Made from nothing but milk and love.

“For fuck’s sake.” They half-slammed the empty carton on the counter, beside the mug it had failed to fill.

Any other day of the year, if they went to pour from the half-gallon carton in the fridge and discovered it yielded less than a quarter cup – not enough for cereal, not enough for hot chocolate, not even enough to charge their phone – they would have simply shrugged and added ‘milk’ to the grocery list, and done without until the next shopping trip.

But it was almost Christmas, and Santa Claus was on its way.

They had to have enough milk.

They groaned at themself. They should have been more careful. They’d set up the cookies yesterday. But when it came to the milk, they had just glanced into the fridge and seen that there was still a carton in there, and one not due to expire until the 27th. They hadn’t touched it in days – of course they didn’t remember how much was in it.

They downed the minimal layer of liquid in the mug in one gulp. It was pointless to save it. That amount didn’t even come halfway to meeting Santa’s requirement.

They’d have to go back out for milk.

Leslie bundled up in both their coats, a hat, and a face mask. The sun had gone down in the time between their return from work and their disappointing dairy-free discovery, so they needed to dress to face the cold and snow.

Of course, snow didn’t really fall here anymore. After New Year’s Day, the weather would get back to the regularly scheduled 60 degree Fahrenheit winter. But the town had splashed out for a couple weeks of WinterWonderland™ climate control system. It was kind of nice by light of day - the snow in the sunlight made everything look bright and clean. But to maintain it, they had to turn on the snow-makers and turn down the temp every night.

Leslie walked with their head bent against the manufactured wind, unsure if they more-so regretted that they didn’t possess gloves or that they did possess fingers as the chill stole all feeling from their extremities in the hour-long walk. They passed a dozen other corner stores and supermarkets in that time, all of which certainly sold milk, but none of which met Leslie’s needs. There was only one place for Leslie to buy dairy products. They considered themselves highly fortunate it wasn’t even more difficult to get to.

At last, with their hands jammed up under their arms for warmth, they came to the last turn in their journey. They imagined the moment they would step gratefully into the heated interior of the store. Maybe they’d even buy a hot chocolate along with the milk, and take a minute to savor the warmth before once again facing the artificial outdoor cold.

They turned the corner, and their dreams evaporated.

It couldn’t be… the corner store… the little semi-independent corner store, that still employed a human cashier out of some sense of retro charm… where you could still buy a half gallon of milk and a dozen eggs and whatever horrible new flavor the sick fucks at Oreo had dreamed up last without once consenting to share your biometric data with the corporations that had produced them all. The shop that had even taken cash up until two years ago. The only shop in town that would sell Leslie open-source dairy…

It was gone.

It had been there the last time they bought milk. But now, in its place, stood a Walmart Mini™.

Too cold to do otherwise, Leslie moved through their frustration and dismay down the street and into the store.

If nothing else, at least it was warm in there. They unzipped their jackets, and took stock of the situation.

They were alone. No other shoppers stood in the aisles. The cashier was gone, replaced by motion-sensitive cameras that followed Leslie through the store, and a self-scan checkout.

The bones of the shop were still there. The store had had the same layout as long as Leslie had known it. It wouldn’t last much longer now; WalMinis™ were contractually obligated to rearrange every so often, in a bid to confront consumers with new goods and perhaps coax them into buying something new, something extra, more than what they came in for.

But for now, Leslie walked straight-forwardly to the refrigerator at the back, the place they had come routinely the past three years for every milk run.

Maybe it would be okay. Maybe they still had to sell out of the old shop’s stock before switching fully to WalProducts™. Sure, Leslie would have to find a new source for accessible dairy moving forward, but at least they’d be able to get their Christmas deliveries tonight.

The refrigerator itself looked the same as ever. The products within it, however, had changed.

It was here.

Two-factor authentication enabled milk.

Leslie pulled a face at the words on the label. “Enabled”. Yeah, right. Two-factor authentication mandated milk was more like it. There was no way to opt-out.

Since dairy had become so valuable with the invention of lactose-based electricity, it only made sense to the people selling it that the people buying it should prove they had paid for what they used. It wouldn’t do to let people run around wildly, stealing each other’s milk. So two-factor authentication was the simple solution. You buy the milk; then, any time you want to open it to use it, you simply use your smartphone to prove that you’re the one who bought it.

