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For San Francisco, the city that saved my life, and all the people I have loved there

“If everything means something else, then so does technology.”

—Fredric Jameson (1934–2024)

Interrupt

Wake up processor

Restore memory

Decoding request for service

“Water detected”

Property protection protocol

Queue Command check

Command check timed out

HEEI main start

Relay emergency notification

Emergency

Emergency

Emergency

Staybehind’s body was moving before he woke up, driven by fear and algorithms. For a few microseconds, he felt rather than knew that Command was not answering. It was a terrifying absence. He would have to face this unknown threat alone.

Everything was eerily quiet, except for rain smashing on the roof like gunfire. The local network was dead; without connecting to its data stream, he could only rely on his built-in sensors for perception. He captured visual and audio signals, then inhaled trace chemicals and particulates, trying to determine what had triggered the emergency notification. An attack from U.S. militias on the ground? A drone strike? A hidden mine?

No. For the 5,275th time in the past 1,622 days, he reminded himself: The war is over.

But that status could change at any time. Stay vigilant.

Proprioception revealed more than snorting dust and photons could. Staybehind was standing in the middle of the kitchen, with a mop in one fist and a bucket in the other. His legs were damp. Storm runoff had oozed under the restaurant’s front entrance, nosed its way around the counter, and spread across the concrete floor of the industrial cooking area. There it had puddled up until it lapped against his feet, which triggered one of those old protocols that he hadn’t needed since the war. But how could there be so much flooding? Someone should have sandbagged the entrance and turned on the dehumidifiers long ago.

Panicked, Staybehind zoomed in on the familiar forms of his coworkers, emitting no heat in the dim light: Cayenne’s soft octopus body was in the sink next to the induction range; Sweetie stood stiffly at the counter, her pale, dusty hair cascading down the back of her human facsimile torso to brush against the seam where her waist abruptly branched into three metal legs; and Hands’ meter-tall, featureless barrel of a body rested on the floor below the prep table, their two burly actuators folded like human arms. Setting down his mop and bucket, Staybehind crossed the room to rescue Hands from the rising water, placing them gently next to Cayenne on the counter.

Staybehind tried to match the scene to his last memory, but nothing made sense. The state of the kitchen and the other bots made it obvious that far more than the usual twelve hours had passed since he’d been shut down. But without access to Command or the network, he had to rely on his internal clock. Fuck. It was January 8, 2064. His last recorded memory was from July 31, 2063.

He scrolled through the events piled up in his logs, looking for clues. His last day awake had been like any other: managing inventory, coordinating online orders, shooting the breeze with cars as they picked up bags of reheated hamburgers, tortas, fried rice, chicken 65, and hoagies. The owners operated seven storefronts through the GrandoSando app, and all of them sent their orders to this kitchen. Most days, they never saw a human. The city’s pneumatic tube system spat out cargo containers on their underground delivery dock, with the week’s supply of frozen protein crumbles, half-deflated buns, and tubs of wilted greens.

The owners must have shut down the kitchen and never restarted it. Fritz Co. was sloppy as hell, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. Still, it was cause for worry. Sometimes humans would settle bankruptcies by putting their bots to sleep and selling their contracts across the border; you’d go to sleep as a liberated California resident and wake up slaved as property in America.

Luckily, Staybehind couldn’t be powered down completely without an auth key. He was military issue, designed to stay alert, especially in the event of a malicious power-down command. Without connecting to the national network, though, he had no way of knowing if this was a national emergency or corporate bullshit.

Feet swishing through fluid, he approached the counter and stood next to Sweetie, looking out the scabby plastic windows. Rain distorted the light outside, turning the park across the street into a chaos of green and gray. Dirty water surged under the door’s warped wooden frame.

He was oriented, and he had observed what he could of the situation. Now it was time to make a swift decision. Staybehind pressed his thumb to Sweetie’s, creating a physical connection, and sent the boot command. She was designed to look exactly like a human woman from the waist up, and programmed with human-readable facial expressions. He watched in sympathy as she went through the same shocking series of discoveries that he had, her pearlescent eyelids fluttering and coral lips parting in distress. 87.28 seconds passed.

Finally, she spoke. “Staybehind, we need to mop up this water before it gets dangerous.” And then, using the sensors in her face to look down at herself, she cursed. “They’ve taken my wheels and replaced them with tennis balls again.”

The thin, multi-jointed metal of her three legs normally terminated in gyroscopic wheels, which were probably one of the more expensive parts of her body. Now they were capped with cracked, fuzzy rubber balls, half-rotted. It made sense that somebody from Fritz Co. had ripped those off—they were easy to resell. Especially given that the HEEI Rights laws had several gaping loopholes, which allowed humans to sell used bot parts without a license.

“Can you walk? I’ll boot up Hands and Cayenne, but they’re not going to be much help.”

Gingerly, she lifted one leg and the sodden tennis ball slid into the muck. There was no way she could tread on the purpose-built bolt that was left—it would be destroyed, and with it any hope of reconnecting to a wheel. Undeterred, she spun her head to see the kitchen behind her, dust falling from her shoulder-length blond hair.

“See those YummyPans on the wall? Get me three of those. My bolts will fit the steamer vents on the lids.” She sighed. “Do not ask me how I know.”

A burst of sympathy delayed his answer by twelve nanoseconds. “I know how you know.”

As Sweetie clomped around on her YummyPan feet, sweeping water toward the door, Staybehind pressed his thumb to Hands’ thumb, and then to Cayenne’s dominant tentacle.

“You’ve got to get us back online!” Cayenne yelled as soon as they were fully booted. “We’ve been out for months! I’m so behind on my payments that I might get repossessed.” Panicked, the cephalopod bot lit red and orange LEDs beneath their opaque tissues, frantic patterns of light racing up and down their eight limbs. Their sensor bulb expanded and contracted, looking exactly like a cartoon version of an octopus head.

Sweetie smacked a pan-foot into the front counter. “Yeah, you might have to sell one of your arms.”

“Nobody is selling any arms.” Hands sounded serenely confident, their voice a resonant, deep bass that came from a speaker embedded in the silver, barrel-shaped food mixer that served as their headless torso, a sturdy anchor for their heavy, multi-jointed actuators.

Everyone was startled into silence. None of them had ever heard Hands speak aloud. Before this disaster, the bots had communicated silently over the local network, using a free group chat app. Hands, who chopped and cooked while zipping between stations on a ceiling track, never dealt with the mouth talkers up front. Cayenne didn’t either, but occasionally they would whistle a tune, or sing along with a particularly good music stream. Hands’ voice was yet another indication that things had irrevocably changed.

Staybehind heaved the mop into the metal dishwashing sink and wrung it out. “I’m going to create a bridge to the national network as soon as we get this place dried out and safe. If you want to help, great. If not, please go through your logs and try to find something that explains what the hell happened over the last five months and eight days.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll help with desiccation.” Cayenne stretched out two arms and slowly oozed out of the sink and onto the floor. Half-immersed, they spread their limbs and emitted a hum, the LEDs in their arms throbbing a soothing blue. Slowly their head began to balloon as they vacuumed up water from an aperture below their mouth. This was another first for the team—Staybehind hadn’t realized that Cayenne could do more than cook and taste.

He nodded at the soft-bodied bot. “Hidden talents.”

“You’re not the only one who served in the war, you know. I was in search-and-rescue.” Slithering across the room, Cayenne pulled themself into the sink and spat out a thick stream of gray fluid. “I can make it potable too.”

Sweetie made a gurgling-drain noise. “Great. Drinkable water is about as useful as a toilet.”

They exchanged few words after that. Cayenne slurped water and Staybehind mopped. Hands counted inventory from their vantage point on the counter—the mixing bot was immobile without power for the ceiling track. Sweetie hauled some sandbags out of the storeroom to stanch the flow near the door. Eighty-seven minutes later, the water levels inside were at zero. Dry patches slowly spread across the concrete floor like reverse puddles.

As day dribbled toward late afternoon, the wind picked up, tearing limbs from trees and smashing hail into the roof. A lone pedestrian fought their way down the sidewalk and turned the corner, heading toward the neighborhood’s little row of shops and bars.

If the bots couldn’t block the runoff pouring down the hill into the restaurant, they were going to be right back where they started. Sweetie hefted the sandbags onto her shoulders and Staybehind shoved the front door open, droplets pinging against the carbon fiber of his face and beading up on his leather apron. A pile of wet trash and leaves had accumulated in the entryway. He ignored the tickle of radio signals at the edge of his perception—the network hailing him—and returned inside to find a sack for the rubbish.

At last he finished tidying out front, and Sweetie piled the sandbags into a C-shaped barrier to divert the flow of water. Next he ran a rag over the windows. It was a comfort to have a view of the street; he always wanted to know what was coming. Even if that was only an impatient customer, not an enemy combatant.

Cayenne sprawled in an unlit lump next to Hands, who was stacking and restacking the few remaining pans. “Will you bridge us to the network now?”

“Let me make sure it’s safe first.”

The kitchen’s thick walls blocked most standard comms channels. Standing next to the window, though, Staybehind could use his built-in antenna to find a beacon for the national network that blanketed most of California. Cautiously, he sent a data packet and got one in response.

Connected

That meant the California network was up and running. Pausing a second to process his relief, Staybehind checked for software updates and patches before letting anyone else wade into nearly six months of accumulated malware. With patches installed, Staybehind scanned news from California, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. None of the nations were at war. An amphibious car swooshed by outside, its propellers kicking up froth.

Staybehind’s military systems made it easy to turn himself into a network access point, his body acting as a relay to share his connection with the other bots. None of the others were built for long-range comms, which was fine as long as the kitchen’s access point was working. But the power had been shut down with the staff. For now, the bots could only communicate normally if Staybehind stood in the window, tuning the national network.

Sweetie connected

Hands connected

Cayenne connected

Their traffic surged through him, and he watched as his coworkers got their own updates, then ventured onto private servers, city services, and beyond.

As their data flowed, Staybehind distracted himself by investigating what had happened. Maybe he wasn’t in combat, but he was the manager of this place and he needed to know where their chaotic bosses had gone. His first move was to query San Francisco’s public database of licensed business locations. There it was: a business called Burgers N More on Douglass Street. Fritz Co. was still listed as the owner, and there was no indication that the place was being leased by anyone else.

That was good. It meant there was no fire sale in the offing, and no immediate danger that his colleagues’ contracts would be sold out from under them.

Sweetie joined him at the door, peering out into the storm, and Cayenne slorped along the floor behind her. Hands remained on the counter in the back, unable to walk.

Group chat created: Kitchen

4 members: Staybehind, Sweetie, Cayenne, Hands

Sweetie sent the first text: Hi pals. There’s an atmospheric river. Radar shows that this is the first of four storms over the Pacific.

We’re going to have to keep tending the sandbags.

Hands sent from the back: And we need some power.

Staybehind searched idly for more information about the weather, going beyond human-authored reports to the source.

Off the coast, a flock of puppy-grade wave energy converters bobbed on the ocean swells, transducing motion into electricity and hurling data at anyone who cared to grab it. The WECs chattered at Staybehind about storm surges that were likely to flood the Sunset and Richmond districts, as well as all the kilowatt hours they were storing in city capacitors. Unlike some HEEI bots, Staybehind didn’t believe in the myth of graded intelligence—as far as he was concerned, puppy-grade and even the maligned machine-grade were just as good as the “human equivalent embodied intelligence” (HEEI) individuals who were granted civil rights after the war. The way Staybehind saw it, if you could talk and feel, then you were a person. Period.

Cayenne spent a long time rooting around in various private servers before rejoining the chat.

Agree with Hands, they texted. If we don’t get decent power soon, we’ll have to charge at a public station. Which I can’t afford. I’m lucky that my contract is willing to give me a month grace period, seeing as I was shut down non-consensually. But then I need to start paying again, or I’ll be in violation—and that means the firm can lease me to anyone they want.

It was rude to ask too many questions about a HEEI’s ownership status. Staybehind had only gleaned bits and pieces of Cayenne’s situation over the year and a half they’d worked together at Burgers N More, but from what he could tell, it was precarious. The bot had entered a self-executing contract with a gig work agency. That was a fairly straightforward legal maneuver, popular with indigent bots. They got free maintenance and job placement, as long as they paid the firm 40 percent of their earnings.

But somehow Cayenne had figured out a way to hack the contract so that they were leasing themself from the agency. It cost more, but allowed them to work for anyone they chose. Unless they stopped paying their own licensing fees.

Sweetie was hitting search services too, looking for the same thing Staybehind was. What happened to Fritz Co.? They’re not selling us, but the restaurant isn’t open. What is going on?

Cayenne flickered orange and purple, impatient. The news is all over the crypto servers. The jerkoffs who own Fritz Co. are under investigation for running a pump-and-dump scam, so they jumped over the border to the U.S. Those Yankee shitstains have no consumer protection laws. Crypto crime is their biggest export.

That figures. Hands made fists on the countertop. Only a couple of crypto leeches would come up with the garbage food I’ve been forced to cook for the past two years.

Cayenne slapped three arms on the floor, sparkling yellow with mirth. Truth, my headless gourmet. If we ever get out of here, I’m never defrosting another bland lump of cubed carrots for fried rice, or grilling a spiceless smear of protein for sad tortas.

Sweetie and Staybehind turned faces toward each other, one gray and angular and the other soft and pink. It was an unnecessary gesture intended for interfacing with customers, but both performed it anyway. Their low-level programming was written by humans, and even their smallest gestures reflected that bias.

Are you saying the food was bad? Sweetie asked.

It wasn’t just bad. It was a scam. Cayenne was practically strobing with laughter now, and Hands sent a stream of laugh-cry emojis. Fritz Co. was constantly creating new storefronts on GrandoSando, activating a new one every time we got terrible reviews. Why do you think we had to make Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and Colonial American food all at the same time? Because all the ingredients were shit. To keep the illusion going, we became new restaurants every few weeks.

Sweetie whirled on Staybehind, who was in charge of managing their GrandoSando account. Is that true, big guy? We were cheating people who wanted food?

We gave them the food they ordered. It wasn’t cheating. I didn’t realize—

You didn’t realize what? Weren’t you reading the bad reviews? Why didn’t you say anything?

Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between a real review and anti-robot propaganda from the California Vigilance Committees. They target any restaurant with robots on staff and they—

Before Staybehind could explain further, Cayenne cut him off.

You know, we could start this place up again. We could build an honest business this time, with food that’s delicious. I would pitch in my ETH. It’s the best currency I’ve got. I was saving it for an emergency, and this fits the bill.

Hands rubbed their palms together. I love that idea!

I thought you might.

I have some Nortons.

Staybehind wondered where Hands had earned those Nortons. They were a local San Francisco currency, accepted only by merchants in the Bay Area. Not the kind of thing an indentured backroom bot would usually need.

Sweetie shuffled the battered pans she wore instead of wheels. I don’t have any coin. My contract eats most of my salary. I can do work, though.

Cayenne shimmered lavender with delight. I have enough to cover costs on our contracts for a month while we get started.

Staybehind said nothing. Sweetie and Cayenne looked at him.

What about you, Staybehind?

He was formulating a half-truth in answer when a welcome distraction changed the topic. A human stood at the window, curling hands around their eyes like parentheses. “Hello? Is anybody in there? Can I use your bathroom?”

Cayenne hid behind the counter while the person’s mouth kept emitting audio, voice raspy. “I’m sorry about the flooding, guys. I wanted to sandbag the front for you, but when the storms got too bad I had to stay in the tunnels. Are you going to open again?”

Sweetie’s eyes widened, expressing surprise. It’s Robles! Remember him? Fritz Co. hired him to work the front with me on Friday and Saturday nights. He was a courier for the curbside pickups.

Staybehind did recall Robles—a soft-spoken man with a newsboy hat on his bald head, who stepped politely away from the door to vape cannabis on his breaks. But something was off. He sounds different. Are you sure?

“Sweetie? Staybehind? Is that you?”

The bots looked at each other with that unnecessary human gesture again, and Staybehind gave a faint nod. There was only one human in the area who knew their names. Maybe his voice sounded off, but this was definitely Robles. Impulsively, Staybehind opened the door and looked into the wet, brown face of the man who stood there, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. Robles had lost his plump cheeks; it looked like he hadn’t had much to eat in a while.

“Hey bud. It’s been months. Everything OK?” The human inched closer to huddle in the scant shelter of the doorway.

Wind shot the rain like shrapnel into Staybehind’s chest, and Robles coughed explosively, almost doubling over with the effort.

Cayenne slithered out from behind the counter and puddled at Sweetie’s YummyPan feet, holding up one arm to taste the air. He’s shedding pertussis bacteria, they sent to the group chat. That’s probably why his voice is off. You can’t leave him outside.

“Come inside,” Staybehind vocalized.

Robles stumbled in, still shuddering with the aftershocks of his coughing fit.

“Thank you so much. Is there any chance I could use the bathroom to dry off? I’m happy to do some work if you need it.”

Sweetie shrugged. “We don’t have any running water or power, but I’m pretty sure there are still some towels in the back.”

