jobs like theirs, creating marvellous wonders that would alter the course of history. What they never considered was that there are an awful lot of jobs essential to a functioning society that nobody would ever want to do if the alternative wasn’t to die.
But heed our warnings they won’t. Why should they listen to fogies like us that just want to return to a time of picket fences, where women and minorities knew their place, or some other era fabricated by their overzealous condemnation of past generations. It was the blind leading the foolish.
A cognitive failing that afflicts us all is to see the final desired stage of a process and ignore the intermediary steps. A utopian society does not pop out of the oven fully formed. There are complex stages that have to be gotten right before you can progress to the next, and unlike the art of bread making, messing up any single iteration of any single step will have catastrophic consequences, sending civilisation back to the stone age. We lose so much more than we gain, an irony in a supposed post-scarcity world.
Because at the end of the day, our only real non-scarce resource is stupidity.