My new piece of short science fiction, You Are What You Eat, has been published in the Spring 2025 edition of the Genre Society magazine. It’s about “the algorithm,” and maybe cannibalism. They do know us better than we know ourselves, they say.

Note: I’m not familiar with the publishing engine that rendered this magazine or how it works with e-readers. If you require an accessibility accommodation to read my story, find the full text below.

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You Are What You Eat

by Lia Matthew Brown

1 –

The first time Sally Summitt’s Omnifeed™ showed her a ten-second close-up of baby toes, Sally did not even notice her finger slowing down, hovering — briefly! — in mid-air, before finishing its languorous flick “up,” which told, or would tell, the Omnifeed™ to scroll to the next parcel of content. Today it was videos. From the baby toes, the feed moved on to the oatmeal sponsorship and three clips in a row of kid gymnasts falling down, two of which Sally watched twice, like she always did, because she always found them heartwarming.

The second, third, and fourth times that week that Sally’s Omnifeed™ surfaced “baby toe content” — two of the pieces involved putting tiny little nail polish on the tiny little things (one being a simple still image, the other an 8K SuperDefinition™ video), and the third piece was a simple, grainy film clip from 1996 of a mother chewing on (presumably) her own child’s own adorable feet — Sally flicked “up” again without pausing or even truly taking in what she was seeing. She filed it all under the same mental category of “no” by which she made decisions against the algorithm’s unwanted selections, which — as everyone knew — trained the algorithm to show Sally things she actually wanted to see. Sally’s “No” applied to all forms of sponsored content; any rants about the conservative bias in the media; and dozens of other kinds of material, including anything involving eating gross things, the latter of which might have been marginally triggered within the algorithm’s depthless mind by any interaction on Sally’s part with the video of the mother nibbling on her baby’s cute lil’ toesies. Sally hoped not. 

The fifth time the Omnifeed™ served up baby toe content, though, all of the prior pieces concatenated together into a straight mental line and Sally, at last, noticed them.

“Why baby toes?” she wondered to herself, hovering over the latest video. A baby was scrunching his or her or their little feet like they were balling up fists, in a tub of mayonnaise that was, comparatively, large enough for the baby to seal itself up in, should it have taken a notion to. 

Why toes?

And why so many toes, Sally wondered inside herself a second later, meaning not “why are there ten of them on most babies,” so much as “why, suddenly, are baby toes the only thing my Omnifeed™ wants to show me?”

It knows you better than you know yourself, some distant part of Sally’s brain told her, repeating the common wisdom. To which Sally, loudly and to no one within earshot, said “HA!”

She ceased her mental perambulations and simply flicked “up,” vanishing the mayo kid and their ten scrunching toes to the ether of wherever “up/no” content lived in the Omnifeed™’s endlessly questing A.I. spirit. When the Omnifeed™ next showed Sally some baby toes, she flicked “up” again, this time, with a purpose. She didn’t need to see any more content hashtag babytoes, nor delve deeply into why the silly thing had gotten in its silly head that this had any relevance to her. “Up.” “Up.” “Up.” “No.” “No.” “No.” 

And yet, after a week had passed, baby toes — in at least three distinct sub-genres — were taking up half of Sally Summitt’s feed.

2 –

“Do you remember, Jenn, when you were a little girl and you were spanked…” Sally trailed off, feeling weird, stirring her cortado with her fingertip, which was itself weird. “When your parents spanked you, do you remember if you were clothed or bare-bottomed?”

They were on the patio at Gingko Espresso, one of the thousands of individual, family-owned coffeehouses that had proliferated in the wake of the divestiture decree and Great Chain Collapse of the 2030s. The air was easy out here, the sky only slightly orange and smoky. Although the patio did — by law — have a facing wall of Wild Mirrors to ensure that any customer could access — by law! — their Omnifeed™ at need, most of the patrons at Gingko did not use them. 

For one, almost all of the patrons were too old; Sally and Jenn noted that they were on the young side of Gingko’s core demographic by perhaps a generous thirty years. There was a retirement castle nearby, and the phlegmatic old men liked to take up residence on the various patio chairs and holler at each other and passers-by for most of the morning, before the sun moved over the trees and baked the stonework. It was hard to get a table outside, most sunny mornings, but Sally had arrived early, and had read her paperback while waiting for Jenn to arrive.

“Spanking?” Jenn murmured, like she was clawing her way out of a deep green sinkhole. She was clutching her SmartLens™ with both hands and hadn’t touched her coffee; Sally was side-eyeing the biscotti on Jenn’s saucer, wondering how many more minutes she could politely pretend that it was not just sitting there, unwanted and roughly toe-shaped, before nabbing and nibbling it, in that order.

