We don’t have any promotions or charities. We just sell bread, we don’t deliver it door to door,” she snapped. The old man left the store even more distraught.
And the more he thought about it, the more anxious he felt. He was already afraid to even touch the bread—what if it was laced with something? What if someone was trying to poison him?
On the fourth morning, he decided to take a different approach. He took an old video camera from the pantry, the kind he’d once used for family gatherings, and set it up to film the porch. And when he watched the footage that morning, his heart nearly stopped.
The screen clearly showed a small drone silently approaching his house at four in the morning, hovering over the porch, carefully dropping a bag of bread, and then flying away. The pensioner caught his breath. Everything had become even more terrifying: this definitely wasn’t a neighbor or social services anymore.
This was something else.
With trembling hands, he packed his things and went to the police station. And then he learned something terrible.
There, after showing the recording, he could barely explain what was going on.
The police officers exchanged glances, and one of them quietly chuckled:
“You’re caught in an experiment, my dear.”
It turned out that some new startup company had decided to test an unusual bread delivery system. And his address just so happened to be in their customer database. All because a few days earlier, the pensioner, trying to check the weather forecast on his phone, accidentally clicked on an ad and signed up for a monthly bread delivery subscription.
He himself didn’t understand how it happened—it looked like he’d simply “clicked the wrong button.” But in reality, he’d signed up for a trial plan. When the old man heard the explanation, he either sighed with relief or became completely angry. They refunded his money and canceled his subscription, but the uneasy feeling remained.
And he still couldn’t bring himself to try the bread he had at home—the loaves looked too ominous.