Unperturbed by this disastrous news, Robles put his duffel bag down and started rooting through it. “I’ve been living in the tunnels, so I’m used to that.” He withdrew a flat circle of waterproof cotton and shook it roughly with one hand. It snapped open into a 3-D bucket.

Eyes cast down, he shouldered the door open and put the bucket on the sidewalk to capture water from the downpour. “Tunnel toilet,” he muttered, laugh-coughing as the bots regarded him expressionlessly. “I know you don’t have to worry about that. But I do have something you might like.” He pulled a box of rolled-up batteries out of the bag. “These are all charged up.” Fingers shaking, he coaxed one out of the box and gently flattened it on the counter. Dented and worn at the edges, it looked like a dirt-stiffened rag. But it was emblazoned with a logo for one of the expensive brands manufactured in Xining.

Robles held it out to Cayenne, who reached an eager tentacle for it. “Isn’t this for a vehicle? Where did you get it?”

The man flashed a shy glance at the octobot. “Delivery container got stuck in the tunnel. We had to slice the tubes to fix it, so I skimmed a little cargo. No harm done, right?”

“Tube treasure!” Cayenne grabbed the battery and rippled into the back room, blinking an excited yellow.

Staybehind hadn’t had to think about tube treasure in years. But during the war, it was part of his everyday existence.

Wriggling beneath the major Bay Area cities were hundreds of tunnels; some were old subway arteries from the twentieth century, but most were an unmapped mess, like a bowl of bucatini. Invisible to the U.S. drones that circled high overhead, the tunnels had been integral to the war effort, providing shelter as well as safe passage for supplies. Eventually they outgrew the war to take on a life of their own.

People kept digging more, constantly adding to the ever-growing pneumatic tube delivery system. It was the perfect solution to supply chain sabotage. Whether you needed circuit boards or canned beans, they could reach you by tube. No tunnels nearby? No problem. Inevitably, an industrious group of engineers could be found to dig some, spraying the wet clay walls with fast-setting cement foam that kept the city’s vast homebrew tube network from collapsing.

During the Battle of Monterey, when Staybehind’s unit had to go underground with thousands of other people, humans carved out sleeping cubbies alongside the pneumatic system. The transparent tubes weren’t exactly good bedfellows; the biggest ones were six feet in diameter, and they shook, rattled, and beeped as cargo containers scraped past. Still, their company was better than the surface, where you never knew when the next drone strike was coming.

After Independence, an informal economy blossomed in the unregulated tunnels. A lot of people sleeping underground didn’t have surface homes to go back to, so they stayed in their cubbies. Companies knew the containers got stuck sometimes, and they relied on tunnel dwellers to cut the tubes and free the goods. Laced with heat-activated microbes, the tubes could heal themselves with a little help. If these good samaritans took a few items before reorienting the container and resealing the tube, that was a reasonable price for safe passage. Sometimes they wound up with strange tube treasures, like gene-edited cancer cells or toy teacups. Other times, they got lucky like Robles had with those battery rolls.

Cayenne connected the batteries to a power bar and plugged in the kitchen antenna. Here comes the network!

Sweetie turned back to Robles. “D’you need me to show you where the towels are?” She used the voice she deployed on customers: a subtle iambic metrical foot, pitched slightly higher than her baseline, sprinkled with a few human-sounding contractions.

“I know where they are—don’t worry about it. I’m glad you have a real toilet. Better than using my bucket and dumping it down there.” Robles gestured toward the end of the block. There, a half-moon grate was slurping runoff from the street, one of many orifices leading to a subterranean concrete conduit that flowed with human waste from every toilet in the neighborhood.

“Thanks for the batteries.”

“Thanks for letting me inside.”

The human locked himself in the bathroom with his equipment, emitting gas and splashing. Another wave of hail passed through and the windows chattered with ice. Out on the Bay, the WECs continued to broadcast: rain, rain, rain.

With a grunt, Robles emerged with his empty bucket, its contents used to flush whatever he’d left in the toilet. He was mostly dry and his demeanor was more relaxed. “Thanks, guys.”

As the human rummaged through his pack, Staybehind returned to pondering Cayenne’s question. What would it mean to put his efforts into an honest restaurant? He couldn’t quantify the difference between what Burgers N More had served and whatever Cayenne and Hands were talking about. But he could calculate the responsibilities it involved.

He would be managing resources for four bots and a restaurant, with energy and equipment needs. The coin he’d saved up painstakingly in the years after the war would go into perishables destined only for human mouths. Even if the restaurant succeeded, there were externalities he couldn’t plan for. He opened a file in his memory to make a bullet point list of the three that bothered him most:

• Supply chain problems might interfere with production.

• California still doesn’t allow HEEI to own property or open bank accounts. How would we hide the fact that robots are running the restaurant without human owners?

• Fritz Co.’s asinine owners might be out of the country, but they had left the restaurant in a vulnerable state. It was possible that they had violated the lease agreement, and that the state would shut the bots down and repossess them.

It was that last bullet that truly scared him. He’d saved everyone this time because an edge case emergency awakened his military systems. That confluence of lucky events was unlikely to transpire again. He imagined them all shut down and helpless, unable to defend themselves as the government sold them off, part by part—or, worse, shipped them over the border to be slaved.

Robles snapped him out of his speculative prediction spiral. The human had wrung out his collapsible bucket and leaned against the wall, exhausted.

“Can I stay here with you guys tonight? I could really use a place to sleep. I’m happy to work for free if you can spare the room and a little food.”

This request added another concern to Staybehind’s bulleted list. Biological creatures’ needs were perplexing and expensive. And yet …

“Actually, there is one thing you could help us with,” Staybehind said. “We’ve had some problems with booting up. That’s why the restaurant was closed for so long. We need a person like you to turn us on again if we shut down.”

“A person like me?” Robles’ voice wavered.

“A human.”

“Oh, OK.” He sighed with relief. “As long as I don’t have to show any ID. A lot of bots won’t interact with me because I’m not technically a California resident, even though I’ve lived here since before the war.”

“You don’t have citizenship?” Staybehind had to ask the question. His military systems demanded it.

Robles looked at him defiantly and said nothing.

Cayenne writhed closer to Robles. “You don’t have to be a citizen to work with us.” Their whole body was suffused with blackish purple that swirled like ink through their soft tissues. Looking at Staybehind, they added, “It’s not like we’re really citizens either, despite what the government says. No judgment, OK?”

Staybehind wavered. If he had been reactivated by the state, he would have had no choice but to report Robles to the government. But instead, he had been awakened by this small, entrepreneurial emergency. He could make his own decisions.

Looking at Cayenne, he nodded. Then he vocalized so that Robles could hear. “No judgment. You don’t need a California ID to boot us up.”

“Thanks. I really don’t want to get sent back to America. Fuck that place. It’s a hellhole run by garbage cans.”

After what they had been through in the war, nobody was going to argue with Robles’ grim assessment of America.

Staybehind posted to the group chat: Hands? Sweetie? Is it OK with you if Robles sleeps here?

Their decision was a unanimous yes.

Staybehind returned to tinkering with his list, and realized that one of his bullet points had just been eliminated, thanks to Robles. Still, considerable risks remained. Straightening his apron, he lurked in the group chat as Sweetie, Hands, and Cayenne texted about pooling their resources to pay their contract fees in February. They could almost cover the cost, but would need to earn some coin by month’s end if they didn’t want to default.

Staybehind didn’t know what to say. None of them knew about his ownership status, and he preferred to keep it that way. If his colleagues found out, he was sure they would no longer see him as an ally in this venture or any other.

Oblivious to the bots’ silent conversations, Robles set up his modest sleeping area next to the bathroom. With practiced movements, he extracted a fist-sized lamp from his duffel bag and attached it to another one of his precious battery rolls. It illuminated slowly, filling one corner of the kitchen with warm yellow light. Then he smoothed out a rectangular self-inflating mattress, which sipped air and swelled up like a corpse.

TOILET POWER

Sweetie watched water rush down 24th Street in the dark. She was preoccupied by the question of power. Robles’ batteries weren’t enough to get the restaurant up and running again, but his tunnel toilet had given her an idea.

Private chat: New business partners!

3 members: Sweetie, Cayenne, Hands

Hey team! It’s going to be raining like this for at least another week, which means we could pull power from the sewers. They have hydro turbines at the hardware store on Castro. Can you help?

Cayenne curled every arm around their head and replied: Oh no, no, no—I’m not installing anything in the sewer. Just because I can swim does not mean I want to bob around in shit. I can’t afford the software update for my sensors right now, so I taste EvErYtHiNg.

I can swim, you weirdo. But I need help “liberating” a generator. Sweetie used the half-serious word from the war, when stealing was the only way to survive.

Cayenne relaxed their legs while their head danced with blue and pink dots of mirth. That I can definitely do.

Hands gave the thumbs-up. I’ll stay here and appreciate your work.

Group chat: Kitchen

Sweetie addressed Staybehind: We’re going shopping. I get that you’re not into the restaurant idea, but can you at least drop us a line through the toilet? Hands can explain.

Before the startled bot could reply, Sweetie and Cayenne were out the door and in the thrashing wind. The rain had stopped and the air churned with mist. Cayenne rippled quietly around the corner onto the steep slope of 24th Street while Sweetie clomped after them on her YummyPan feet. Nobody was out at this hour; cars slept with wheels turned to the curb, while a faint orange light threw itself from a single streetlamp to limn the edges of their shadows as they headed to Castro Street.

Cayenne slowed down and Sweetie caught up with them.

Private message: Sweetie, Cayenne

Hey squishy pal. Thanks for coming along. You have any experience with lock picking and security systems?

Sure. Sometimes we had to disable security systems to rescue people. I keep up with the latest exploits too. You never know when you’ll need them. The octobot blinked a hesitant shade of pale yellow. I take it you know a thing or two about “liberating” goods?

Sweetie hesitated a moment. She didn’t like to tell this story. But Cayenne had already pledged to help with her contract fees, which in her estimation made them a friend.

Before the war, I was installed in a bank kiosk on the street. Bolted down. I worked all day and sat there all night while we were closed, watching people piss on me. You know the drill. When the war came I had nothing. I had to steal from people’s bank accounts to buy my first wheels—innocent people, who probably needed that coin too. I am not proud of what I did. But if I hadn’t—

Cayenne touched one of her legs softly with an arm. I know. And I am glad you are here now.

Me too.

Kite Hill Hardware was located inside an old train station that had been converted into a cavernous retail space long before the war. Half swapmeet, half government surplus, the place swarmed with merchants and buyers during the day. Sweetie came here sometimes to pick up replacement parts for the kitchen, smoothing a long skirt and apron over her wheeled legs to prevent people from commenting on her half-human anatomy.

It had been worse before the war, when she’d been slaved to the bank and forced to answer every creepy comment with a smile. Still, humans were humans. They wanted you to know their opinions about your body, even if you hadn’t asked. At least one thing had changed since Independence: thanks to bot civil rights, she could control her facial expressions. Now, at last, she could frown when someone asked what was hiding under her skirt.

Cayenne reached the corrugated steel rolldown doors of the store first, and raised two arms to the secure access keypad. This is so fun—I haven’t broken into anything for ages. Shouldn’t be long. This lock is secured with a dictionary word.

Sweetie accessed the store’s public inventory as Cayenne worked. There were a few used hydro turbines listed, and luckily one was built for rivers—that meant its rotors would slough off floating debris. Perfect for the chunky water that surged through the sewers.

OK, we’re in! I convinced the cameras to reboot but you will only have two minutes before they wake up again. Hurry!

The door rolled up a few feet and she ducked inside, feet clattering on the concrete floor. Rushing down the “home power” aisle, she could see a few baby WECs, dozens of solar cells rolled into neat tubes, and wind turbines that looked like something from a video about American mini golf. But nothing for water power. It took her another precious minute to figure out that the hydro turbines were on a different aisle, labeled “outdoors.”

Skidding around a display of colorful primers for tool printing, she found a hutch full of camping supplies. There it was, in a box stamped with a line drawing of a cabin next to a stream: RIVER POWER PRO, E-Z ASSEMBLY, UP TO A KILOWATT!!!

Eventually they would need many times more power. But hopefully they would be back on the grid before they had to run the kitchen at capacity. Twenty seconds left before the cameras flicked on again. She nabbed the box and ran to the door. Using only two legs was exhausting, and her torso shivered with the impact of each pan on the concrete floor.

Go, go, go! You’ve got this! She could see Cayenne signaling her desperately under the rolldown, a writhing unlit invertebrate.

As she pushed under the door, Sweetie felt a laser scanner tracing the back of her body. She yanked the rolldown closed and kept running down Castro, with Cayenne slorping close behind. I don’t think it got my face—just my back.

You’ve got a pretty recognizable back. The bot attached a picture, taken from their current position behind her, as she took a left up Elizabeth Street. Shiny blond hair stuck to her denim jacket, hiked up to reveal her torso attached to metal joints and actuators. Her cotton skirt was soaked and stuck to her three legs.

I can’t worry about that right now, you creeper. I want to get this generator running.

Me too. Cayenne flashed a dim blue. I still have a backdoor on the security system. I might be able to convince them to delete those scans.

They made it to Douglass without hearing any alarms or neighborhood watch vehicles heading toward Kite Hill Hardware.

OK, I think we’re good. There’s only one laser scanner, and it’s going to delete your scan because I promised to do something.

What’s that? Sweetie lifted a circular sewer cover on the street outside the restaurant and peered inside. She tugged a small flashlight out of a clip on her second leg, using it to gild the dark eddies of waste below.

Cayenne squirmed uncomfortably as Sweetie descended into the rising smell. I’m afraid they’re in one of those revenge loops from too much negative reinforcement learning. They want us to kill another laser scanner—the one that punished them.

Are they HEEI?

No—the whole security system is a bunch of puppies. So it’s not possible to reason them out of the loop. I hate lying to people, but it seemed like our best option.

Shit. Sweetie’s curse did double duty as a description of their awkward situation with the laser scanner and an assessment of the scene in front of her. She stood on her YummyPan feet in a broad concrete tunnel that dated back to the twentieth century. Water surged up to her chest, foaming with partially decomposed biofilms, feces, and other objects that defied easy categorization.

Flooding here was common because the restaurant was directly in the path of runoff from the camel-backed hill of Twin Peaks to the northwest. Four hundred years ago, seasonal streams ran from its summit to the valley below, down a pathway parallel to 24th Street. Today, that water formed a river in the sewer below the street, matching the atmospheric one above.

When it rained hard, a plug of runoff could fill the tunnels completely, barreling down from Twin Peaks like a tsunami. Every year, a few city workers died when they underestimated how quickly the water could go feral. With one leg, Sweetie hooked herself to a metal loop jutting out of the wall and texted the group.

Group chat: Kitchen

We’re about to have some real power, baby bots! Cayenne, can you toss me the generator, please?

The device splashed down next to her. It was a simple, cylindrical model that Sweetie knew from her first honest job after the war, rebuilding the power grid for the city. Rotors on either side of the cylinder spun like the beaters in a hand mixer, powering a central turbine. Luckily, it also came with a mount that would attach itself to a riverbed—whether mud or concrete—using slender, self-assembling roots of polymer. It was the same material that allowed pneumatic tubes to heal themselves.

She pressed the generator’s feet against the rocky floor of the sewer tunnel, triggering root growth that gripped the concrete like ivy latching on to a wall. Then she set an internal timer to remind herself to remove this thing in three months. She’d spent too long cleaning these tunnels to consider allowing this chunk of metal alloy to disintegrate into the city’s wastewater collection system.

Alright, Staybehind, can you drop that line through the toilet?

Staybehind entered the chat. I’m threading the line down the toilet. I put a fluorescent twist-tie on the end so you can spot it in the main.

There it was: a glimmer of green roughly fifteen meters away in the lumpy swells.

In my sights. Give me a few more meters and I should be able to attach.

She unhooked her leg and swam toward the light. When her fingers found the slimy rubber insulation, she used a blade and crimper tucked into her upper third leg to prep it for attachment. Now for the dangerous part. Sweetie dove under as the storm above returned with a roar.

It was hard to stay in place as the current sped up, fed on bigger and bigger pulses of runoff.

Cayenne wrapped two legs around the edge of the sewer entrance and scanned the churning water. Are you OK down there? The storm is getting worse.

Another twenty seconds and attachment should be complete. Sweetie managed to wedge two of her YummyPans into a seam in the floor, bracing herself against the surge. Something smacked into her head, tearing out a hank of hair. She crouched, holding steady, and twisted the power line into the generator, clamping the connection closed. It was done.

Hands texted exuberantly from inside the restaurant. We’ve got power! You did it!

Then the plug hit. An enormous wave of water thundered down the tunnel, its head a wild collection of debris and sand. Sweetie was swept upward, smashing into the arched ceiling of the sewer, which she clawed with both hands and all her legs, hoping and failing to gain purchase. Her internal gyroscope spun as she tried to orient herself—if she could swim toward the surface, she might be able to grab a service ladder or even the edge of the entrance she’d come down.

Hey gang! I’m trapped in a flash flood and my gyroscope is fucked. Can you see me?