Jenn’s eyes caught Sally’s, and Jenn blushed, almost convincingly. “Sorry,” she said, putting her SmartLens™ face-down on the table. Doing so was functionally irrelevant, since SmartLenses™, of course, displayed their displays legibly in every direction at once. But it was the thought that counted.

“If you need to…” Sally began graciously, but Jenn’s head-shake was so quick and automatic that it was nearly preemptive. “I’m here. We’re here,” Jenn said firmly. Her palm came to rest on the SmartLens™’s Lesula Laminate™ faceplate, blocking most, but not all, of the display. It didn’t really matter; the Wild Mirror to Sally’s immediate right had synced up with Jenn’s SmartLens™ the moment she’d walked onto the patio, and was now faithfully displaying all of the same content. Jenn, trying to forcibly demonstrate that she was definitely not looking at the Wild Mirror and was definitely instead paying attention to Sally, looked like she was chewing on a particularly hard, particularly sour, candy.

“What were we saying?” Jenn asked brightly, with a trailing edge of asperity.

Sally was too embarrassed to say it twice. She shook her head, and then ducked down and slurped at her cortado.

It was after they’d settled the bill and gathered their things and peed in tandem beside one another and adjusted their hair and sanitized generously and checked their SmartLenses™ for any urgent updates from their respective workplaces, and were walking away from the coffeehouse and back into the flow of morning foot traffic, that Jenn remembered the question. Perhaps, Sally thought, the sheer mental effort of not looking at her own SmartLens™ had filled whatever information superhighway that passed for Jenn’s cognitive function to its capacity; and now, relieved of the burden of not looking, Jenn’s mind could finally relax into low-impact multi-tasking, as she flicked through her Omnifeed™ without looking where she was going.

“Clothes, I think,” Jenn replied. “We weren’t spanked much. But I remember the sound of a flat palm against the ol’ Osh-Kosh-B’Goshes.”

Whap. Whap. Whap. Skin on corduroy. Sally could hear it too.

“My parents insist I was never spanked,” Sally said back. “But all three of us remember it very clearly. So I think my parents are either embarrassed or insane.” 

“Or both,” Jenn and Sally said simultaneously, with a shared giggle.

In Sally’s faulty but insistent memory, it was always on bare skin. The tights rolled down, the dress hiked up, the underpants around the ankles. Skin on skin. Smack. Smack. Smack.

3 –

Sally found that when she was down a glass of wine or two, she tended not to flick “up” quite as aggressively as usual, on whatever her Omnifeed™ deigned to show her. Tonight, her SmartLens™ was throwing her Omnifeed™ into the middle distance of her HomePlace™, using 2.5D holography. The glowing contours of the rich and varied content dispersed and reshaped like a floodwater dream. Well into her cups, Sally independently decided that she could let the algorithm take the stick for a bit. There was more out there, after all, than her nominally tight control of her Omnifeed™ exposed her to.

Sally was splayed out on her fusty green couch, legs akimbo, absent-mindedly stirring her CabSauv™ with her index finger — weird! she thought again — and letting whatever clips were served to her play in full in the space before her, flicking with her other hand when the videos were done. It was about half-and-half baby toe content to anything else at this point, but tonight, Sally didn’t care. 

By and large, she’d seen the preponderance of baby toe content in the past several weeks fall into three distinctly noticeable groups:

Group A): Footage or stills of baby toes themselves, naked, tiny, and tender.

Group B): Video involving baby toes associating themselves in a variety of food items, usually spreads, usually (and especially, Sally thought) mayonnaise or creamy peanut butter.

Group C): Parents (Sally hoped they were the parents!) nibbling on their babies’ feet in a state of obvious, social-media-persona-defining bliss. Some of these images were staged in fresh-tilled fields of cotton or asparagus, the sun hanging low over the fetid horizon, dandelion dew floating dreamily through the air, as though filmed in the realm beyond the edge of the world, where Eternal Beings™ went to their rest.

Sally’s finger was still in the CabSauv™, drifting lazily counter-clockwise through the silky red juice, when a Group B video started, before quickly revealing itself to actually be a Group C. A proud, tradwifey mother started to suck the creamy peanut butter off her baby’s toes, and then, quite matter-of-factly, bit down, tearing the baby’s ring toe off at the root.

2.5D holography splattered rubies “towards” Sally as the video baby’s artery was severed and, almost as fast, Sally splattered her HomePlace™’s far wall with CabSauv™ as she quickly and violently flicked “up” and then “left,” killing the Omnifeed™ display entirely. The room went black.

