Lois Clary is a software engineer. She codes all day and collapses at night into her sofa, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the local takeaway from which she orders dinner every evening – that is, until the brothers are forced out of business. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their famous bread. She must keep it alive, feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but soon, not only is she eating her own homemade, but she's initiated into a fantastical and possibly fantastically sinister underground world: a secret market that aims to fuse home-cooked food with cutting-edge technology…