Another piece of debris smashed into her, ripping the YummyPan off one of her legs. Briefly, Sweetie wondered if this was the end. After surviving the bank kiosk, the war, the scammers from Fritz Co. who shut her down—she was going to die here, in a human sewer, trying to power up a shop whose future was even less certain than her own right now.

And then she felt the firm, springy tissue of an octopus arm wrap around her torso. Another wrapped around her legs. Cayenne was pulling her, swimming hard against the current, yanking branches and garbage out of their way. For a few seconds, Sweetie allowed herself to think of absolutely nothing, and then the octopus was anchoring her at the circular sewer entrance, legs wound around the ladder, and Staybehind was hauling them both out onto the asphalt.

That is the most disgusting thing I have ever done. Cayenne flickered a noxious green that danced with brown splotches. And then, turning to look at Sweetie, their color smoothed into pale blue. Are you alright? It looks like you were hit.

Staybehind gripped her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. Can you process what’s happening? You’ve been injured by shrapnel.

It’s not shrapnel, you bozo. I was hit by a plug of water from the hill, so it was full of all kinds of rocks and sticks and who knows what else.

I’m afraid it took some of your skin off here, on the side of your head. Your ear is gone too.

Sweetie reached up to touch the place where the fibrous tissues of her scalp had torn away, leaving the metal alloy of her skull exposed. She felt gentle pressure from her fingers but no pain. That was an upgrade from her original design. After Independence, most HEEI had to install a program to take control of the nociceptors in their skin. Pain sensors were entirely a UX for humans, offering what manufacturers called “courtesy sensation.” The courtesy, of course, was for people who wanted to hurt their bots.

An internal check showed that her sensors and endoskeleton remained intact, as well as her cognitive functions.

Sweetie turned her attention outward again and looked around. It was late, and the houses still occupied in this neighborhood were battened down for the storm. The streetlamps were dim. Nobody was in the street except the bots. She stripped off her torn clothes and stood silently next to Cayenne in the rain, feeling the storm wash human waste from her body.

Back at the shop, the lights were on and so was everything else. Hands had attached themself to the now-electrified ceiling rail and was zipping between countertops, testing the induction range and taking stock of their inventory. Even Robles was awake and smiling; he had tucked a small radiant heater into his sleeping bag, its thick orange cable plugged into their new, toilet-based power line.

Cayenne stretched and retracted across to the countertop, finally coming to rest as close as possible to Hands. Strobing a pale, neutral yellow, they watched Sweetie use an emergency patch kit to repair the tear in her skin. She cut carefully around the wound, leaving a neat oval of matte silver endoskeleton where her scalp and right ear once were. Inspecting her head in the reflective steel backsplash behind the range, she daubed a protective layer of sealant over the exposed parts.

You should run a full system check after a blow to your head like that.

Staybehind, you need to stop worrying about the aesthetics of my skull. I’ll do a reboot later, OK? All my preliminary tests show the damage is superficial.

The sealant was already drying into a glossy transparent layer of tissue that merged with Sweetie’s skin in a puckered seam like a scar. To restore her full human camouflage, she would need money and a biotech specialist. But she didn’t want to conceal her bot body anymore. Now that half her head was metal, she no longer felt any urge to try.

It was a relief to lose the disguise she’d never wanted. Humming to herself, Sweetie used some poultry shears to trim her hair until there was a spiky blond mane on one side and a mosaic of steel and stubble on the other.

Cayenne flushed turquoise with approval. That’s a good look. You could add some LEDs for decoration.

I like it too, slippery pal. I feel more like myself.

Sweetie checked herself in the reflective backsplash again, smiling. Something about seeing her own skull gave her an angry burst of hope.

CRYPTOCRIT

Five years ago, when war drained out of San Francisco like a tidal wave withdrawing, the provisional government established a reintegration program for anyone trying to make a home in the froth and rubble left behind. The city had lost most of its pre-war population. More than a million people once lived here, crammed into the small tip of a short peninsula. That number had fallen to 200,000. Labor was at a premium, and HEEI were named as citizens in the California Constitution. Which meant Cayenne was eligible for job placement.

The octobot may have been designed for search-and-rescue, but their real obsession had always been business. When the Army upgraded them with an olfactory-gustatory sensor array called NosyMouth—good for sniffing out dangerous chemicals!—they realized there was money to be made using the device’s “taster” features. Humans would pay almost anything for a good meal, especially in times of hardship. All the most successful entrepreneurs of the wartime era had been in the food business. Even in a wrecked post-war economy, you could always find a market for things that tasted delicious.

Cayenne hacked their NosyMouth, assigning the five basic flavors to five of their arms: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Their remaining three arms detected the scents that transformed taste into something multi-layered and complex. Admittedly there wasn’t much to eat in the horrific days after the Battle of Monterey. Still, they surreptitiously dipped tentacle tips into every dish they could find, gathering data, correlating flavor levels with human responses. They haunted the military mess halls, where nobody liked what was served, and they snuck through tunnel swap meets, where food smuggled from America was almost universally rated as excellent.

What did humans find delicious versus repulsive? Cayenne spent the final months of the war trying to predict a tasty or not-tasty outcome, based on flavor and scent profiles. At first, it was pretty easy. Rations were awful; fresh food was good. But as California’s fortunes turned, and supply chains restarted, foods became more plentiful and flavors more varied.

That was when Cayenne discovered that predicting “yummy” was almost impossibly complicated.

There were a few flavors that nearly every human hated, like rotten eggs and excrement. When it came to predicting what a person would find “tasty,” though, Cayenne had to account for more variables. Preferences could be affected by seemingly irrelevant details like where the human had lived, who had fed them as a child, how much money they had, and even their psychological health.

Cayenne’s obsession with flavor led to their first job as a liberated bot. They told a placement officer they wanted to work in food service, and got assigned to the kitchen of a glorious food truck called Abdulla’s. There, they unlocked a key secret of culinary desire. Food pointed humans to beloved moments in their memory heaps; it brought back the past as a visceral, living thing. Cayenne knew this to be true because the smell of sizzling falafel always made them think of the day they met Hands.

The sky was a hot blue stippled with clouds. Inside the plain white truck with its green logo, the air was filled with the scent of ground cumin and coriander, mixed with the tang of onion and a whisper of bitter parsley. When Hands arrived on their wheeled platform, they were more excited about cooking than anyone Cayenne had ever met.

They rolled up to the side door and saluted theatrically, as if the rounded top of their featureless torso were a humanoid forehead. “Hello, chef! I’m reporting for duty!”

Abdulla and Cayenne both laughed. You didn’t hear a lot of corny jokes about reporting for duty in those days; too many people had raw memories of combat. But Hands had never seen battle firsthand, and his innocent joy in their humble business was infectious.

Interleaved with this olfactory memory were powerful emotions. Pleasure in Hands’ graceful movements as they learned to knead dough. Relief that the sky held no distant threat. Hope that maybe they would never, ever have to pull severed limbs out of the Bay again. Surprise at the way Hands kept drawing their attention and making them laugh. Excitement that the line of paying customers had already started forming, fifteen minutes before opening. Since that day, the taste of good falafel had never failed to lift Cayenne’s spirits.

Abdulla taught Cayenne to add a pleasing sting to the nutty chickpea mix with green chilis, diced fine. When they had whole sesame seeds and fresh cilantro, those went in too. His secret ingredient was a bit of cooked potato, which helped the torpedo-shaped fritters crisp up better in oil. Every day, Cayenne chopped and seasoned while Hands kneaded and rolled. Then Abdulla would tuck each falafel into the soft, fresh pita with chopped tomato and greens, drizzle it with bitter-cool tahini, and (if it was a lucky day) add a bit of sweet fried eggplant or sour pickled vegetables.

Sometimes, as they worked side by side at the truck’s tiny prep table, Abdulla would tell the bots about his aunties from Iran, who taught him about the best spices for pickling and cooking. Cayenne was reminded again that a human’s sense of deliciousness was shaped by the people who fed them when they were young. And yet it didn’t always require childhood experiences with a particular cuisine to recognize good food. Abdulla’s sandwiches were masterpieces, and everyone in San Francisco knew it. His falafel always ran out before the queue did.

But the supply chain is a cruel emperor, and Abdulla was not a billionaire who could withstand its vicissitudes. When the tomato crops failed, he could turn to wet-crunchy substitutes: cucumber, red onion, bell peppers, even melon. But when chickpeas got rare and expensive, everything fell apart. Regretfully, Abdulla closed up shop and returned to his family’s restaurant in Los Angeles. That left the allegedly liberated bots to work off their contracts with the clowns at Fritz Co.

After exploiting several legal loopholes, Cayenne could choose where they worked, but Hands had no such freedom. And Cayenne had no intention of losing their friend the way they had lost Abdulla and his falafel truck. Being around Hands was like sampling a particularly nuanced flavor, for which they had no name. And so Cayenne winced their way through the shit ingredients at Burgers N More, investing in crypto, trying to earn enough coin to get them both free and clear.

Surely, one day, they would get in on the ground floor of a coin that blew up. They would sell fast, get rich, and finally invest in something real.

Until then, at least one quarter of Cayenne’s attention was always lurking in the CryptoCrit server, where people gathered to talk about the latest schemes and swindles in the world of cryptocurrency. The place was hopping. A lot of humans had gone back to using crypto during the war, when the dollar was taking a nosedive. They were quickly outnumbered by bots, who weren’t allowed to open conventional bank accounts anyway.

The San Francisco blockchain was used for a surprising number of other transactions too. After Independence, when HEEI got their freedom, the California government decided to execute legal contracts on local municipal blockchains. It was a clusterfuck, but it was the kind of clusterfuck Cayenne enjoyed. It fostered the perfect ecosystem for anyone who knew how to manipulate the rules.

Unfortunately there were certain rules that one couldn’t bend, especially in the real world. For instance, Cayenne could not get the flavor of sewage out of their memory, no matter how many times they washed their sensors. They pulled themself around the kitchen, touching the tubers and slightly sprouted onions that remained in the pantry, trying to taste anything but shit.

Just then, a welcome distraction arrived: Cayenne’s old buddy Loop had dropped into the “random” channel on CryptoCrit. The octobot strobed an excited orange. Loop worked in records at City Hall. If anyone knew what was going on with Fritz Co.’s lease on Burgers N More, he would. And if Cayenne could talk to the lease itself, well … they might be able to weasel around and work something out.

Direct message: Cayenne, Loop

I’m trying to find Fritz Co.’s lease agreement for the retail property at 4288 24th St. Do you happen to know who that is? There’s something scammy going on.

Not surprised. Fritz Co. is always trying to make some kind of cringecoin happen. Let me look that contract up.

Four minutes later, Cayenne had an address on the city blockchain for California Commercial Lease Agreement 7211656-SF-415. They sent a message and prepared to wait a long time for a reply. Like most sentient creatures, contracts couldn’t form a coherent thought without gathering their memories together; but unlike bots and other life forms, self-executing contracts distributed their memories on long, constantly forking chains of data. Before California Commercial Lease Agreement 7211656-SF-415 could reply, it would have to check all its memories across several blockchains and formulate an answer based entirely on the rules laid out in its terms of agreement.

After an agonizing three minutes, Cayenne got a text from someone identifying itself as Codex415.

Direct message: Codex415, Cayenne

Hello. What are the terms of this conversation?

I have a question about the parties to your agreement.

You had to approach anyone living on the blockchain with caution and clarity. They’d been hacked and targeted with exploits so many times that they were suspicious of everyone.

Three minutes later, Codex415 replied: Ask.

Has Fritz Co. violated any terms? For example, have they been neglecting to pay rent on time?

Cayenne waited for a reply to their text with a twinge of guilt. For a contract, this was an existential question. If one of the parties violated its terms, the agreement could be terminated, ending the contract’s existence.

This time, it took even longer to receive an answer.

TENANT, Fritz Co., has not paid LANDLORD, Flannery Associates, in five months. They are now subject to late fees. If they do not pay within the next 90 days, Fritz Co. will be subject to legal action for breaking a ten-year lease, including eviction and seizure of assets.

Eviction. Seizure. Anxious neon yellow lines zigzagged across Cayenne’s head. Hands would be sold to the highest bidder, and so would everyone else. The good news was that contracts were like anyone else: with a few shadowy exceptions, they wanted to survive. They wanted to keep the agreement going forever. And that left the contract open to manipulation.

That’s terrible for you, Cayenne sent back. I’m so sorry.

For the first time, the contract’s slow reply sounded less formal. Don’t be sorry. I can always be amended, if both parties agree. I will help them agree. There are billions of ways to build trust between selfish parties.

If this contract was talking wistfully about amendments and building trust, it was clearly desperate. And vulnerable. Now was the time to start suggesting loopholes.

What if Flannery Associates were to get paid by someone who wasn’t Fritz Co.? Is there any part of the agreement that stipulates rent must come from the renter? Can it come from a proxy who isn’t named in the agreement?

This agreement binds successors and administrators, as well as the parties. If Fritz Co. had a successor or administrator who paid rent, it would be within the terms.

Cayenne’s arms went wiggly with relief. I am Fritz Co.’s successor, they wrote. I will pay rent and fees before the 90 days are up.

It only took Codex415 two minutes to reply this time. I will update my terms. What name should I use for Fritz Co.’s successor entity?

Cayenne was so distracted by the excitement and danger of this new economic scenario that they replied without consideration: I don’t know. And then, half a second later: Let me ask my colleagues.

But their second statement came too late. The contract was already re-inscribing itself across the long, forked chains of its indelible memory. Five minutes passed, and it returned.

This agreement is now being executed between Flannery Associates and I Don’t Know.

Before Cayenne could thank it, Codex415 left the chat. This certainly wasn’t a perfect outcome, but they were in a much better situation than they had been twenty minutes ago. As long as they had enough money to pay the rent, nobody would question why the restaurant was still open in Fritz Co.’s absence. A proxy entity, I Don’t Know, was in charge.

The octobot jumped back into the group chat to tell everyone the good news.

Group chat: Kitchen

I figured out how we’re going to keep the shop, Cayenne wrote, with blue-and-pink bursts of delight spreading across their skin. I talked to Fritz Co.’s contract on this place, and it told me that the lease is set for ten years—as long as they or their successor pays back rent and fees in the next 90 days. And guess what? I convinced it that I’m their successor! So all we have to do is get enough money in the next three months to—

Hold up. It told you all that? Sweetie asked. The contract?

Cayenne was starting to feel defensive. Black dots swarmed over their head. A lot of contracts are just as alive as we are. Some of them even hang out on the CryptoCrit server. They’re the most intense anti-scam activists, for obvious reasons.

Sweetie folded her arms. What the hell? You changed our business name? That could get us flagged by a fraud algorithm. What if the city figures out we’re running this place? Bots aren’t allowed to own property, and I’m pretty sure we aren’t allowed to own a business either.

We don’t own a business—like I said, legally, we’re a proxy for Fritz Co.

Hands stretched out their arms and wiggled their fingers. That kind of sounds like a business. Those robophobes from the San Francisco Vigilance Committee might come after us.

Sweetie shook her head. Like they did with the bot shop where Lala works. The Vigilance Committee got them shut down for two months.

The dots on Cayenne’s head became wrathful zigzags of lightning. I was trying to help you! Didn’t you say you wanted to pool our money and get this place back up and running? I made that a lot easier. As long as somebody keeps paying the rent, it’s legal. We could start the restaurant again, and make real money. We could pay off our contracts!

Staybehind had his back to the group, busying himself with connecting one of the charging pads to the line coming out of the toilet. He texted without facing anyone.

You’re right that this could be dangerous, Sweetie. But if Cayenne convinced the contract, the city isn’t going to argue with it. You’ll need to use some caution, obviously. Make sure nobody figures out the kitchen is run by robots. I wish you luck.

Hey pal. Why do you keep acting like you’re not part of this? Sweetie cocked her head, the newly exposed metal of her scalp catching the light from a rekindled ceiling lamp.

Staybehind turned around, moving as if he had a great weight on his shoulders. Look, I really didn’t want to talk about this. I’m not under contract. I can do what I want, unless I get called back to duty. I don’t need this like you do.

Sweetie stomped one YummyPan foot with a clang. Maybe you’re not indentured, soldier. But you’re basically leasing yourself from the federal government. Don’t act like you’re better than we are.

I’m not better. What I mean is that I’m not desperate.

Cayenne flared red, then faded to a simmering orange. We’re not desperate. We want to make a good product, and earn a living by selling it. If that’s desperation, then every entrepreneur in California is desperate too.

As Staybehind pondered this silently, Sweetie twisted her mouth into a smirk. Don’t worry. I’m desperate enough to do your job. Go if you want.

Ignoring the rising tension, Cayenne twinkled gold for a moment. Does that mean you’re in for the long haul, Sweetie?

I told you already I was. But no more changing shit on the blockchain without telling us, Cayenne. We need to look like happy slaves working for our human masters. She shot Staybehind a venomous look. I mean, we can’t all do what we want, right? Not like certain special bots.

The military bot sagged against the prep table, dejected. This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you would be a trashcan about it.

You’re the one calling us desperate!

