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“Doña Yola’s Algorithm,” a story selected from Litro’s The Odds Are In competition.
It begins with a simple premise — someone who always seems to know — and turns that social intuition into something larger, stranger, and more exact.
By Claudio Navarro
Translated from Spanish
A Chilean village oracle malfunctions in this sharp comedy about algorithmic dependency. Translation captures the deadpan humor of technological breakdown.
San Clemente, in the Maule region of Chile, has no fiber optics. It doesn’t even have a good 4G signal.
When tourists arrive looking for Google Maps, the screen goes blank.
But the locals don’t get lost. Because they have Doña Yola.
Doña Yola (92 years old, 1-Core Biological Processor, Infinite RAM Memory) sits on the green bench in the plaza from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM.
She doesn’t knit. She doesn’t read the paper. She just processes.
Her function is Big Data.
If you walk by the plaza with a bag of charcoal, Doña Yola scans the input, cross-references the historical database (whose birthday is today), and shouts at you:
“Buy sausages at Lucho’s! The ones on sale at the supermarket have too much gristle!”
And she is right. She is a predictive algorithm with 99.8% accuracy.
Doña Yola managed the town’s “Tinder.” If she saw the pharmacist’s daughter crying (Input A) and the mechanic’s son single and drunk (Input B), she calculated the outcome instantly. She would shout across the plaza: “Don’t do it, mija! Chance your relationship survives: 18%. He loves his motorcycle more than you.” Then, she would redirect the traffic toward the baker’s nephew.
The social ecosystem worked perfectly. Until last Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Doña Yola had a glitch. The doctor said it was a transient ischemia.
The IT technician would say it was a corrupt firmware update.
Doña Yola returned to the plaza, but she was no longer version 1.0. Her cookies had been deleted.
Her cache was fragmented. And her audio module (left ear) had static.
The chaos started at ten.
Don Pedro, the Mayor, approached to ask for his daily report.
“Yola, what do people think about the paving of the north street?”
Doña Yola looked at him with glassy eyes. She processed “paving” and understood “infidelity.”
“They say they saw you leaving the motel with the secretary,” said Yola, with a metallic voice.
The Mayor went pale. The news (Fake News) propagated through the town’s neural network (the old ladies at the greengrocer’s) at a speed of 100 megabits per gossip.
By eleven, the Mayor’s wife had already thrown his clothes into the street.
Then came the e-commerce error. Mrs. Martita approached, hopeful.
“Yolita, I need a tip urgently. My granddaughter is getting married and I want to make her the wedding cake. What should I put in it to make it unforgettable?”
Doña Yola looked at her. The processor failed. She crossed “Newlyweds” with “Rat Plague.”
“Strychnine,” said Yola, confidently. “Buy the white powders Gladys sells at the back of the store. It’s the only thing that leaves them stiff at once.”
“Stiff at once?” asked Martita, impressed. “What potency! It must be an ancient pastry secret.”
Martita went to Gladys’s. She bought the package with the skull (thinking it was a gourmet gothic brand).
She baked the cake. Three dogs that licked the crumbs and the great-uncle who tasted the meringue ended up in the ER with a stomach pump.
The town went into panic. The algorithm had gone crazy, but the dependency was total.
No one knew how to make decisions without Yola’s validation.
People lined up in front of the green bench, desperate, receiving terrifying search results.
“Should I sell the truck?” asked one.
“Kill them all,” answered Yola, smiling sweetly (she probably meant “Sell it in autumn,” but the output came out damaged).
“Is it going to rain tomorrow?”
“Your father never loved you.”
By six in the evening, the plaza was a war zone.
There were broken marriages, businesses closed due to disastrous financial recommendations, and the Priest was exorcising the fountain because Yola told him the water was “possessed by communists.”
The Mayor, sleeping in his car, convened an emergency town hall in front of the old woman.
“We have to reboot her,” said Lucho. “A glass of cold water in the face. Or a scare.”
“No,” said the doctor. “It’s planned obsolescence. The hardware can’t take it anymore.”
Doña Yola looked at them all. Her head moved from side to side, like a surveillance camera looking for focus.
Suddenly, she raised a finger. Total silence. The Oracle was going to speak. Maybe it was the security patch.
The bug fix.
“Error 404,” murmured Doña Yola. “I want to go to bed.”
She stood up. Walked slowly, dragging her slippers, and disappeared down Calle de los Tilos.
The town was left alone. Without a guide. Without a filter. Without personalized suggestions.
They looked at one another. They had to decide what to eat, who to talk to, and what to think, using only their own organic and defective brains.
It was the most terrifying night in the history of San Clemente. No one slept.
Freedom, they discovered, has too much lag.
Litro is an international literary magazine publishing short fiction, essays, interviews, culture writing, and new voices from around the world.
