Bread Overhead

In a near-future industrial setting, automated walking mills produce ready-to-eat loaves that unexpectedly become buoyant when filled with a lighter-than-air gas and drift away from their conveyors. The airborne bread confounds collection machines, startles wildlife and the public, and becomes a media spectacle. Corporate managers and designers scramble to manage publicity, explain the phenomenon and protect profits while technicians trace the scientific causes. The narrative satirizes technological hubris and consumerist promotion by tracing how a celebrated innovation yields absurd, unanticipated social consequences.