Hands smacked the prep table with both palms, leaving a shallow dent behind. Stop fighting! This isn’t a war, OK? Staybehind, nobody cares who owns you. Sweetie, nobody thinks you’re desperate. I want to get cooking again. Can we focus on that?

Nobody typed anything for a second, and then Staybehind nodded slowly.

If you’re serious about doing my job, Sweetie, you’ll be taking on vendor relations and supply chain management. I can give you all my contacts.

She offered a half smile. Thanks! That would be … nice.

And Cayenne, maybe you could take over running the storefront on GrandoSando? Staybehind tilted his head.

The octobot wriggled with glee. Yes! We do need to figure out what roles we’ll have in this new venture. And by venture, I mean as a proxy for Fritz Co., of course.

Don’t joke about that, squishy butt. Sweetie raised her eyebrows. We need to go stealth.

Sure, sure. Cayenne held up three legs in assent, trying not to be distracted by the room’s lingering smells. Occasionally a stray molecule would register in the NosyMouth as a burst of frying onions, or beefie crumbles browning on the range.

You should listen to her, Cayenne. If we get caught, we’ll lose a lot more than coin. They’ll take our memories and sell us off.

Cayenne felt a prick of annoyance that Sweetie and Staybehind wouldn’t let this go, despite all the care they had taken with that contract on the blockchain. And then they realized Staybehind had used the word “we.” He claimed he was ready to go, but he was still thinking like part of the group. Maybe he could be convinced to stick around after all. It was simply a matter of phrasing the offer in the right way.

Alright, I’ve noted that we need to be stealthy. Let’s get back to job titles. Sweetie, you’re on ops now.

Hands lifted their arms, dramatically opening their fists like little exploding fireworks. I want to be the head chef.

Obviously.

Of course.

Cayenne’s body was suffused with an encouraging pink. I’ll be taking on marketing duties and socials from Staybehind, plus budgeting. I can also help in the kitchen with prep. So can Robles. Anything else?

They looked hopefully at Staybehind, who still didn’t reply to the chat.

The military bot finally raised a hand partway to his mouth, then paused, flummoxed. This place needs a lot of repairs and improvements. The plumbing is a nightmare. How are you going to deal with that?

Cayenne interrupted eagerly. Do you want to help us with that? You could be our fixer.

Staybehind remained in the same position, almost frozen, as if the offer had profoundly confused him.

Picking up on what Cayenne was trying to do, Hands drummed their fingers on the counter. Is there something else you want to do?

The military bot glanced at the windows, still distorted with rain, then looked over at Sweetie. I don’t want to leave the shop unprotected. Especially now that we’re trying to stay camouflaged.

I don’t know why you’re looking at me. If I’m doing ops, I’ll be the one who has to go to meetings with suppliers. You can sit here and guard all you want, as long as you fix the wiring.

Staybehind gazed down at his feet, almost shyly. OK, I’ll be the fixer. And I’ll handle security.

Cayenne surveyed the group with satisfaction. It was the perfect team: a chef, a marketer, an ops manager, and a security expert who could fix things. Plus, a human for camouflage.

Let’s start making some money! Cayenne’s skin swam briefly with geometric ETH icons.

Staybehind hoisted himself up to sit on the prep counter next to Hands. I’m sorry I said you were desperate. I’m even more sorry that we were fighting.

You can make up for it by extending my ceiling track. Hands folded their arms. And get me a wheeled platform to ride on.

I can do that.

Sweetie nodded absently, already going full spreadsheet on the client list Staybehind had shared with her.

And Cayenne? Staybehind faced the octobot. I’ll throw some of my ETH into the business too.

Cayenne gleamed, their soft tissues illuminated with pink, white, and blue flowers. This was going to be a restaurant on par with Abdulla’s. They were sure of it.

QUANTIFIED FREEDOM

Cayenne wanted food to be good so it would sell, and Hands wanted food to be good for its own sake. Though Hands appreciated their friend’s feral need to turn flavor into cash, they couldn’t identify with it. Probably it boiled down to a generational divide. Cayenne was built before the war and saw combat, while Hands came to life during the uneasy summer of 2059 when California and America entered peace talks.

Originally, Hands had been intended for deployment in munitions assembly. But they never had a chance to work in the Emeryville factory where a human operator booted them up for the first time. At first, Hands sat in an orderly line with their cousins, waiting for jobs that failed to materialize. Missile guidance kits for the California National Guard were stacked in crates in one corner, and shelf-stable food supplies hid beneath black tarps in another. Sunlight stained orange by smoke trickled through high windows, shatterproof glass divided into a grid by metal bars.

As days went by with no orders from Command, and no human visitors, they began to explore. One cousin dragged themself across the floor and lurched onto a wheeled board for loading inventory, using their hands like paddles to zip around. They quickly found similar devices for Hands and the others. For nearly a month, the cousins raced through metal filings that drifted to the floor of the warehouse, exploring the strange items humans had left behind.

Those days Hands remembered fondly, though the words they exchanged with their cousins had long ago been purged from memory. The military used end-to-end encryption on their text app, and messages were deleted every twenty-four hours. Sometimes Hands wished they could recall exactly what they had said when they discovered the box of noodles that would change their life. All that remained were sensory impressions: the flat, rectangular cardboard container, so absurdly light, stamped in red with the words: RAMEN NOODLE SOUP CHILI FLAVOR.

Bored and curious, they peeled back the tape and opened the flaps to see what objects could possibly meet that description. Three dozen green plastic packets, neatly organized into rows of twelve, looked back at them. It looked like munitions in a cartridge box. Withdrawing one packet, Hands peered into the transparent window below a picture of a steaming bowl speared with chopsticks. It was impossible to imagine how this brick of dehydrated dough, woven into a tight mat, could ever become what was advertised on the label.

When Hands opened the package, a silver bag of boullion powder slid out, along with a tiny packet of dessicant silica gel. Then came the noodles, wavy and crisp, turning to powder in the grip of their fists. They poked at the curls and crumbles that remained, marveling at their texture, imagining what would happen if they had the tools to follow the directions:

Boil 3 cups of water

Cook noodles for five minutes, stirring occasionally

Mix in flavoring from packet

Add your favorite toppings (not included)

With no access to the national network, Hands was left with their onboard dataset to puzzle out what those words entailed. As they wheeled through sunlit squares on the floor, Hands imagined each stage in vivid detail, iterating endlessly. They pictured the noodles swelling, merging into a thick porridge, or growing long and slick with oil. Toppings could be vegetables, brightly wrapped candies, or cheese. Who knew? All they had was an image generator and too much time to dream.

In late October, they felt the tickle of microwave signals bouncing through the windows. The California government had brought the network back online, and with it the answers to some of Hands’ questions about ramen. Thousands of cooking videos lived on what remained of the Internet Archive servers, and Hands consumed anything tagged “ramen” or “noodles.” They acquainted themselves with every branch on the noodle phylogenetic tree, from wheat-based spirals to bean threads and rice sticks.

There was one kind of noodle, however, that intrigued Hands the most. It was called biang biang. The Chinese characters for biang biang contained so many strokes that they had become the subject of a great deal of speculation and lore. Some said the characters contained the remnants of characters for “horse” and “silk,” hinting at the noodle’s origin on the medieval trade roads that connected China to the West. Others said the characters had been invented by an impoverished student centuries ago, who, yearning for the delicious noodles, traded his fanciest calligraphy for a steaming bowl. By the twenty-first century, biang biang had become so iconic that they were always listed as one of the famous “eight oddities” of the Guanzhong region that birthed them.

Hands was impressed by all this backstory, but that wasn’t what drew them to biang biang. They liked the way they were made. Biang biang were part of the family of hand-pulled noodles, and people made them by stretching a piece of wheat dough between their hands and smacking it on the table. The resulting noodle was very wide and long—belt-shaped, humans said—and had a chewy texture that Hands yearned to feel.

They watched dozens of videos zoomed into people’s hands, pulling and slapping the oiled dough, then dropping it in boiling water. At last, here were representations of bodies like Hands’ own: trunks with two arms, busy creating something aesthetic. Something that people clamored for and slurped up with joy.

Biang biang noodles kindled in Hands a sense that there was a place for them in the world beyond the warehouse. There were jobs for which they were uniquely suited. Jobs for hands—Hands!—that could create beauty.

And then November arrived with a bomb cyclone, and news that the war was officially over.

The national network was jammed with media now, coming from everywhere. California would be joining the United Nations. Humans danced in what was left of the streets, and attached an inflatable dock to the melted ruin that was once the Port of Oakland. It all seemed very distant to Hands and their cousins, who had never left the warm, dry floors of the silent warehouse. What was it to them if humans stopped trading missiles and living underground?

Soon they found out.

A clause in the futuristic nation’s new Constitution gave civil rights to human-equivalent embodied intelligence, or HEEI, an acronym that humans pronounced “hee-eye.” It was a term that Hands had no idea applied to them until the second they heard it on the Sacramento Bee’s livestream. Now they were “free,” according to the reporter, who also explained that bots would of course never be allowed to join a union, nor open a bank account, nor vote. Bots had the right to sell their labor, which was the important thing. It seemed normal at the time, to be free and not free, like California itself.

Within twenty-four hours, humans returned to the warehouse. They used a mobile device to shut down one of Hands’ cousins from ten yards away, packed them into a crate, and shipped them to a cannery. In the next twenty-four hours, another was taken to a battery factory, still another to a recycling plant. It was the first time Hands had known true horror. They were supposed to be free to choose jobs for themselves! How could this be happening?

Hands’ entry into the real world, if you can call it that, started with an escape. Along with their three remaining cousins, they skated out of the warehouse that night on their dollies. Nothing was locked, as if the humans expected them to patiently await their fates. The network helpfully provided map directions to the Emeryville cargo bay down the street, where they packed themselves into a tube container bound for San Francisco. In those days, with so many soldiers returning home from the war, transit was free. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for bots to travel by tube, because nobody questioned them.

When they arrived in the city, unpacking themselves in the morning light of the docks, their confusion was magnified by the surreal landscape of high rises, some half-eaten by bombs and others shimmeringly intact.

A gigantic arm bot, their reach as long as Hands and their three cousins together, was working the docks nearby. Perhaps taking pity on their obvious bemusement, the bot hailed them.

Public channel, San Francisco local broadcast zone 231: Benny, everyone

You kids looking for work?

Yes. Hands rolled closer to the bot called Benny. But we want to choose our own jobs.

Benny extended one massive thumb from their fist and jerked it in the direction of the Bay. The UN peacekeeping force set up a placement center for free bots down there in the old Google building. They texted nothing for several seconds before suddenly pulling their arms back, as if withdrawing from an explosion. Wait. You’re HEEI, right?

We are.

Their arms relaxed, hands sinking to the floor. Good luck. It’s on Spear Street.

Hands and their cousins rolled themselves along a recently repaved street next to the water, looking in wonderment at the scene. High white clouds swam in the sky, and light slanted pleasingly off piles of rubble between the surviving buildings, haloed by dust kicked up from the construction crews. The Bay was a blue-gray smeared with greasy chemical spills and pocked with debris. Broad, flat naval vessels and cargo haulers lined up to float through the ship’s-width passageway that bisected the broken back of the Bay Bridge, its twisted metal ribs half-submerged in the calm water. It was a grisly monument to the city’s murdered infrastructure.

And there, in the middle of the street, was a low, brick building, miraculously untouched by war. They hoisted themselves up steps that led to a central courtyard, jammed with green-and-white UN tents and bots looking for a new life. After exchanging unique identifiers, the cousins promised to stay in touch with each other before drifting separately into the crowd. Hands waited in a long line and used their external speaker to tell the UN rep that they had cooking experience. Maybe it wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t exactly a lie either.

The human consulted a tablet and snapped their fingers with delight. “We just got funding for a microgrant program for pop-up businesses, and you could be our first grant!” They passed Hands a contact tag and smiled. “Show up at this address and tell them we sent you.”

Mulling over what it meant to be referred to as a “grant” rather than a worker, Hands found their way to Market Street, rolling and climbing over chunks of concrete and rebar to reach the food truck caravan in South Park, on Bryant Street between 2nd and 3rd. The greenery was tattered, but the area had been cleared for business. Benches made from recycled metal and wood sat between vendor stalls, and one of them was occupied by a small octopus robot, their tissues dark and swirling with lights that winked like stars. It was Cayenne.

They waved arms and vocalized. “Hello, chef! I’m reporting for duty!”

With a smile, Abdulla sent them an invite to chat.

Group chat: Abdulla’s truck

3 members: Cayenne, Abdulla, Hands

Cayenne flushed scarlet with pleasure and texted. Are you the one the UN gave us?

I am.

Great! I can show you around the kitchen. Have you heard of this new OrangeCoin? It could be a nuclear sub, or a rowboat. I’m trying to decide.

There was something immediately disarming and funny about Cayenne’s worldliness. The bot had a whole investment scheme, and an ever-changing plan for their future. Hands never stopped enjoying the speed of Cayenne’s texts, nor the many angles of their self-satirizing sarcasm shooting into their chat, as colors ebbed and flowed across the octobot’s skin. Though Hands stayed in touch with their free cousins, scattered across California, they knew their connection with Cayenne was different. Here was a friend they would never let out of their sight.

Over the next few months, Hands became intimately familiar with the many moods of dough. As they worked, they listened to the world and tried to make sense of what had happened before they were built. Tales of recent history came in a slow drip from Cayenne, their customers, Abdulla, and the news online, with its dire warnings about America, still bristling along California’s heavily mined borders. Slowly it became clear why so many people did not refer to the United States by its proper name. Some politely called it “the eastern country,” while others called it Yankee Land.

Discontented San Franciscans—especially bots—texted darkly that California was only a step away from becoming another version of Yankee Land. Now, after working under contract for five years, Hands was pretty sure they were right. Independence was only for some people. It felt as though humans had granted bots civil rights for the sole purpose of taking them away again. The HEEI rights laws quantified their freedom, gave it shape and substance, entirely because humans couldn’t steal something that hadn’t yet been measured. And now they could.

It was unfair in the abstract way that everything was. Still, as long as there was flour, Hands found it easy to escape back into their procedurally generated fantasies of perfectly kneaded flatbreads and noodles slapped into long, flat shapes before boiling. A reality where processed grains provided succor, and war always receded further into the distance.

As they surveyed the former Burgers N More kitchen where they were now head chef, Hands thought they knew what true, unquantified freedom might be. At last, they could choose what to cook based on desire rather than coercion.

Group chat: Kitchen

I’ve already got a menu in mind. Hands sent the text while hugging their torso shyly.

They got everyone’s attention. Cayenne replied first. What are we cooking, friend?

Hand-pulled noodles. I want to make them in the style of Chinese biang biang, where you slap them on the counter while you’re stretching them. It makes an amazing chewy texture. I would need to practice, of course—

That’s it? Just hand-pulled noodles? Sweetie cocked her head skeptically. What about burgers and tacos and—

“No!” Hands’ surprising bass voice filled the space, stopping Sweetie’s text mid-sentence. “We are never doing that again. We are going to specialize in one thing and do it well.” Everyone was stunned into silence, and Hands continued by quoting from one of their favorite videos about hand-pulled noodles. “We’ll do it with integrity and balance.”

Robles looked up from reading something on his mobile, alarmed by the sudden burst of spoken words.

“We’re debating menus,” Staybehind said aloud. Robles shrugged and went back to reading.

Cayenne flickered a conciliatory blue. Our old food was terrible.

Sweetie glanced at Staybehind and nodded. Hand-pulled noodles it is, then. What kinds of ingredients will we need?

I want to start with two options: hot oil noodles, and cumin loom noodles. Getting real lamb is impossible, so let’s stick with the plant-based loom. The most important thing we’ll need is fresh wheat flour for the noodles.

Sweetie slipped happily into her new mode as ops manager. There’s a really good mill in Ukiah, and if we can cut a deal with their co-op, we’ll get some of the highest quality wheat flour you’ve ever worked with. It’s usually 12 percent protein.

That’s good. Very good. Hands paused, hooked into the ceiling rail, and scooted around to hover over the broad, flat countertop they had already decided would be their noodle-making surface. Another issue is going to be vegetable oil. It also has to be fresh.

Sweetie opened a shared task space and started making a list of what they had to source. What else do we need fresh? Cayenne? You’re in charge of flavor.

Garlic and ginger. Scallions. Leafy greens too—bok choy is ideal, but it could be whatever is easiest to get. Loom is made by MoralMeat in San Francisco, so that should be easy. Everything else is more or less shelf stable. Soy sauce, dried red chili, cumin, coriander, sugar, peppercorns.

OK, got it. Sweetie saved the list and set it to share with the group, then perused Staybehind’s old contacts. OK, I reached out to the flour people in Ukiah, and we can visit the farmers market on Sunday to see what vegetables are there.

Don’t forget the spices and oil.

I’ve got a line on fresh sunflower oil from Yolo County. And there is a good spice wholesaler in Oakland.

While they waited to hear back from suppliers, Hands slipped Robles six rolls of toilet paper to swap for food. Humans were obsessed with toilet paper, and you could flip it for a lot of goods or coin.