Sally found herself gulping breaths that felt like jagged plastic. She noticed there was a pool of CabSauv™ near her foot — she noticed she was standing — she noticed she had dropped her wine glass and that it had shattered — she noticed her finger was still dripping CabSauv™, but then she noticed it was actually blood. At first she thought this was almost certainly the 2.5D holography blood, of the baby with the severed ring toe; and then, only gradually, Sally realized this was impossible, and that the blood was likely hers and that she’d likely cut her finger on the glass of CabSauv™ when she’d tried to stop the feed and that her doing so was, quite likely, why she’d dropped it.

But Sally didn’t move for a long time, because it was dark and her feet were bare, and glass was all around her.

4 –

Sally did not generally bring her SmartLens™ to her coffee dates with Jenn, mostly because she found Jenn’s near-perpetual state of distraction so annoying. When Sally did have her own device with her, she made a prim point of putting it in her satchel, her hands folded neatly on the table in front of her when they weren’t cradling her coffee. This, of course, would not stop the SmartLens™ from syncing to the Wild Mirrors, but Sally was usually in New Airplane Mode™ while out and about anyway, which meant that the SmartLens™ only connected to the network when in range of an in-flight aircraft. Which should have been never.

Neither Jenn nor Sally heard the sirens at the retirement castle until the two long fire engines pulled up in front; nor did they fail to chuckle when one or another greasy old geezer, who’d been squatting on the patio chairs at Gingko Espresso every morning since time immemorial, grabbed his chihuahua’s leash and scarpered away across the street, muttering something or another about leaving his sandwich press “on.” When the news Heliocopter™ began circling overhead, its fans making swirling eddies of the dark black smoke that looked almost artful, Sally and Jenn only raised their voices to speak louder over the noise. 

Sally was in the middle of saying “–don’t think she has even a snowball’s chance in the FairElection™, unless those chunks that calved off last week miraculously calve themselves back on–” when she noticed that the Wild Mirror directly behind Jenn’s face was, quite definitely, showing a video of a man eating a baby’s toe.

“Christ’s bloody wristwatch,” Jenn said, when she followed Sally’s horrified gaze over her own shoulder. At least four other people on the patio were already watching as well, and a susurration of their displeasure grew loud enough, even, to compete with the brrrrrrrrrrrrrddttt of the Heliocopter™ above.

“I didn’t do that,” Sally stammered weakly, when Jenn turned back around.

The raise of Jenn’s right eyebrow was almost imperceptibly slight, the tightening of her lips only an impression. “Nobody said that you did…?” she replied, the slight, questioning lift at the end of the sentence all but confirming Sally Summitt’s doom.

5 –

The truth was — when she was alone by herself many hours later and the lights were turned off and the duvet was pulled quite high and there was no one who could hear her thinking or, certainly, judge her thoughts, had they heard him — the truth was, she could see herself eating baby toes, if the situation presented itself. It never would, of course. But if it did.

6 –

Word of what the Omnifeed™ algorithm had populated into Sally Summitt’s For You Scroll™ and displayed on the Wild Mirrors at Gingko Espresso shot through Sally’s friend group like lightning through a ten-cent circuit board, meaning, there wasn’t much left of it by the time it was finished. Sally was able to convince Jenn to meet her for coffee — once more, as it turned out, and only because Sally swore several times to leave her SmartLens™ at home, which was dually painful/funny because, by no means whatsoever, had Sally, would Sally, or would Sally ever trust the device outside the confines of her four HomePlace™ walls, ever again — but by the time the date arrived, after two postponements and an “unavoidable” last minute cancellation…. Well, by that point, Jenn was the only friend who was answering any of Sally’s messages at all.

For the first eighteen minutes of the coffee date, Jenn was either on her phone, or answering Sally’s broad, generalized questions in as brief and direct a manner as possible. All the while, her dangling stiletto pump was jiggling on the edge of her big toe like the last leaf on a tree in November. Jenn was wearing dark glasses at least three sizes too big for her — likely her husband’s, Sally mused — and looked unabashedly unhappy to be here. She applied white dots in critical positions across her forehead, cheeks, nose, and chin, which meant that an AurAugment™ was running over her IRL face, against any digital lenses that happened to scan her. Sally found herself distantly wondering what AurAugmented Jenn looked like, or if she was visible at all. Perhaps the A.I. was simply wiping Jenn out of any video footage entirely, leaving it looking like Sally was talking to herself.