For most people, it wasn’t a problem. Everyone had the Google Account they’d made in kindergarten. It was easy as pie to follow the link on the milk carton, log in to your Google Account with ID, password, thumbprint, and retina scan, click the button to send the One Time Password, miss the text notification with the One Time Password because your phone’s messages were muted, send a new One Time Password, check your messages and see the first one, enter the first one, be confronted by a blaring alert accusing you of stealing your own identity for entering the wrong number, do the CAPTCHA in which you identified which pictures showed men who’d never in their lives stopped to look at the moon, re-log in, get a new One Time Password, and finally, verify your identity with the milk’s receipt-of-purchase to send a wireless signal from your phone to the Bluetooth enabled milk carton cap so that it would open up.1

(1 If this sounds more complicated than implied by ‘easy as pie’, it’s possible you’re interpreting that analogy in terms of eating pie. There are a lot of steps in most pie recipes!)

The point is, as long as your phone was charged so you could use it, it was easy to access the TFA required to open your carton of milk to charge your phone. People around the world used TFA every day, usually several times.

Leslie, however, was locked out of Google two-factor authentication.

The thing was, they had liked their little old iPhone 34. It fit in their hand and in their pocket. The camera was good enough for what they needed. Sure, the holographics looked more like something out of Star Wars than modern technology, but it was a vibe.

So when the iPhone 35 came out, they hadn’t upgraded. Nor had they upgraded for the iPhones 36, 37, 38, or 38Ultra.

After the release of the iPhone 39, they’d received a warning. The software on their iPhone 34 would soon cease to be supported, and they would be unable to update it. They had expected that. They had done some research. Once new hardware was in wide circulation, it was only natural for software support for older models to fizzle out. It was something like having a technological disability – not always easy to live with, but manageable with the proper considerations. They were willing to take on that challenge. They would update one day, but not yet.

The part they hadn’t anticipated was that they would lose the ability to update the Google software on their phone as well. Eventually, they couldn’t use it at all. And when Google was disabled on their phone, and they went more than a month without using their Google Account, they found that they were locked out of it, no matter what device they attempted to access it from. Reactivating the account would take more time, effort, and money to fully prove their identity to reclaim their data than they had to spare.

So Leslie lived the life of the technologically disabled, with an outdated iPhone and no Google Account. Some things, they did the old-fashioned way, forgoing whatever apps would make it slightly more convenient. Other things, though alarmingly few, offered their own proprietary takes on TFA as an option in addition to the usual Google Account based one. Leslie had a whole folder on that same iPhone 34 devoted to TFA apps for various services.

But dairy TFA all went through Google.

They sighed.

If they couldn’t leave milk and cookies out for Amazon Santa Claus™, none of the gifts they had ordered would be delivered. As a condition of the premium delivery service, users had to provide cookies on the local server with the information the automated delivery drone needed to complete its delivery, and milk to recharge it enough to move on to the next delivery. Without them, it would quickly skip over Leslie’s house, holding the presents they’d already paid for hostage.

Maybe they could just… break the milk open. Sure, they’d get fined, and maybe get banned from the WalMini™, but it was a distant branch on the mega-corporation family tree that connected it to Amazon Santa Claus Delivers. Even if breaking the milk open eventually had repercussions for their Amazon usage, it would take some time for those consequences to come into effect.

Still. There would be consequences, sooner or later. It was impossible for Leslie, unversed in corporate rule-dodging as they were, to predict what they would be exactly.

Physically breaking open the milk would have to be the last resort. There had to be another option.

They weren’t the tech savviest guy on the planet. Sure, they used Firefox with a host of extensions to browse the web, and had installed a DreamCatcher by their bed to block most of the D wave ads and avoid subscribing to Microsoft Sleep Premium™, but they’d followed directions online for both of those. And both of those were legal, for now, and technically freely available even if the corporations did their best to bury the info online deep in a mess of AI-genned search results.

But by-passing two-factor authentication…

They imagined they’d need to go to the DarkNet to even get an idea of who to ask to help with that.

Well. Desperate times.

Leslie bought a gallon of TFA-enabled milk. Usually they went for a half-gallon, but they figured they may as well make it worth their effort. After they got it open once, they could pour it into analog water bottles and dispose of the milk jug.

The walk home was even colder and more desperate. Leslie managed it in forty-five minutes, hugging the milk to their chest, their mind racing even faster than their legs.

Alone in their apartment, they hurled the milk into the fridge and slammed the door.

Then they slammed themself down into their chair, turned on their computer, and opened a private window.

An hour into their search, they found a forum: Posts that Say Milk dot com. A banner across the top of the web page read: We Are All Citizens of Milk.

There was an array of different pages available with posts about different topics: recipes involving milk, debates about different kinds of milk, milk memes… At the end of the list was a tab labeled ‘milk help’. It sounded promising.

Leslie clicked it.

A long list of posts appeared, each with a title in large letters, saying attention grabbing things like: Help! Drank One Month Expired Milk! and Brother Keeps Drinking All the Milk Before I Can Charge My Headphones, How to Stop Him?