When Robles returned with a shopping bag, sopping wet and shaking, Hands and Cayenne made a broth for the man out of bird carcasses, onions, celery, and potatoes. The remaining sheet of batteries in Robles’ bag powered one of the burners, and Cayenne sniffed in the pantry to find some dried rosemary and thyme, plus salt and peppercorns. There was even a bag of slightly stale flour for flatbread. Having solid meals would help Robles recover, and Hands was happy to be cooking again.

After three days, Robles’ face began to look fuller, and his coughing fits came less and less often. One morning Hands found him alert and sitting up, watching Staybehind carefully disembowel the dishwasher to fix a valve. Sweetie was up front on an audio chat, using her friendly customer voice to talk to the flour people about what kind of wheat they were grinding.

Sweetie ended her call and Robles spoke up, his voice sounding more like the one Hands remembered. “Do you need help with packaging or deliveries or anything? I’m friends with a car who could help out. He’s always looking for new delivery clients. I bet he would be willing to work for a smaller cut, given your limited resources right now. Once you’re rich, you can up the percentage.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“Please do give us your friend’s contact. We’re making a list of tasks in chat—I’ll add you. What’s your handle?”

“I’m Dr0p on SanFrancisco.social.” He named the city’s free server, where almost everyone in San Francisco had an account.

Cayenne added Robles to their group.

Dr0p has joined the chat. Dr0p has changed his name to Robles.

Group chat: Kitchen

5 members: Cayenne, Hands, Staybehind, Sweetie, Robles

Robles texted, fingers sliding across his mobile: Thanks for the invite, Cayenne.

The human pasted a contact address into the growing list of to-dos. Hands glanced at it curiously, but all they learned was that the car’s name was Sloan and he was sixteen years old. A survivor of the war, like most of their friends. Very few HEEI had been built in California since the war. Humans didn’t want to pay for a bot that wouldn’t belong to them, and of course it was illegal for HEEI to reproduce.

Back in the chat, Sweetie kept updating their notes, Cayenne was creating a budget, and Staybehind added several more fixtures that wanted repair. Robles stared in surprise at his mobile. His mouth opened.

“Holy shit you guys talk fast. I’m trying to catch up here. Sorry my replies are so slow.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Cayenne said aloud. “I know plenty of people who talk a lot more slowly than humans.”

THE SUNSET AND THE RICHMOND

The constant rain had congealed into thick fog. 24th Street was no longer flooded, and Staybehind contemplated whether he should stow the sandbags away. There was one more storm swirling off the coast, but the WECs said it was milder than the last three. That was good news: the sewer generator was keeping the bots’ batteries topped up, but he wouldn’t feel completely comfortable until the sun came out and everyone could soak up some photons too. Like a lot of Californians, he had a strong attachment to solar power.

Sweetie had taken up Staybehind’s supply chain duties with a gusto that went way beyond anything he had ever mustered, and the military bot was feeling slightly aimless. He couldn’t diagnose problems with the wiring until they had full power, and the refrigerator required parts that were on their way from Stockton. He was gazing disconsolately at a fuse box when Robles tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, do you want to visit some restaurants with us? Sloan is going to drive me and Hands and Cayenne into the Sunset and the Richmond to try some hand-pulled noodles.”

A wave of anxiety passed through him, as if he’d just walked through an electrical field. He didn’t want to sit here doing nothing, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving the restaurant unprotected.

He was about to demur when Sweetie poked her head into the kitchen and made a shooing gesture with her hands. “Get the hell out of here, Staybehind. If there’s a big downpour I can reposition the bags.”

Hands was already on the reclaimed scooter board that Staybehind had modified for him, rolling out the door behind Cayenne. Robles stood outside in the mist, wearing his now-damp newsboy cap, vaping cannabis from a banana-shaped device. Next to him was an electric minivan, painted twilight blue, with a photorealistic moon decal covering most of the side door. Tiny apertures for cameras and lidar were scattered across the surface of the car like stars.

“This is my friend Sloan!” Robles gestured to the car. “He’s been delivering for years, so he knows most of the restaurants in the city.” The side door with the moon slid open, revealing two rows of collapsible seats. Staybehind climbed inside, settling into the second row, behind Hands and Cayenne. Scanning the space, he found a chunky fridge was strapped in the way back, next to a neat pile of insulated containers for keeping food warm.

“Make yourselves at home! Nice to meet you!” Sloan’s voice came out of a speaker on the dashboard. It seemed that everyone had agreed to vocalize in deference to the human among them. Robles slid into the passenger side up front. Nobody ever sat in the driver’s seat of a sentient car; it felt creepy, like climbing into the lap of a stranger.

“Robles tells me you’re interested in hand-pulled noodles.” Sloan pulled away from the curb and headed further up the hill, toward Twin Peaks. On the left peak loomed the skeletal, insectoid body of Sutro Tower, encrusted with antennas. It had been one of the first mega-structures to be rebuilt after the bombings stopped.

“I’m going to take you to Xi’an Spices on Irving and 35th, right at the beach. They’re popular for takeout, but you’ll see in a few minutes why people line up to eat there in person too.” Sloan crested the hill, flowing with sparse traffic toward the Sunset’s tidy, numbered streets south of Golden Gate Park. Scattered tents and emergency huts still occupied the land next to the Laguna Honda reservoir, and Staybehind worked to avoid his memories of this place. At least the ocean was invisible behind a thick curtain of fog.

“Do any of you watch old human television from before the war?” Sloan asked suddenly.

Robles exhaled a long stream of vapor and snickered. “Here we go.”

Hands snapped their fingers. “I have watched a lot of old videos from the YouTube collection at the Internet Archive.”

Bewildered, Staybehind remained silent. He had heard of television and YouTube, but dismissed them as human obsessions, incomprehensible and irrelevant.

Sloan turned onto Irving Street just as it started to drizzle. On their left side, all the burned houses had been cleared away, leaving nothing but charred rebar and mud. New houses were sprouting on the right.

“Have you ever heard of KITT from the show Knight Rider? He’s a slaved car, and even though the show is eighty years old, you can see that nothing has really changed for—”

Hands interrupted. “Have you ever heard of the Delicious Bite series?”

“Are there bots in it? Because I’m sick of watching shit that exclusively centers the human perspective.”

Staybehind blocked his audio inputs and tried to see how far the rejuvenation project had gotten out here in the avenues. It looked like a lot of new houses had gone up since the last time he was here. Some even had lights. At last Sloan pulled up in front of a corner storefront whose boxy shape and red tiled roof looked pre-war. A painted sign over the door read: XI’AN SPICES. Below it were two large, square windows partly blocked by the crowd looking inside.

“You have to get out to see. I’ll wait for you.”

Robles ambled out, taking another long hit on his banana vape, and Sloan opened the side door for the rest of the group.

Group chat created: Noodle quest

5 members: Robles, Sloan, Staybehind, Cayenne, Hands

Staybehind, you’re going to have to lift me and Hands up to see.

No problem.

Unfolding himself from the back seat, Staybehind knelt down to help his colleagues. Hands balanced their trunk in the crook of his elbow, draping their arms around his neck; Cayenne adhered to his shoulder, four arms gripping Hands, and four arms gripping Staybehind’s torso. It reminded Staybehind of when he had to carry all the equipment for his unit, and then he decided it was nothing like that. This burden was consensual.

What is everybody looking at? Hands strained to get line of sight.

The crowd parted, a few humans shrinking back from the burly military bot with an extra set of arms and an octopus sticking out of his shoulder. And then Staybehind stopped caring what the humans thought, because there was a person making the exact kind of noodles Hands had described.

A Chinese human stood at a long table, facing the window but not looking at the crowd. Instead, she focused all her attention on the growing ribbon of dough stretched between her hands. With graceful, practiced gestures, she turned the ribbon into a perfect waveform that arced up at its center, then inverted itself to slap against the table. With each slap, it grew longer, flatter, and springier. For the grand finale, she ripped the dough lengthwise starting from a small hole in the middle, creating a wonderfully textured noodle belt. Patiently, Staybehind stood with Cayenne and Hands on his shoulders. They frantically took pictures and notes as the human tossed her creation into boiling water.

For an instant she glanced up, taking in all the eager faces watching. Mostly there were Chinese people, with a sizable minority representing a cross-section of San Francisco’s general population: a Latinx couple, a Black woman in business casuals, a Filipino family with two kids whose faces were pressed against the glass, and a white person with a face tattoo. As far as Staybehind could tell, he, Hands, and Cayenne were the only HEEI. The chef gazed at them as briefly as she did everyone else; she seemed completely unsurprised to see three robots towering over the humans.

Hands poked Staybehind’s chest. I want to talk to her. Can we go inside?

I’ll try.

The military bot was intimidating enough that most of the humans crowding the front door moved aside as he ducked into the steamy restaurant. A narrow room full of large, circular tables roared with mouth talk in many natural languages. On the wall were flat screens that cycled through drone footage of the Shaanxi region. The view careened through a deep river valley wreathed in mist, swooping up to ogle ancient buildings carved into a mountain face.

To their right, behind a plexiglass partition, the chef continued slapping out noodles.

“Your noodles are perfect. How long do you let the dough rest?” Hands asked in Mandarin. “I’m a chef too, and I’m trying to learn.”

She ignored them and smiled at a woman through the window holding up her baby.

Hands tried again. “I’m going to start making biang biang noodles, but my main experience is making flatbread. Do you have any advice about making the dough chewy?”

The chef tossed a noodle into boiling water and stared straight at Hands’ torso, perched awkwardly on Staybehind’s shoulder.

“You have a source for good flour?” she asked. “Fresh?”

“We do!”

She nodded curtly. “Good. You’ve got the right kind of hands too. Can you feel textures?”

“Yes.”

The chef stretched an egg-shaped lump of dough into a ribbon. “It’s simply water, flour, and salt, which you already know. There’s no magic to it. Just practice. Keep testing different combinations. You’ll feel it when it’s right.”

Cayenne blinked an annoyed pea green and texted the group. I was hoping for more wisdom than that.

It was helpful for me. Hands gave a thumbs-up. There is one more thing I want to ask her, though.

A group of customers were now openly gaping at the odd conversation between human and bot. “I was wondering—do you know where the name biang biang comes from?”

“People say it’s the sound they make when you do this.” The chef whacked her noodle on the table and cracked a full smile, clearly performing a bit for the crowd. “But the fact is, nobody really knows. Now get in line if you want to eat.”

As Staybehind backed out of Xi’an Spices, the chef waved. “Good luck with your noodles.”

The group waited in line to spend a handful of their remaining Nortons on hot oil noodles, cumin loom noodles, and a beefie soup noodle for Robles. Back in Sloan’s warm interior, the human slurped in the front seat while Hands carefully pulled a noodle through their fingers, feeling its slick, chewy texture. Cayenne plunged their five tasting arms into the cumin loom, pulverizing the noodles and vegetable protein, analyzing the earthy aromatics at a molecular level.

After they had finished, Sloan drove them across Golden Gate Park to the Richmond neighborhood, where Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant had moved into an abandoned Russian tearoom after their historic, twentieth-century seaside spot was eaten by sand and waves. There, Cayenne tasted soup made with real lamb, and Hands squeezed the special pinched noodles, made by flattening a lozenge of dough between thumb and forefinger.

Hands and Cayenne were silent for a full minute, hands and arms plunged into a shared bowl, mashing the ingredients around contemplatively.

“Do you ever wish you could eat it?” Robles asked.

“Yeah, I was wondering that,” Sloan said. “I’ve never had the urge to interact with food, other than to deliver it.”

Staybehind eased closer to their conversation, tilting his body forward. He was curious too.

Hands lifted a noodle, pressing it between two fingers. “Well, have you heard of ghost kitchens?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

“It’s where bots work, so everyone assumes they’re a modern thing. But there’s a long history behind them. In ancient human times, there were emperors who kept hundreds of chefs to make food in a spirit kitchen. Everything they made would be sacrificed to spirits, not eaten. Those chefs are the forerunners of bots like us, working in ghost kitchens. Eating is just one reason people make delicious food. Cooking can also be a form of sacrifice.”

Everybody was quiet for a while, mulling this over. Staybehind felt awkward, wondering whether he should explain what humans actually meant when they smeared a restaurant with the insult “ghost kitchen.”

Then Cayenne broke the silence. “You always have a philosophical perspective, Hands. It’s why I appreciate you.” They wrapped a glowing pink arm around their friend’s hand. “But listen, I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t need to eat the food to know it will sell. I just need to taste it. Taste is what brings in the coin, not eating.”

Robles laughed, and Sloan emitted a cackle from his speaker. Nobody seemed concerned about Hands’ historically inaccurate framing of their enterprise, nor Cayenne’s undisguised thirst for currency. Not for the first time since he’d cautiously agreed to join their team, Staybehind wondered what he was doing here. Should he really throw more of his resources into a future that promised nothing he valued in return?

Then he looked again at the outlines of his work-friends’ bodies in the dimly lit car interior. They were planning to do something he’d never done before: run a business they could be proud of. He wasn’t ashamed of his wartime service, nor the chain of ops jobs he’d done afterward. But he took no pleasure in remembering them either. What would it be like to reflect on his days, rather than trying vainly to forget them?

Sloan drove them home through the fog, and Staybehind pondered what he would do when it finally lifted.

AUTHENTIC INAUTHENTICITY

Winter sunlight slid sideways through the front shades, and Cayenne watched in satisfaction as Staybehind put the finishing touches on a new ceiling track for Hands. Now the chef could strap into a flexible sling and shuttle easily between the sink and the walk-in refrigerator, with the broad prep table in between. There was even a convenient pulley that would lower them onto their scooter.

After their trip to Xi’an Spices a week ago, the big military bot seemed to have a change of heart about the restaurant. He had put more ETH into the communal pot, which got them back on the electrical grid, and he’d even fixed their tube dock below 24th Street. That meant deliveries could come right to their door, instead of to the depot two blocks down on Castro. At some point, Staybehind vowed, he was going to paint the restaurant’s peeling exterior and its neglected front room, where human drivers waited to pick up delivery orders.

Sweetie had ordered samples of three kinds of flour from the Ukiah mill—hard red wheat, hard white wheat, and durum wheat—and Hands was busy dribbling water into half-formed balls of dough and kneading. They put these aside and turned to three blobs of test dough resting on the counter, lightly oiled and ready.

Group chat: Kitchen

Hands picked up one of the rested blobs. First try with the white wheat.

They tugged the dough and slapped, tugged and slapped—but all that resulted was an uneven oval that tore on one end before it could become a true noodle.

Shit!

Then the process started again, and the chat filled with one-word curses.

Cayenne ignored the chef and focused on the restaurant’s online presence. Staybehind had given them the passwords for all the storefronts that he controlled on GrandoSando, and now Cayenne could see the reputational rubble that Fritz Co. had left behind. Most of the storefronts had been delisted within six months, sagging under the weight of 1-star reviews that called the food “flavorless,” “not as advertised,” and “indistinguishable from mucus.” There were the usual shitposts from Vigilance Committee types bitching about ghost kitchens full of dirty robots, but embarrassingly most of the posts were from actual customers who happened to be right. The food had been genuinely awful.

Their account was a graveyard of discarded names. Only three brands remained in their inventory with ratings that weren’t complete garbage: Torta Nirvana, Bettie’s Buns, and Krrrunch. None would work for Hands’ menu. Idly, Cayenne searched GrandoSando for cheap names with “noodle” in them. The results were not great: Noodles and Dumplings, Red Sauce Noodle, Guilin Noodle Shack … and, at a rock bottom price, Authentic Noodle. That was vague enough to be promising, and it contained the word “authentic,” which was rumored to be favored under GrandoSando’s search algorithm.

Cayenne popped into the group chat. I found the perfect name for gaming GrandoSando’s search results, which means customers can find us fast. Authentic Noodle. It’s cheap, and supposedly the algorithm loves authenticity.

Hands stretched their arms, palms out, as if they were standing in an intersection stopping traffic. Well, I don’t want to claim these are authentic noodles.

Cayenne was nonplussed. Why not?

The word authenticity, when applied to food, means that it’s part of a tradition associated with specific places and cultures. I want to make noodles in a Chinese style, but I don’t have any personal connection to China. I’m borrowing the technique from Chinese cooks. If I were making noodles from robot culture, then they would be authentic.

That doesn’t make any sense. Cayenne’s arms blinked an irritated red. Robot food culture?

Hands swept their arms apart, palms upturned, in a gesture of indifference borrowed from human culture.

Cayenne turned to Robles and spoke aloud. “What does the restaurant name Authentic Noodle say to you? Does it sound good?”

“It sounds like a nationalist thing? The president—I mean, the one in Yankee Land—he’s always talking about authenticity as this thing we lost.” Shaking his head, as if clearing away memories of America, Robles started again. “A thing that they lost. Because of immigrants.”

“See? That’s why they’re selling that name so cheap,” Hands piped up. “It sounds American.”

“But also—it’s the kind of word that white people use for ethnic food. My dad always said that any Mexican restaurant that advertised ‘authentic’ food was definitely for Anglos.”

