When my sister Amy called to tell me she'd found our mother's old recipe box while cleaning out her basement, I was in the middle of reading an article about pattern recognition in the human brain. The kind of article that makes you feel superior for reading it, until you realize you've absorbed exactly none of it. The timing wasn't lost on me - here I was, trying to understand why humans see meaning in randomness, while simultaneously wanting to believe that finding Mom's recipes exactly three years after her passing, to the day, meant something profound.

The apocalypse didn’t start with zombies or nuclear war. It started with a document processor who’d had enough.