None of the problems sounded like theirs.

Then they noticed the sidebar. The site hosted a few voice-only chatrooms, where nothing was recorded and voices were automatically disguised for privacy. The text on the sidebar suggested, “If you have any problems that are too *much* to put in writing, bring them here to talk to one of our dedicated mods!”

They put on their headphones and entered the Milk Tech Help chatroom.

It was quiet when Leslie arrived. There were two mods present, but that was the only information the screen showed. There was nothing else to see or hear.

“Hello?”

A picture appeared – an avatar of a black and white rat. “Hello. What brings you here?”

“I have a bit of a milk problem.”

“You want the addictions chatroom,” said the other mod, represented as they spoke by the avatar of a purple dog.

“No, not that kind of problem. It’s – I bought milk tonight. But I don’t have access to my Google Account anymore. So I can’t open it.”

The purple dog avatar made a knowing sound. “You want unauthenticated milk access.”

Leslie hesitated. It sounded so blunt put that way. But it was the truth. “Yes.”

“You know of course that that violates Google’s terms of service.”

“I know.”

“Well. If you know the risk you’re running, I do know someone who might be able to help.”

“You do?” asked the rat avatar.

“Well. Not personally. But I know someone who knows someone.” There was the faint sound of typing on a keyboard. “Just wait a moment.”

They waited.

Then there was a soft chime as a fourth person entered the voice-chat. “So you have a problem for my contact, hmm?” asked a low, grizzled voice.

“I guess so,” Leslie said.

“Who is your contact, anyway?” asked the rat avatar.

“They call her The Milk Lover,” the enigmatic newcomer said.

“No way,” breathed the rat avatar.

“Yes way,” said the purple dog. “I thought you might have heard of her.”

“I sure have. I heard she used to be –“ the rat avatar’s voice dropped so low that Leslie had to strain to hear – “a streamer.”

Leslie shuddered. Streaming had been outlawed for twenty years. “Can I ask – I mean, um… do you know what she streamed?”

“Old video games,” said the purple dog. “You know Minecraft?”

“No?”

“No, you’re probably too young. It was a classic. Anyway. Yes, she was a streamer. She used to blog, too. She’s seen things on the internet you and I can only imagine.”

The latecomer laughed. “She and I both. I’d say if anyone can crack open your corporate-controlled carton, it’ll be her. But I should warn you – you may find her a little… odd.”

“O- odd?”

The purple dog sighed. “You’re scaring the kid, Chad.”

Leslie found their voice. “I’m not a kid,” they said. “I’m – well. I’m a milk lover, too. How can I talk to her?”

Chad chuckled. “You’ve heard of Tumblr?”

“The old microblogging platform?” the rat avatar asked. “It’s dead.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Leslie said.

“Yes, you have. You might not know it, but you have. Traces of its meme culture are laced through the entire structure of the internet. And I wouldn’t call it dead, exactly. I’d call it undead.”

“This is why I had to contact Chad,” the purple dog avatar said. “I can’t get in touch with the Milk Lover directly because I don’t go on that site, and its the only site she uses.”

The rat avatar asked exactly the question on Leslie’s mind. “How can a website be undead?”

“Simple. When staff finally called it quits on the sinking ship their site had become, some of the users stepped in. Not many of them, and not uniformly. It’s a loose network of a website, riddled with potholes, individually configured to each user’s specifications on their own little domain. But the connection is still there. The community for those determined souls who remained is still alive. It’ll die one day, when we do. There’s no way to find the site through any search engine. No new blood starting new blogs. But we persist.”

“Then how am I supposed to get on this tumblr to talk to the Milk Lover?”

“It’s simple,” Chad said. “All you need - “ there was the sound of typing - “is this invite link.”

Leslie watched the screen, waiting for a notification that something had been sent in the Posts About Milk website’s chat.

Instead, their phone chimed.

They picked it up, shaking slightly.

They had a message from an unidentifiable number. It was just a blue hyperlink that read milk here.

When Leslie looked back up to the screen, Chad was gone, and the purple dog avatar had gone off-line.

“Man,” the rat avatar breathed. “This is actually exactly what I signed up for when I started modding, but I still didn’t think it would really be like this. You good?”

“I think so? I guess – I’m gonna go talk to the Milk Lover.”

“Best of luck. Stay safe. Use up your milk before it goes bad.”

“You, too.” Leslie disconnected from the voice-chat and closed out of Posts That Say Milk.

They moved the hyperlink over from their phone to their monitor and opened it.