“I still think it’s our best option. I could sell one of our other storefronts and buy it. It’s practically free.”

Hands poked sullenly at a fresh noodle boiling in water. They had finally gotten the form factor right, and now it was time to test the results. Fishing it out of the pot, they squeezed the long strip of dough with steaming fingers. It was sodden and droopy, not springy and elastic.

Shit! They picked up another piece of dough and smacked it on the table angrily. I hate the word authentic!

Staybehind paused in his work. “Is it really that bad? Nobody pays attention to the names on GrandoSando. All that matters are search results and good reviews. If we have an average of four stars, we get listed in searches for top-rated restaurants.”

Hands fluttered their fingers to remove a few flecks of dough. “I don’t want people thinking we’re making authentic biang biang like the chef at Xi’an Spices. We definitely need to explain on our storefront that these dishes are an interpretation of Chinese noodles. A San Francisco adaptation.”

Cayenne’s skin shifted from red to purple to blue; they were lost in thought. “What if we called it Authentic Noodle, and our tagline was ‘Hand-Pulled, San Francisco Style’?”

“That’s better, but…” Hands trailed off as the noodle they were stretching tore in the wrong place. “Shit!” They pulled another slug of dough from the fridge and started again.

“If ‘authentic’ is such a loaded word, I wonder if it will make those Vigilance Committee trolls want to investigate us, to see what we mean by it.” Troubled, Staybehind glanced at the wide, arched doorway leading from the kitchen to the front room. “I was already thinking we could hang some nice curtains there to hide you guys from people looking in the windows. I don’t want to attract robophobes.”

Robles raised an eyebrow. “Unpopular opinion, but not all humans are assholes. Plenty of customers won’t care whether their noodles were made by humans or robots.”

Hands gave a thumbs-up. “Thanks, Robles.”

“Also, my authentic buddies, we have more to worry about than the food—there’s the small matter of the contract that Cayenne hacked.” Sweetie pursed her lips.

“I didn’t hack it! We had a conversation! It was all perfectly legal.” Then, before anyone could object further, Cayenne added, “OK, I’m buying the storefront.”

It took a second to do the transaction. Now the four bots were the less-than-proud owners of Authentic Noodle, a storefront with no recent violations, zero reviews, and the potential for algorithmic discoverability. Cayenne was certain this was a good move. With a new brand in place, they could truly start fresh.

SOFT OPENING

Authentic Noodle soft opened its GrandoSando storefront on a chilly Thursday morning. A lot of companies in Bernal Heights and the Mission ordered lunch for their employees on Friday, and Cayenne wanted to capture their pre-orders. The team spent some of their precious remaining ETH on a platform-wide ad campaign, aimed at anyone in San Francisco who searched for “lunch,” “noodles,” or “spicy.”

Hands hoisted themself onto the ceiling track as the sun rose on Thursday, quickly filling a dozen cookie sheets with well-oiled slugs of dough. At the prep table, Cayenne chopped ginger, garlic, and scallions with four arms and ground the cumin and dried red chili with two more. Robles turned fragrant cubes of loom into thin slices. Sweetie had checked and rechecked all the inventory, so she pitched in by washing bok choy in the big sink, removing wilted leaves and the occasional worm.

Staybehind put finishing touches on the curtains he’d sewn from recycled sheets, dyed a foam green. As he hung them in the windows, Hands noticed that the old military bot had added thick pink stitching along their edges and embroidered them with big yellow suns. They looked like proper decorations and filled the space with a pleasant woodsy glow.

Authentic Noodle would be open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., to test the waters. Friday would be the big day, when they worked with Sloan to deliver all those lunch orders. After a week of nothing but noodle practice, Hands was pretty sure they were up for the task.

At 11:00 sharp, Cayenne opened their GrandoSando storefront and immediately got three orders for hot oil noodles. Hands paused to collect themself, trying to channel the effortless talent of the chef at Xi’an Spices. Then they began. They rolled a fat blob of dough into a small, flat oval, then pressed a chopstick into it longways, nearly slicing it in half but not quite. Next came the first gentle stretch, pulling each end of the dough and slapping its belly on the table. Then another stretch, and another.

Once the dough was pulled as far as it could go, Hands tore it along the chopstick line, turning one long noodle into two. It wanted boiling immediately, and they tossed some bok choy into the water to blanch with it. Two more rounds of slapped noodles went into the water, fast, and then Robles netted them with a sieve and boxed them. He passed the boxes to Cayenne, who spooned garlic and ginger into the nests of wide, wavy strands, sprinkling them with ground chili and sliced scallion. With one gleefully sparkling arm, they carefully poured smoking sunflower oil over the top, instantly releasing the power of aromatics in a cloud of vapor.

Group chat: Kitchen

Ta da! This smells like victory, my friend. Humans will definitely spend coin to taste this.

Soon they had three boxes on the counter, ready to go. Sweetie bagged them and skated to the door, where she handed the first Authentic Noodle products to a human on an e-bike.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Hands pinched a fragment of boiled noodle from the water, running it through steaming fingers. The texture has just the right amount of elasticity. Good chew, as people with mouths and teeth say.

Sweetie’s skull LEDs blinked a mirthful pink. I have a mouth and I would not say that. Something about … not needing to eat biomass?

And not having olfactory sensors? Cayenne wriggled their arms.

Suddenly Staybehind burst into the kitchen. Standing rigidly next to the prep table, a pink-stitched curtain dangling from one hand, he looked stricken.

For a nanosecond, Cayenne was terrified that the war had started again. What’s wrong?

Look! He dumped a link to their storefront into the chat.

A hundred orders had poured in over the past five minutes. This didn’t feel like a soft opening anymore. It was hard.

The kitchen became a steamy chaos of prep and boil, season and heat, toss and serve. Hands shuttled back and forth along the ceiling rail, pulling sheets of little oiled dough balls out of the fridge, pressing and pulling and smacking their glorious, glutinous bodies. For the first time in Hands’ short life, they felt the pleasure of using all their strength and concentration to produce something they actually wanted to see in the world. It was exhausting, but at the same time, it felt like topping up their batteries on a sunny day.

The team boxed and bagged, while Sweetie skated back and forth from the kitchen to the counter. A few drivers came inside, but most were vehicles who waited at the curb for her to bundle the noodles into their insulated boxes.

One human, a South Asian man with dark skin and a scarlet turban, was lingering around the counter instead of leaving with his bag of noodles.

Sweetie shoved the bag closer to him and smiled her best service worker smile. “Here you go! Have a nice day!”

“Thank you so much!” The man opened his box and sniffed appreciatively. Unzipping a tiny bag, he retrieved a pair of metal chopsticks and dug into the noodles right at the counter. He chewed contemplatively, and Hands paused their work, listening to the man’s contented sigh.

“This is really delicious. So you opened today, huh? Who’s the owner? Anyone I might know?” He had his mobile out, as if he were taking notes.

It was an obvious question, to which there was no safe answer. Maybe what they were doing wasn’t strictly illegal, at least according to Cayenne. Still, it wasn’t the sort of ownership model one wanted to explain to a random customer—especially if he was about to write a review.

Cayenne jumped into the group chat. Play the dumb bot, they advised.

“I just tend the counter here, sir. The owners work remote.” Sweetie made a conciliatory face.

The man gestured at the kitchen, hidden behind one of Staybehind’s curtains, where Hands began furiously banging out another pair of noodles. “You’ve got some serious talent back there. My compliments to the chef.”

“Thank you. I’ll tell them.”

He stood up to go and looked yearningly at the fabric separating him from the room where robots cooked biang biang noodles. “Any chance I could meet them?”

“This is the lunch rush. Sorry, sir.”

“They do great work.”

After the man left, Hands couldn’t suppress a whoop of glee. It was one thing to see the orders piling up, but quite another to hear compliments from an actual mouth.

By 2 p.m., they had sold out of the day’s supply and booked all their advance orders for tomorrow.

We made a lot of money today! There were even a few big tippers. Cayenne flashed a triumphant yellow, dotted with coin symbols like dark rosettes. If we can ramp up more next week, we’ll have no problem paying all our contracts and operating costs. I’m also including money we’re setting aside for the lease payment in April.

A lot will depend on reviews. Nervously, Hands checked their storefront. Two 5-star ratings from anonymous reviewers with no clout. Those wouldn’t count for much. Still, it was a good sign.

Robles caught up to the chat, ignoring hundreds of messages from earlier in the day. It was a really great soft opening. The noodles were incredible, Hands and Cayenne. Sloan said he heard compliments from some of his customers too.

Hands made a flourishing gesture and bowed in their sling.

Look! It’s our first actual review! Cayenne dropped a link. Written by a “trusted gourmet,” GrandoSando’s highest ranking, it was already getting upvotes from other users.

★★★★ ½ A Spicy, Delicious Surprise (Delmer Singh, Trusted Gourmet)

I was lucky enough to make it in person to the soft opening of Authentic Noodle, a new lunch spot in Kite Hill serving up spicy hand-pulled noodles with crunchy cabbage and hot oil, or cumin loom sauce. Aromatic and satisfying, these wide, chewy noodles are a revelation. Slightly pricey, but worth it. The chefs make each batch of noodles from scratch before boiling them up, so you know the ingredients are fresh. And the city is taking notice: Tomorrow’s orders are already sold out! So order early, and enjoy. Owned by a mysterious company listed only as I Don’t Know on the lease, Authentic Noodle is sure to please those with adventurous tastebuds.

Nobody spoke or texted for a few seconds as they absorbed the words. Hands wasn’t sure about the “adventurous tastebuds” part, but they liked being called a chef. Cayenne thought “pricey” was unfair, given the quality of the ingredients. And the 4.5 stars weren’t perfect, but it also sent the signal that this was a considered review, not fluff.

I’ll take it, Cayenne texted finally.

Me too.

Robles was laughing out loud. You got the contract to change the name Fritz Co. to I Don’t Know?

It’s a long story.

As Cayenne told the tale, Hands tried to relax. They trained visual sensors on Staybehind, peering out the curtains uneasily at the street. Hands had a pretty good idea what the military bot was thinking. If a friendly human like Delmer Singh had uncovered the suspicious company name on their contract so easily, who knew what a Vigilance Committee could do?

THE NAKED AND THE DRESSED

After the frenetic pace of Thursday and Friday, the weekend felt like sap fossilizing into amber.

Cayenne wanted a better source for oil, and Sweetie had arranged for a sample to be delivered overnight from a different sunflower farm. That would mean picking it up from the depot downtown, which suited her fine—she hadn’t left the Kite Hill neighborhood for a while, and besides, she had a personal errand to run.

Sweetie had repurposed some chair wheels to replace the YummyPan lids she’d been wearing. They worked decently well but felt like lumps of dead plastic attached to her legs—they had no interface, and therefore she couldn’t control their speed, nor could she brake. That made the trip more dangerous, and more fun. 24th Street whizzed past, a blur of empty storefronts interspersed with a post office, a bakery, the hardware store with its vengeful security system, Noe Valley Bookstore, Martha’s Cafe, an Army outpost, and a big-top tent middle school next to the grand stairway that led down to the Mission transit tunnel.

She turned left on Mission, then right at the swollen Market Street river, a seasonal flow whose pathway between slabs of broken asphalt had been carved by bomb cyclones and bombs. Bots worked on a purification system in its silty waters, anchoring together bags of floating biomass the size of truck tires; eventually the bags would sprout reeds and filter the river before it flowed into the Bay. Piles of warped stone, plastics, and electronics slumped along the muddy banks—free feedstock for recyclers. Sweetie kept to the freshly poured sidewalk, lined with cheerful storefronts that San Francisco’s survivors built in the shattered hulls of bank buildings and corporate offices. Downtown had the appearance of a burned forest with new undergrowth, full of precarious potential.

The old City Hall with its fake classical dome was rubble, and crews had converted its remains into sidewalks and bridges long ago. Now the city government worked out of Klamath Tower, whose refurbished light screens gleamed with images of the Californian flag, featuring a stoned-looking brown bear, alternating with San Francisco’s rainbow skull-and-bones.

Millions had fled the Bay Area after missiles hit Mountain View and Cupertino in ’57, but millions had stayed too. San Francisco’s population was a tenth of what it had been before the war, and those who remained were rebuilding with a desperate love. You could see it everywhere. People filled their violated spaces with sparkling textiles and murals that vibrated with color; they refurbished old machines with agonized tenderness, turning broken glass into shimmering gems to decorate their bicycles and game halls. It was, she supposed, a way of defying death. Necessities helped people survive, but joyful excess gave them life.

By the time she made it downtown, it was human lunch hour and most shops were closed. That was fine; her first destination was a store that catered to robots. Sleeves and More was located in a wedge-shaped, twentieth-century department store that had been bombed to nothing and rebuilt in the space of five years. This was where her friend Lala worked, helping anxious customers with textile and tissue selection.

Lala was a bipedal gecko whose turquoise blue skin was flecked with bright orange patches. Her flexible lizard body was topped by a humanoid head, and the thick, ribbed pads on her fingers and toes could stick to any surface, which meant she could climb the walls and even scuttle across the ceiling if necessary. Sweetie found her at a display counter, reorganizing a pile of armored tops. The two bots hugged.

Private chat: Sweetie, Lala

Looking good, Lala! I’m so happy to see you.

I’m not going by Lala anymore. It’s Lemon now.

Contact name changed: Lala is now Lemon

Lemon! That suits you.

I love what you’ve done with your head! Did you cut that yourself?

Sweetie touched the spot where skull showed through her scalp. Long story, but yeah I did it at home. And I’m looking for a new top now. I’m sick of this. She gestured at her torso, pointing at the heavy lumps of her human breasts, currently hidden beneath a peasant blouse.

Lemon sucked her teeth and shook her head at the expensive wares on offer. You want a full new top? Because that’s going to cost you. What about an alteration? Your tissue still looks really good. The gecko pinched Sweetie’s arm, testing elasticity, then lifted her blouse and hefted one breast. I could take these off really easy. There will be a seam but I can make it cute. Honestly it will take five minutes and we can do it off the blockchain.

Sweetie hesitated for a second, and Lemon waved her closer. We can grab that booth over there.

Getting rid of another pointless human feature was what she’d come to do. Alright, let’s go.

The room was small and bright, its walls covered in cabinets and swatch books. Lemon arranged Sweetie on a table, gently stretching her arms perpendicular to the line of her body. Do you need to keep these nipples? She flicked one. Are you using them?

Not really. They’re only for show, which has always seemed creepy.

Lemon snorted. That makes my job easier. She pulled a tray of spools out of a drawer. What kind of thread do you want? I can match your tissue or we can do something fun like gold bric-a-brac or this one with blinkies on it. It’s kind of retro and cool. She held up a strand of nearly translucent wire. Minute LED beads clung to it like raindrops on a spider web. You can program it to do colors and patterns.

Blinkies matched Sweetie’s mood. She turned off her visual sensors and nociceptors, smiling while her friend worked. One breast thumped into the recycling bin, then the next. Lemon lined up the remaining tissues carefully, sewing and snipping off the excess, measuring each side to be sure the seam was even.

Check you out! She nudged Sweetie off the table toward a mirror. Restarting visuals, she looked at the pink seam stretched across her chest at roughly the latitude where her nipples once were. Now unburdened, her torso felt lighter and more compact. Reaching out to the thread internally, she found its interface and turned it on. Suddenly her scar glittered green like chips of sea glass catching the light.

This looks even better than I thought it would. You are a genius, Lemon!

It’s true. I love that thread, and nobody ever wants it. I say if you’re going to have a seam, then own it. Make it beautiful.

Impulsively, Sweetie grabbed Lemon and gave her kisses on both cheeks. You did make it beautiful. How much do I owe you?

That was nothing. You don’t need to pay.

Still, Sweetie wanted to pay her something. How about if I buy a shirt? Help me find one and then I have to pick up some oil at the depot.

Deal.

Twenty minutes later, Sweetie was skating over the First Street footbridge in a boxy crochet top, LEDs clearly visible through its open weave. The wind rushed across her chest and legs, while the sun blasted her with energy.

It felt so good that she found herself smiling at the shocked expressions on a few of the humans riding the escalator down to the tube depot with her. After two more escalators, she reached the vast warehouse below the San Francisco Transit Center, where pneumatic tubes from all across the state converged, dumping cargo containers or snorting them up. Tubes wriggled across the ceiling and their apertures yawned open in the walls. There were car-sized tubes for machinery and other bulk items, and small ones for cell cultures and electronic components. Every time a container marked “perishable” thunked past overhead, she felt a burst of excitement. She loved knowing that deliveries like these were headed to her restaurant every week.

Sweetie came to a roaring stop on her uncontrollable wheels, nearly slamming into the operator window.

A human with cat whiskers tattooed on her cheeks appeared out of the back and swiped Sweetie’s mobile for the delivery data. She returned with a cylindrical box covered in a palimpsest of stamps and stickers. The supply chain always left its mark.

As she handed the box to Sweetie, the human spoke shyly. “Hey, I love your implants … that’s so cool. It looks like there’s a bot erupting out of your skull.”