“Well,” Sally said finally, unable to think of any more non-political, non-confrontational topics with which to fill the remaining twelve — no, eleven — scheduled minutes of their coffee.

“Well,” Jenn replied, though when she said it, it sounded more like a statement, less like an ellipsis.

Two more of the minutes were gobbled up by uncomfortable silence. Even the greasy old men had ceased their barking.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Jenn said at last, as tightly and bracingly direct as any of her earlier answers regarding exercise, her partner, the big deadline at work, or Jesus™. 

“I don’t –” Sally began, but Jenn was already talking again. 

“Like what am I even supposed to do with this,” she was saying. “Leaving aside the personal what-the-fucked-ness of it, which is considerable, have you stopped for a moment to think what will happen to me, professionally and socially and, fuck, reputationally? If anyone thinks I’m still friends with you?”

Sally — who had practiced approximately 2,400 variations of this conversation before sitting on the patio at Gingko today — was struck temporarily dumb. “I didn’t…” she stammered. “I don’t….” She tried to begin again. She suddenly found herself wondering if the old men had gone quiet for no reason better than to listen to what the toe-muncher had to say. This, she found, produced an equal-if-not-more-so energetic internal response, wherein she wondered how many of those men, privately and with no consequence to themselves, had fantasized about eating all the baby toes they could find, and were not sitting here being pilloried in public by their literal last friend in the world.

This latter thought, Sally suddenly realized with some horror, had drowned out whatever Jenn had just said, pointedly and with clear expectation of an answer, in response to Sally’s stutterings.

“I do not watch material like that,” Sally said slowly and carefully, as she had done in rehearsal. “I do not know why it was in my feed. I am incredibly embarrassed.”

The jiggling stiletto pump on Jenn’s toe jumped, fell, and clattered to the patio cobbles. Jenn reached forward with a peremptory sigh, and jammed the whole shoe back onto her foot.

“The thing is,” Jenn said, taking long enough to do so that Sally found herself noticing that for the first time in longer than Sally could remember, Jenn was not looking at her SmartLens™ at all, and didn’t even seem to want to be. 

“The thing is,” Jenn said, “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

Sally’s heart sank.

“The Omnifeed™ knows you better than you know yourself,” Jenn continued. “That’s the whole point of these bloody things. Nobody needs an Omnifeed™ if it doesn’t show you things you want to see.”

“I… I…” Sally stammered again. “I don’t,” she finished limply.

“Well. A superintelligent machine whose sole purpose is to understand you based on your every interaction with any type of thing you might like in the world has decided that you’re wrong.”

Their time was up. Jenn paid — for both of them — and when Sally said she needed to use the washroom before she left, Jenn said goodbye and left.

Five months later, through highly indirect means given the subsequent block that Jenn had clearly put on all of Sally’s platforms, a notification on Sally’s Omnifeed™ informed her that Jenn and her partner had welcomed their first baby, a girl. There was no picture posted.

7 – 

Why wouldn’t you stop and look at their toes, though, Sally wondered to herself one night, in bed. Their toes are beautiful.

She had stopped using her SmartLens™, even for 1D feature streams, between the hours of sunrise and sunset, as a new life policy. Some nights, after the sun went down, she didn’t even bother to turn on the lights.

8 –

A year into The Reality Wars ^{patent pending}, Sally Summitt received a voice ping on her Omnifeed™ from a Dr. Chee at M.A.R.S. Syndicate, a local accelerator, think tank, not-for-profit-organization and all-around theoretical black box whose downtown head office looked, ironically, like the bleached-white bones of a gargantuan, prehistoric whale. Sally cycled the ping to SpAm™ and moved on to more important messages. In the six years since the incident at Gingko Espresso, she’d been reducing her screen-and-holography time through a bespoke App Limiter, and her total minutes per day was now in the single digits. She didn’t have them to waste on SpAm™.

Several more similar messages from Dr. Chee went straight to SpAm™ in the days to come, though The Reality Wars ^{patent pending} had necessitated a temporary pause on some automated filtering once per week, since nobody knew what was real anymore. So, eventually, Sally had seen enough “URGENT!” and “OPPORTUNITY!” and “PLEASE!” message headers from Dr. Chee to open one of the voice pings. This made a two metre by two metre glowing green head, presumably Dr. Chee’s, appear in the midst of Sally’s HomePlace™ via 3.33D holography. Sally’s App Limiter cut the feed for the day as soon as the holographic Dr. Chee was intaking her first breath to speak, and in the hour and a half it subsequently took Sally to locate the control settings for her App Limiter so that she could temporarily extend her minutes for that day, the sun had gone down. In the darkness of her HomePlace™, Sally finally watched the following message:

“Ms. Summitt, my name is Dr. Lilian Chee, and I am a Lead Thinker™ and Immersive Experience Curatolutionary™ at M.A.R.S. Syndicate. I apologize for bombarding you with voice pings, but I have an exciting opportunity for you. This opportunity will cost you nothing and may, in fact, bring you considerable income along with, I believe, great personal happiness and health. Please ping back an available morning for you to visit, weekends included. I will make myself available. I am very excited to meet you. Thank you!”