The screen filled instantly with a blur of black fur and sharp white teeth and red mouth. On edge as they already were, the sight of it set Leslie’s heart pounding. It took a few cycles of the images to realize it was a rotating set of photos of a black cat, always in motion, always mid-bite.

Scrolling down from that header image revealed a series of white rectangles covered in black text. It appeared to be encrypted somehow, scrambled to the sight of anyone who wasn’t a logged-in Tumblr user. Tumlrite? Tumblerina? Leslie didn’t know what word the denizens of this impossible undead website would use to describe themselves. Or possibly the text wasn’t encrypted digitally, but rather written in a particular code or dialect intelligible only to the die-hard Tumblroo.

There was no indication that any other user was viewing the page, or that there was any kind of communication ability on this page at all, but suddenly, the voice of the Milk Lover was in Leslie’s headphones, cutting right to the chase. “So you want to bypass two-factor authentication.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Send me a scan of your milk.”

Leslie fetched the jug from the fridge. Using the 3D scanner on their phone, they captured the milk jug’s image from all angles. Then they moved the files over to their computer and sent them.

“Hmm.” On the screen, the milk jug spun around as the Milk Lover clicked it and observed it. “Send me the receipt.”

Leslie did so.

“Hmm,” she said again. “Not the easiest nut to crack. You’ll have to give me a minute.”

Leslie waited. Minutes passed. The only sounds were from the Milk Lover’s end of the line, and they were all mysteries to Leslie. The clacking sound was certainly a keyboard, but the squishing, squeaking, and, once, quiet shrieking, were all unidentifiable. They thought they heard, at a distance, as though the headset with the microphone had been removed from the wearer’s mouth “Marcy! Stop that!” but they had no idea what that meant or how it related to opening up their milk.

There was a shuffling kind of noise, and then a sigh into the mic. Leslie guessed the Milk Lover had put her headphones back on.

They cleared their throat. “You, uh.” They didn’t know exactly where this sentence was going, but in the silence, they felt they had to say something. They could only hope it would be a good idea. “You really like milk, huh?”

A hush fell over the line.

Leslie was seized with the sudden soul-shattering conviction that they’d blown it.

“Read my url out to me.”

“Uh. It says ‘milk lover’.”

“Right. I think that answers your question.” The typing sounds resumed.

Leslie resumed their silent, anxious waiting.

Their phoned chimed.

It was a message from Santa Claus. Their delivery was now scheduled for 3:28 am.

The milk had to be out and ready by that time. They twisted their hands nervously in their lap, wishing there was anything more they could do.

At last, the Milk Lover made a satisfied noise, making Leslie sit up right.

“Hold your phone up to the milk cap,” she ordered.

Leslie did so.

With a twist and a hiss, the milk jug unsealed.

Leslie smiled, the kind of pure, unintentional smile of relief that you can’t stop if you want to. “It’s open,” they breathed. “It worked!”

The voice on the other end remained calm and business-like, but Leslie thought it maybe sounded a little proud, too. “Glad to hear it.”

“Thank you,” Leslie said, sincere gratitude evident in their voice. “This means so much to me.”

“It was my pleasure.”

“Can I ask one question?”

“You just did. You can ask one more, though, if you want.”

“Why did you do this? Why help me?”

The answer came immediately and unreservedly: “Because everyone deserves milk.”

Without another word, the connection dropped.

Leslie was alone again, with their now opened jug of milk.

They checked the time. 3:25 am.

They jolted to their feet, and flew to the counter, where the Amazon Deliveries glass sat waiting. Hands shaking faintly with adrenaline, they hastily poured the milk, bringing it level with the pre-measured line. They gripped the glass in both hands and, leaving the milk jug open on the counter behind them, carried it out to their apartment building’s doorstep, where they’d designated the landing zone.

As they set the milk down, they thought they heard a quiet noise. Their breath caught. They leapt for the door, and slammed it behind them. They sank to the floor and listened.

Yes – it was the unmistakable sound of sleigh-bells and drone rotors.

Santa Claus had arrived.

Leslie waited with bated breath. They heard faintly the ‘ding!’ of the drone connecting to the local network and downloading the cookies they had left out for it. Then more whirring, more jingling as it flew as directed to the landing zone. The thump of the package settling on the floor was followed by the sipping sounds of milk through the drone’s straw and into the charger. It sucked until it drew air. Then the rotors’ whirring resumed, and Santa jingled off to the next delivery.

When all was quiet, Leslie slipped outside. There on the doorstep was a bag, containing all the gifts they had chosen for their family and friends this year.

Beside it was the empty glass of milk.

Leslie breathed a sigh of relief. Christmas was saved, thanks to the Milk Lover.

- The End -