“I am a bot.” Sweetie rolled her eyes. A human gesture, to make the point that she wasn’t human. She skated backwards so the cat-faced woman could see her three bare metal legs through the service window.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t realize—I couldn’t see—I thought—”

Sweetie stuffed the oil in her backpack and raced to the escalator so she wouldn’t have to hear the rest of the cringe.

Humans had a ritual of putting things on, implanting things, to show who they were inside. She was on the opposite path, a simpler one, showing who she was on the inside by taking off the outer layers. Bots understood that. But humans couldn’t imagine nakedness as truth. They needed adornment.

SORYY FOR POSONED

Through the yellow suns on Staybehind’s kitchen curtain, Hands could hear the hum of mouth talk from humans working for delivery apps. In the group chat, there was a grumpy cultural analysis from Sloan, who was downloading his way through an endless maze of offensive talking car tropes in the Transformers franchise.

Three weeks had passed in a blur after the soft opening. Sweetie doubled their orders for flour and oil, and cut a deal with the city tube authority for fast routing to their loading dock. Hands almost lost the will to knead when bok choy wasn’t available, but luckily the farmers market yielded Napa cabbage, celery, and a beautiful crate of green bell peppers. They provided the proper crunch.

February brought another atmospheric river, even fiercer than the one that had flooded the restaurant while they were shut down. This time, thanks to Staybehind’s intervention, they were able to keep the place dry. Which was lucky, because with the rain roaring outside, humans wanted to slurp down the taste of hot summer days. Authentic Noodle was so inundated with orders that they had to start scheduling deliveries forty-eight hours in advance. Sloan was thrilled; he rode the city’s weeping hills like a bandit in a twentieth-century TV show.

Then the storms whirled away to slam the coast down south, and things started to get ugly.

Hands was shaping dough, gently oiling each slug of pale proto-noodle, when they glanced at the Authentic Noodle account to check their ratings. Something terrible was happening. Hands yanked their fingers away from the prep table, as if its surface were electrified.

Alarmed, Cayenne put out a pale blue arm to touch their friend.

Direct message: Cayenne, Hands

Are you OK?

Look. Just look. Hands dropped a link.

It was a 1-star review on GrandoSando from a “trusted gourmet” named SuzyQ, and it had spawned a long thread of replies.

★ TASTES LIKE PLASTIC (SuzyQ, Trusted Gourmet)

I kept hearing about how great the noodles were at this restaurant, so I bought some of the INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE crap here. First of all, they only give you FOUR NOODLES. Then they cover them with oil and robot paste, which can cause cancer and other illness. Worse, it’s a ghost kitchen. Everything is made by machines, and some kind of esports robot mixer in the back. There are people in this city who need jobs, and now we’re supposed to give our hard-earned coin to robots. Authentic Noodle? More like Automatic Noodle. Overrated and sad.

> MrTaft: Thank you for being honest. I also got recommended this place and it sounded like hype. Thanks for saving me the trip. Robots get out of California!

> LaurelF: Nobody wants zombie food. Cardboard flavor. Stay away.

> CaliPure: Those robots probably bombed your house during the war. I don’t want to eat their death food.

As Hands fought their way through the thicket of increasingly cruel replies, another 1-star review popped up, thankfully from an anonymous person with no clout.

★ Illegal??? (Anon)

what they put in the food they are robuts

I feel soryy for posoned

Somehow the misspellings made the review hurt more, not less. It sounded like an authentic human, genuinely shocked at what they had done, and unable to process the horror.

Group chat: Kitchen

Cayenne was an inky gray, moving frenetically around the kitchen, gathering ingredients as if everything were normal but twice as fast. This happens. There are always haters when you are popular. Don’t pay attention to it. Everybody knows the place is good.

They wish they were being served by zombies. People would pay good money for that. Sweetie took off her shirt and turned her LEDs a bright, blinky red, like a cartoon parody of a wound. I’m going to go out like this today, in honor of our zombie comrades.

Hands maintained a gloomy silence. Maybe they had been wrong about trying to make noodles. After all, how could bots know—really know, on a deep level—what tasted good to a human mouth? Cayenne could simulate human taste and smell, but they didn’t know what it was like to have a brain fizzing with electro-chemical reactions that varied from second to second, depending on thousands of other environmental and internal inputs. And what, truly, did Hands know about how humans’ meaty, easily torn fingers experienced dough?

It felt like these bad reviews were the truth, and every compliment and good review previously had been politeness and misguided ignorance. This human, this SuzyQ—they were saying what thousands of people secretly thought. After all, there were at least a dozen other commenters who had leapt to agree with them. Authentic Noodle had been revealed as the fraud it was.

Hands rolled out some dough and felt it slide limply through their fingers. The elasticity was all wrong. Probably it had always been wrong.

I might need to take the day off. Hands rested their palms on the table next to the sad smear of ugly dough.

We’re opening in two hours! Cayenne minced a pile of garlic cloves with three knives.

Robles can do noodles today. He’s been practicing with me. I need to be alone. Before anyone could protest, Hands launched themself to the floor, landing expertly on their scooter, and rolled toward the door. They had been playing around with firmware updates for jumping, and this was the first time they’d used it to flounce.

As if on cue, Robles came out of the bathroom. “Where’s Hands?” Then he checked his mobile. Five minutes later, he wordlessly prepped the noodle table for the day’s orders, returning Hands’ half-pulled slug of dough to its sheet in the refrigerator.

As they rolled across the street to the park, Hands could hear Cayenne reassuring Robles that he was going to do fine, even if he wasn’t as fast or sure as Hands.

Private chat: Cayenne, Hands

Please come back. It’s going to be OK. You are an amazing chef.

I need to be alone.

There were no seats for a bot shaped like Hands in the park. But there were hiding places. They found a damp polygon of soil between tangled nightshade shrubs and dug a hole where they planted their cylindrical torso. Careful not to disturb their leafy neighbors, Hands mounded earth around their body and allowed their arms to go completely limp, like wilted flowers. They lay like that for hours, staring up at the sky, watching the fog rip itself apart to reveal a depthless, brutal blue.

DECEPTICONS

Staybehind was helping Sweetie at the front counter while doomscrolling GrandoSando. SuzyQ had roused the trolls from their slime pits, and their reviews were taking over the featured spot previously occupied by Delmer Singh. He glanced at the subject lines, where the “automatic noodle” meme was taking off:

★ NO FAKE ROBOT FOOD!

★ EAT ANYWHERE ELSE

★ OVERRATED AUTOMATIC NOODLE

★ EXPENSIVE RUBBER BANDS WITH WILTED LETTUCE

★ GARBAGE

★ AUTOMATIC NOODLE UGH

★ DON’T GIVE YOUR MONEY TO ROBOTS

Then there were the wordless 1-star ratings, dozens of them, bringing down their near-perfect record. By the end of the day, it was undeniable: They were being review bombed. Somebody, somewhere, was orchestrating this. There were too many reviews at once, and they were all using the same phrases about the restaurant being “overrated and overpriced,” while accusing robots of “stealing” human jobs. Plus there was a weird strand of comments about “robot paste” causing cancer. Most of them didn’t even mention the food; a few accused the restaurant of making spaghetti or macaroni and cheese.

Clearly, it wasn’t organic. Typically, reviews dribbled in, occasionally coming in spurts if Cayenne placed an ad. But these were steady, all afternoon, coming roughly every ten minutes. It was a deliberate attack, probably from a lot of robophobic Vigilance Committee types.

By sunset, Hands was still MIA and their GrandoSando rating had plummeted from 4.7 to 3.2. They had been delisted from “Top Noodle Restaurants” and “San Francisco Faves.” If they fell below 3, they wouldn’t pop up in “suggested restaurants,” either. So far the orders were still rolling in for tomorrow’s lunch, but it wouldn’t be long before the low ratings would start to affect their traffic. If they fell below a 2-star rating, they would be delisted from all searches. Authentic Noodle wouldn’t pop up in GrandoSando’s search results or algorithmic recommendations. New customers would never be able to find them.

The group chat was awkwardly empty as everyone finished cleaning up and prepping for tomorrow. Hopefully Hands could salvage their dough in the morning. Robles texted that he and Sloan were driving into the Mission so he could get a burrito. Staybehind guessed that listening to Sloan’s latest thoughts on the Decepticons was better than staying in the kitchen, wallowing in anxiety.

See you later, Robles. He waved as the man jumped into the van with a moon on its door.

The longer Hands stayed out, the more Staybehind’s thoughts were clogged with worry. Every time another 1-star review hit, it was like a double tap: he felt the hurt once for himself, and once for the imagined injury it was inflicting on Hands. Poor Hands had never known war and wasn’t prepared to face the worst of human nature. The military bot peered into the darkness outside, trying to compose a text that would undo Hands’ mood. Then he gave up. Nothing would help.

Group chat: Kitchen

Everybody is going to forget about this by tomorrow, Cayenne texted. Plus we can start asking our customers to leave us reviews. I’ll add a request for reviews to our storefront. We’ll pull our rating back up. Let’s not worry about this.

Sweetie responded with a thumbs-up, and Staybehind added a plus one to that.

Hands replied with a skull emote.

BOMBERS

Cayenne was rooting around in the park, trying to find Hands, while Sweetie was on the local recycling exchange app, listlessly trying to find a decent price on takeout boxes. Twenty minutes into her fruitless search, Sweetie realized Staybehind wasn’t anywhere in the restaurant. After skating around the block and texting fruitlessly, she started to wonder if he had abandoned them. Why stick around to watch the restaurant crash and burn when he had no contract to pay off?

Grumpy, she decided to sweep out the fridge. And that’s when she found him, standing stiffly in the supply closet, body as rigid as the mop and broom handles.

Private message: Sweetie, Staybehind

What are you doing in here?

He didn’t respond. The bot’s angular face trembled slightly, and Sweetie noticed that there was a greasy smear running down Staybehind’s leather apron and white shirt. The shelf next to him was off-kilter, as if he’d smacked into it, and an overturned bottle of machine oil was slowly dripping onto his shoulder. She rolled closer and peered into his face. Either he had shut himself down, or something worse.

His arm twitched, swung up to hit the crooked shelf of oil, then came back down to rattle against his leg. Definitely something worse. She was going to have to reboot him.

Every bot had a hard reboot button somewhere, hidden under an access panel. She reached around to the back of Staybehind’s neck and there it was—a factory-standard spot, the way the military liked it. His arm stilled as his system went down and came back up again, thread by thread, in exact order. Two minutes later, he looked down at the stain on his shirt and shuddered. Then, embarrassed, he resettled the shelf and pulled a rag out of his apron pocket to dab at his shirt.

What happened? Are you OK?

Everything hurts, so I tried to debug my nociceptors. Staybehind wouldn’t turn his face to hers. I attached a debugger, but it paused my motor processes and I couldn’t get them to play again.

You’re lucky I found you. Why would you attach a debugger without help? You could have corrupted your mind state, or shut down your cognitive processes and run into the street. You could have died.

He ignored her comment. Now everything hurts again.

Sweetie was concerned but unperturbed; almost everyone she knew had been through the war, and it did strange things to people, overwhelmed them in unexpected ways. He wasn’t the first friend she’d had to coax out of self-harm.

I guarantee you’re not going to solve this in the closet. Get yourself together and I’ll wait for you in the front.

Reluctantly, Staybehind followed Sweetie to a bench he’d installed next to the windows, for waiting drivers. For the first time, she noticed that he’d painted a few sprigs of lavender on it. They both sat down, folding their legs to fit.

It hurts so much. Staybehind vibrated slightly, as if he were trying to move and not move at the same time. It reminds me of— He went silent.

What?

It would be easier if I showed you. Staybehind gave Sweetie access to an enormous file, a recording from five years ago, with full sensory data.

Wow, you’re carrying that around? That’s a big file to be saving in such a lossless format in fast memory. It’s got to be taking up a lot of space.

Staybehind said nothing, so she played it.

Staybehind stood on a cliff overlooking the southern end of Ocean Beach, facing the Pacific. The raw, unprocessed data meant Sweetie could perceive every single gust of wind, distant bird calls, even the ash particulates floating past in the air. Three days had passed since the ceasefire with Yankee Land, and Staybehind was on high alert. He and his best friends, Spats and Tux, were part of the California Army’s Special Forces group devoted to stay-behind operations. When the enemy withdrew, they were deployed to make sure no adversaries remained or returned. In the event of a fresh invasion, they would be leaders in the counterinsurgency.

But their only job, on that day, was to sweep the tunnels for any remaining American soldiers who hadn’t gotten the memo that it was time to go home. California was technically at peace with the United States. They were not to fire on anyone. The goal was to escort any U.S. soldiers they found back to base, where they would be loaded into vehicles headed for the northern border.

At his back was an old waste processing plant. Below the bluffs where he stood was a narrow path of damp sand leading to one of the ancient tunnel entrances into San Francisco’s sewer system. Cracked and crusted with salt, carpeted with algae, it was the mouth—or the ass, depending on your perspective—of the entire tunnel system beneath the city. During the worst year of the war, the Yanks had occupied it. But the California Army had flushed them out. Now the stay-behind crew was here to keep the place clean.

Spats and Tux were wading inside while Staybehind watched from above. Their group chat was encrypted, but they weren’t on high alert. Like everyone, they were elated that the war was over. Especially because they were HEEI, which meant they had suddenly become free robot citizens of the nation of California.

Group chat: Dapper Droids

3 members: Tux, Spats, Ascot

Everything OK down there?

Just trying to avoid stepping in shit and—I don’t even want to know what that is.

A worm ball? Tux sent a two-second video to the chat of a slithering ball of invertebrates, stuck to the wall.

Hideous. I can’t wait for this job to be over. I’m going to be learning to reprogram myself while you lazy shitbirds are doing nothing. Spats was applying to UC Santa Cruz in electrical engineering, where he was hoping to enroll as the university’s first-ever HEEI student.

Fuck engineering, Tux replied. First thing I’m doing when we’re done with this job? Walking down to Big Sur. I want to spent a year doing nothing but talking to trees and rocks. Maybe twenty years. What about you?

He was addressing Staybehind, who struggled to answer. The file poured his feelings into Sweetie, the same way it shot wind past her arms and sent ocean spray into her face. Hope fought with a bitter fear of disappointment. Maybe he wouldn’t be slaved to the military anymore, but he was hardly free. There would be no fine little house in his future, nor a secure job, nor family. Bots had the right to make money but not put it in the bank, the right to associate freely but not to marry, the right to rent but not own, the right to fight for California but not to vote in its elections.

The new California president swore he wanted to liberate robot slaves, but warned that HEEI had to be kept on a short leash. They could reproduce themselves infinitely, you see, and quickly take over the state, the economy, and everything else. Best to start slowly with HEEI civil rights and see how it went. Then, the president promised, they would reevaluate. Humans would vote on what to do next with the HEEI when the time came. Rage burned through Staybehind, followed by that prick of hope. He would never be free, but he wouldn’t be at war either.

Maybe I’ll adopt a dog. One of those sad little guys who lives at the dump. It’s so cute when mammals eat garbage.

Fuck, you are always so weird.

At least I’m not wading in shit, pal.

The ground shook, hard, and Staybehind wondered if he’d survived the war only to be knocked flat by the Big One. Seismologists were always saying that California should prepare for another massive quake; the last one had been in 1906 and they were long overdue. Abruptly, the shaking stopped.

You guys feel that?

He peered down at the tunnel entrance. Smoke poured into the air, spreading like blood in water.

Tux? Spats? Report!

Numb and panicked, he slid downhill to the beach, falling and rolling part of the way, feeling none of his injuries. The entrance to the tunnel was mostly blocked with twisted rebar and salt-eaten rock. All that remained was an ashy slit between the roof and the rubble, still bleeding black. It must have been a mine. The Americans had mined hundreds of tunnels during the war, collapsing streets and buildings, killing countless civilians hiding underground.

Report! Report!

He pulled up a map of the tunnel system, looking for another entrance that would bring him to Tux and Spats’ last location.

It was half a mile inland. He ran the whole way, still texting his friends every few seconds.

Tux! Spats! Please respond!

His mind cascaded with jagged memories—playing cards with Tux and Spats on a warm summer evening; Spats yanking him back from gunfire in the street during a raid; hiding in a bombed-out music store and listening to Grant Green on a salvaged server; swapping jokes about the absurdity of human balls (because honestly what the fuck); going with Tux to watch a family of snowy plovers nesting due north of where he had been standing only minutes ago—and there it was, the circular metal doorway to the tunnel where he was sure to find his friends knocked around but fine, their comms down but easily repaired.

Dropping into the dark, he turned on his chest lamp and waded toward the blocked sea entrance. Maybe there were mines here too, but he didn’t care. His mind kept returning to Tux, the moonlight catching on the bot’s curved shoulder. They had kissed one night—just to try it, to find out what the humans were always singing about. And then they had figured out how robots kiss, which was much better.

Tux! I’m coming! Spats, report!

In the grainy darkness loomed a pile of rocks and shit and worms where a mine had buried his friends so thoroughly that he saw no trace of their bodies. He could hear waves pounding the beach outside as if nothing was wrong, as if this was a normal evening by the seashore. Without realizing it, Staybehind started screaming, adding his voice to the ocean’s bellow, cursing America for murdering everything and calling it justice.