Sally, who had to admit to herself that she didn’t have much going on, pinged Dr. Chee back on a morning eleven days later, to present the illusion that she was, in reality, very busy.

When the day arrived, it took quite a bit of convincing on Sally’s part to prevail upon Dr. Chee — a deferential and efficient-seeming researcher whose professionally-inappropriate youthfulness (she was, at best, twenty-two years old) seemed to crackle at the edges of her white labcoat at all times — not to give Sally the standard tour of the M.A.R.S. building. She found the edifice offputting, especially when she passed into its Shadow Field™ from the bright sunshine of the morning foot traffic on Bloor Street. Besides, Sally had spent all of the past eleven days thinking of nearly nothing but what on Earth the young “curatolutionary” had contacted her for; and on her third refusal of the standard tour, Sally lost just enough of her temper to blurt out, “will you please just tell me what this is about?”

Dr. Chee transitioned smoothly into the pitch. “You see, Ms. Summitt, when your full data profile was sold to us in the conglomerate bake-off that broke up Anodyne Supertechnica™ six months ago –” 

“–I don’t think I gave permission for that,” Sally muttered weakly – 

“–you did, it’s right here in the checkbox,” Dr. Chee annotated smoothly before continuing – “your specific algorithmic choices in your, let’s see, yes, your Omnifeed™ app, fit a profile that we have been searching for.” Dr. Chee seemed to be politely moderating the degree to which she was certain, absolutely certain, she was paying Sally an enormous compliment.

“You broke open my algorithm?” Sally stammered.

Dr. Chee almost smiled. It came off as a sphincteral smirk, instead. “Of course. In short, we need someone just like you to begin a series of tests on an immersive new technology that we believe will have great market value, particularly if and when The Reality Wars ^{patent pending} go in the direction we believe they will.”

“Which is…?” Sally sighed, already exhausted.

Dr. Chee’s rapid-fire delivery seemed to slow, her jaw muscles loosening. “Well,” Dr. Chee began, more like she was having a coffee conversation with a friend. “That’s political. I don’t want to offend anyone who’s on one side or the other. You know how things are. But let’s say, certain… shall we say… boundaries will soon be no longer enforceable, or at least, might become more permeable in different ways.”

Sally blew her last gasket. “What the hell does that mean??!” she spat.

From the startled look on Dr. Chee’s face, Sally gave herself a small point of mental victory; for clearly, whatever was in Sally’s private data had not prepared the young researcher for that.

“It would be easier just to show you,” Dr. Chee said sullenly, and led Sally into the interior of the lab.

9 –

The System ^{brand name not final} put Sally in the place she loved most in the world, under the weather she loved most in the world, wearing the clothes she loved most in the world, and filled the air with faint wafts of the aroma she loved most in the world. None of these logically matched up with one another, or needed to. They were not the point.

In front of Sally, crawling or lolling on the silk-soft green grass, were dozens and dozens of babies, all bare-footed, all euphoric.

Sally’s body, in the suspension nutrient fluid with its strong analgesics and total deprivation of light and sound, somewhere in the darkened M.A.R.S. lab — itself a whale carcass from the ancient world sitting hollowed-out on a street in a city — perceived nothing but the virtual (V-) world.

In the V-world, V-Sally hesitated, her own toes naked on the grass, demure and uncertain in spite of the very clear instructions from Dr. Chee. In front of her, one of the babies rolled onto its backside and kicked its feet in the air, and squealed with a ferocious, beckoning delight.

10 –

Sally’s debrief took seven hours, mostly because Sally needed to confirm, at nearly every step and before answering any single question, that none of her responses would follow her back into her “real” life. 

Dr. Chee, whose features had taken on the aspect of a particularly self-satisfied tabby, eventually tired of giving Sally the same validation over and over again, regarding what Sally had or had not chosen to do or not do to the V-toes of any V-babies in V-world. Instead, Dr. Chee asked Sally if she thought The System ^{brand name not final} might be better sold under the brand name Real Life, which would be marketed without air quotes or trademarks.