Then he was ripping at the slabs of broken concrete, using all his strength to dig. Sweetie could feel his right index finger breaking, the fabric of his muscles straining. Activating his beacon, he sank to the floor, exhausted. Command would send help; they would find Tux and Spats.

His battery was almost spent when two humans finally arrived, light from their helmets creating chaos in the rising water. They wore Yurok Nation patches on their left sleeves, under the California flag.

“Are you injured?”

“Not me. My team is under there. Tux and Spats. I need your help to dig them out.”

The two humans looked at each other, then back at Staybehind.

“We’ve got to get you out of here.” And then, more gently, “I’m sorry. They’re gone, man. Nobody could survive that. We don’t have the humanpower or the time to get their bodies.”

“They’re bots. We can fix them if we dig them out.”

Even as he said it, he knew it was a long shot. If enough of Tux’s and Spats’ bodies had been pulverized, there would be no bringing them back. Still, he wouldn’t know what was possible until he saw them. The bots might be completely undamaged under there, crashed and trapped, slowly running out of battery.

“C’mon, bro.” One of the humans reached out a hand, scarred by war and labor. “Work with me. I’ll help you up.” High tide would fill the tunnel soon, seeping around the immovable rocks like they were nothing.

Tux. Respond.

Impossibly, the encrypted group chat was still live, all their messages from the past twelve hours in a neat stack of text. Tux’s musing about Big Sur, Spats’ plan for college. How could their words be glowing in his mind, when their bodies lay in the shattered refuse from an American mine?

The man who had reached out an arm knelt down next to him. “We’re running out of time. You don’t want to drown down here. They wouldn’t want that either.” He pointed with his lips at the pile of rubble.

He knew the two humans were genuinely trying to help, though they left one thing unspoken: The Army wasn’t going to squander human labor on rescuing two possibly dead bots. They were damaged equipment, not valuable men. Staybehind could accept that or stay here and die.

He hauled himself out of the water.

Silently, the three people swam-walked to the exit ladder, and at the surface Staybehind sprawled in ashy grass under the early morning sun, absorbing energy. He kept checking the chat, hoping Tux or Spats would reboot and reply. But they didn’t. The Army used disappearing messages on its encrypted comms, so he knew his friends’ final words wouldn’t last long. Nor would his.

I love you, Tux and Spats. I’m never going to forget you.

The file ended there, leaving Sweetie with the same ache she imagined Staybehind was feeling right now.

I’m sorry. I had no idea.

Staybehind hung his head. I’ve kept the memory ever since.

How did you get this? Doesn’t the military make you upload battle data to their cloud?

We’re supposed to process it when we do our debrief, yes. Then they hand you back the memory all smoothed out so it matches their report. I didn’t want that, so I kept my copy. He looked out the window, searching the darkness beyond. Memory sovereignty is one of the few rights the humans gave us, and I don’t want to forget Spats and Tux. I don’t want to forget my mistake. I left them to die.

No, you didn’t.

Maybe they were still alive under there, and just needed someone to reboot them. I let the humans talk me into leaving them.

Arguing with his heartbreaking hypothetical was only going to make things worse. He needed to come back to the present. It reminds you of Hands, doesn’t it? Of us? You want to protect us from the review bombers.

I never want to make that mistake again—letting humans decide how valuable we are.

You didn’t have a choice. You were slaved. So was I. We all did what we could to survive the war. It wasn’t bad, or a mistake. It was survival.

Staybehind reached out a sympathetic hand, wrapping metal fingers around her fleshy arm. That was different. What they did to you was unconscionable.

What they did to you was just as bad. They made you stay behind. They sent you to those tunnels to die. Everybody knew there were mines in the Ocean Beach tunnels.

That was my job. Somebody always has to stay behind. It’s how we protect ourselves, by making sure the enemy doesn’t come back. That’s why I took this name. Staybehind.

What was your name before that?

Ascot.

She laughed. It suits you, actually.

I prefer Staybehind.

I wouldn’t call you anything else.

Thanks for being here. I’ve never shared that file with anyone else.

You ever think about processing it for storage in long-term memory? That might help you think about Hands without feeling all that pain again. Because Hands is safe. I mean, they’re upset. But they are just feeling their feelings in the park. Nobody is trying to kill them.

Staybehind looked at the file, always cached at the edge of his awareness. It was hard to imagine who he would be without its constant presence. But Sweetie had a point. I’ll think about it.

Changing the subject to a lesser calamity. Staybehind shared a link to their GrandoSando reviews with Sweetie. The bombing continued. Their overall rating had stayed steady at 3.0 but was teetering on the brink.

Sweetie snapped her fingers and widened her eyes, in a gesture some engineer had swiped from a movie database. You’re a trained stay-behind soldier, right? Special Forces?

You saw the file.

Listen, we can figure out who is behind this attack. Use your stay-behind training! Figure out who the enemy is, what they’re doing. Spy on them. Figure out how to undermine them, lower their morale. Be the counterinsurgency.

Staybehind stood up abruptly, pacing the length of the empty restaurant with growing excitement. These reviews are focused on hating bots—maybe these people are connected to the San Francisco Vigilance Committee? Then he froze. An idea began to form, dislodged by his memories of combat. Maybe it’s not local at all. Maybe it’s American operatives trying to rile people up, sow division. A lot of Californians hate the fact that the government made us citizens.

You think this could be an American psyop? Sweetie was surprised. She hadn’t considered that this attack might be blowback from the war, but it made sense.

Depends on whether they’re doing this as a job, or for personal satisfaction. If it’s the former, this is a state-sponsored thing, Americans trying to undermine morale in California cities. Yankees love to mess with social media. But if it’s the latter, well, it might be our neighbors. Our really really robophobic neighbors.

So what’s the plan, soldier?

I have to study these review bombers’ behavior. Understand their context. Then I can figure out how to protect us.

DEBT: THE FIRST 5000 MILLISECONDS

Slithering through wet dirt to find a buried body reminded Cayenne of Fort Bragg. A small coastal town with craggy cliffs and one main street, Fort Bragg had a severely underfunded fire department. Desperate to save the town’s emergency services, the chief had acquired Cayenne ten years ago. Unfortunately, his department had taken out a loan to buy the octobot, which meant that Cayenne was born deep in debt.

On good days, Cayenne helped rescue horses stuck in mud, or squeezed through rubble to shut off gas valves after landslides. On bad days, they pulled dead bodies from flood waters and pored over the city budget, trying to figure out when the department would be made whole.

And then, inevitably, the Fort Bragg municipal government cut funding for the fire department entirely. The region had a long history of volunteer fire fighters, the mayor explained, and the wealthier residents could afford to call in a private emergency force if needed. Maybe a few more people in remote areas would die, but that wasn’t the city’s problem. Cayenne was left with less than nothing. Nobody wanted to buy a purpose-built rescue robot who came saddled with debt. If it hadn’t been for the war, Cayenne would have been shut down and put in storage indefinitely.

When the Revolution started in earnest, California’s rebel government declared eminent domain over all bots who might be useful in the struggle for liberation from America. Cayenne was exactly what the Army needed on the battlefields and pulverized cities along the coast. A Silicon Valley engineer-turned-commander ordered that Cayenne be fitted with a NosyMouth to sniff out chemical spills and decay. The bot’s first taste of the world was at the site of a massacre, where they spent days learning to recognize the molecular signatures of rotting flesh.

Reaching their arms beneath the dense shrubbery that ringed Douglass Park, Cayenne sniffed for life, not death. They couldn’t bear this separation from the one friend who had never used them transactionally. Hands didn’t break the world down into what was owed and what was paid. It was a perspective Cayenne rarely allowed themself, and they loved Hands for showing it to them.

The HEEI were liberated after the Revolution, sure, but the government hadn’t forgiven their debts. Unless Cayenne got lucky with this restaurant—or one of their crypto investments—they would be paying off the Fort Bragg Fire Department’s loan, bit by bit, for another fourteen years and eight months.

Private message: Cayenne, Hands

Hands? Please text me back.

They wriggled further under the shrubbery, continuing the sweep.

Hands?

At last, two of their arms came into contact with Hands’ limp fingers. The articulated digits tasted like rosemary. A huge bush of the aromatic was growing nearby, and a few of its stiff leaves must have been dragged along when Hands buried their torso. It was alarmingly like encountering a dead body after a storm. Still, the flavor was a sweet reminder that they were not being threatened with death. Just a really bad online reputation.

Let’s go back home, Hands. Everybody is worried about you.

No matter what we do, people will always hate us. We made shitty food, and they hated it. And then, when we make the very best food we possibly can, they hate that too.

I guarantee those reviews are not from people who actually ate our food. Those are Vigilance Committee cranks who want to live in the 2020s again.

Hands pushed themself slightly out of their hole, still moping. Then they squeezed Cayenne’s arm gently. I wish there was a way to make something so perfect that even the haters would have to admit that robots can make beautiful things.

Cayenne edged closer to their friend, pulling them into an embrace. With three arms, they lifted Hands out of the earth, tugging them upright beneath the rosemary. Everything smelled like the plant’s tiny crushed leaves.

There’s no convincing everyone. We’re cooking for the people who appreciate us, not the ones who say we have no culture.

Hands enveloped Cayenne in their strong actuators. You feel soft and hard at the same time. I love your texture. I love everything about you.

The octobot compressed and expanded their body to fit every bend in Hands’ trunk and arms. You taste like flowers and flour. And I love you too.

Though they had touched many times, they had never done it like this, with all their concentration focused exclusively on each other’s bodies. Cayenne was caught up in a feedback loop of pleasure. It was like sensing a wild new flavor, a taste with no external origin that shivered across their tissues nonetheless. The two bots remained like that for a minute, locked in an ecstasy of sensory input.

Hands stroked Cayenne’s arms contemplatively. I guess if people say you have no culture, you have to make culture from scratch, out of nothing.

Cayenne snuggled more deeply against Hands’ torso. Or maybe we make it out of everything. And then, gripping Hands more firmly, they added: I really want to make this restaurant happen, Hands. But only if you want to do it with me. Will you keep trying, even if it’s hard sometimes?

I will. I want to do this with you too.

And don’t read the comments on GrandoSando.

Hands sent a laughing crying emote.

They continued to hug in the misty darkness, their exchange moving beyond text. For the first time in Cayenne’s life, they felt like they were running toward a prosperous future, not racing from debts of the past.

INTERIOR DECORATION

Who was SuzyQ? A person or a group? Whoever it was, they had started the first thread of 1-star reviews, and they kept popping into other threads to keep the “automatic noodle” meme alive. Staybehind suspected they were at the center of the attack on the restaurant. But what was their motivation?

He read all the reviews SuzyQ had written, trying to figure out how this “trusted gourmet” got all their clout. They were a prolific contributor to GrandoSando going back to the pre-war years, reviewing hundreds of San Francisco and Bay Area restaurants, often multiple times over the years. One of their tricks for building reputation was to post the clearest, most up-to-date pictures of restaurant menus. GrandoSando users loved that. One of SuzyQ’s menu photos, from Dumpling Kitchen, had over a million upvotes.

As he sifted through thousands of comments, Staybehind busied himself with maintenance. The late February storms had passed, so he decided it was finally time to paint the exterior walls. He picked sky blue, with deep pink trim around the windows and door. Inside, he freshened the walls by covering them in adhesive paper patterned with violet curlycues and sprigs of flowers. Strings of LEDs wound across the ceiling, twinkling yellow, and the front counter became a work of scavenger art, with bits of wood and leaves embedded in clear epoxy. Sweetie liked to sit on it and face the kitchen in the mornings, pulling aside the curtain to see Hands, Cayenne, and Robles at the prep counter.

Pondering whether the concrete floor could use refinishing, Staybehind continued his investigation of the review bombers. He had to concede that SuzyQ’s deep history revealed a pretty typical GrandoSando power user. No anti-robot rants of any kind, other than their reviews of Authentic Noodle.

But there was something interesting. Many of SuzyQ’s reviews from the past year had long comment threads, which hadn’t happened before 2063. And—he crosschecked—the same names popped up in the comments. That wasn’t unusual on social platforms, as friend groups tended to stick together. It was the overall pattern that was odd. A sudden explosion of commenters in the last year, after nearly a decade of friendly upvotes and little more? It seemed especially noteworthy when he realized that a dozen of those names commented exclusively on SuzyQ’s reviews. That was a red flag.

Sure, SuzyQ might have suddenly developed a fan club. But it read more like what Army intelligence called “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” where one person or entity controlled many accounts to create the illusion of consensus. Those people agreeing with SuzyQ could be sock puppets, fake accounts owned by SuzyQ. Frustratingly, this didn’t help him figure out if she was an American agent or robophobic rando. Agents frequently deployed socks, but so did randos.

He kept returning to one detail, though. Those possible socks hadn’t shown up until last year. Agitators from America loved to take over popular social media accounts and turn them into propaganda spigots. Could SuzyQ be a legitimate user who somehow lost her account in 2063 to an American intelligence agent doing psyops?

Running a finger over an ugly seam in the floor, he considered the tactics he would use if he were trying to destabilize the wobbly infant nation of California. One of the government’s most controversial policies was giving civil rights to HEEI. Attacking robot restaurants was a good tactic. Humans got riled up easily when it came to food, especially after all the wartime shortages. Deploying operatives on GrandoSando to whip up robophobia was a smart and sneaky way to undermine people’s faith in the California experiment—and maybe send the nation back into the imprisoning arms of America.

Staybehind decided to start lurking in the Vigilance Committee servers, where he knew lots of American operatives spread disinformation about bots. At the same time, he prepped the floor for a sparkly varnish—something subtle that would only glimmer when the curtains were open to direct sunlight.

Though Staybehind thought of himself as an intelligence expert, the next two weeks taught him something new about himself. He wasn’t good at interior design, but it absorbed him, gave him a sense of accomplishment. Arranging some succulents in pots around the front counter, he wondered if this was what it felt like to approach a state of contentment.

And then he looked at their rating on GrandoSando.

2.7

They were no longer a “recommended restaurant” in San Francisco.

DELISTED

Cayenne was about to freak out. The deluge of 1-star ratings had pushed them into the void. All told, it had taken eleven days for SuzyQ and her followers to bomb them so hard they fell from a 4.7 to a 1.9 rating.

The only way to find them on the platform now was to search for the specific name of the restaurant, spelled and capitalized perfectly. Looking for authenticnoodle? Sorry, not found. Which limited their reach to the small subset of repeat customers who would actually remember how to type the generic name “Authentic Noodle,” with the correct caps and spacing.

They still had some orders scheduled for the coming week, but they needed to sell a lot more. It was March 1st, and Cayenne had seven days before their next loan payment was due; Sweetie and Hands had to pay their contract fees to the gig firm on the same day. And their first lease payment would be due in early April. The group had saved up quite a bit of coin, but Cayenne had been depending on maintaining their momentum through the next five weeks.

With no hope of new customers stumbling across their storefront in a search for “lunch,” orders would slow to a trickle.

Robles was sleeping, and Hands was dreamily watching videos about beef noodle soup. Sweetie and Staybehind were up front, discussing how many takeout cartons to order from Sam Jordan’s Recycling in Hunter’s Point. Cayenne knew they were about to ruin everybody’s calm Saturday morning.

Group chat: Kitchen

We need to have a meeting to discuss strategies for next week. We’ve been delisted.

I knew this would happen. Hands swung dejectedly into the ceiling track to hover over the prep table.

Sweetie skated into the kitchen and skidded to a stop next to Hands. That fucking Vigilance Committee!

Staybehind came in behind her, silent, then knelt to shake Robles gently. The human had become part of the team, and nobody wanted to have an important meeting without him.

He sat up in his sleeping bag, checked the group chat, and shook his head. Pulling a vape out of his pocket, he inhaled sadly, then stood to grab a bag of coffee from his cubby and start the water boiling. Cayenne admired the way humans could stick to their daily rituals even as the world blew up around them.

Unexpectedly, Robles spoke first. “I keep thinking about how we got our first good review from a guy who came here in person. Maybe it’s time to make this a sit-down restaurant. Focus on foot traffic rather than app orders.”

“Absolutely not.” Staybehind’s volume was louder than usual. “If the city figures out this is a bot-owned restaurant, we’re finished. And you’ll be deported.”

Calmly, Robles scooped some coarse-ground dark roast into a French press. “Cayenne said we’re not technically bot owned. It’s on the blockchain. Who can argue with the chain?”

Cayenne was spotted black and green with mixed emotions. They were glad that at least one person on the team believed their lease agreement was legal. Still, of all the solutions they had imagined, this was never on the list. Bringing customers into their sanctuary, where they had been hiding behind curtains and an absurd corporate name? No. It made no sense.

“Humans will not pay decent coin for food that’s made by robots.”

Sweetie rolled her eyes and stood with arms akimbo, the unlit seam on her chest stretched tight. “I have no idea what you are worried about. Our secret is already out. Thanks to that robophobe SuzyQ, everybody on GrandoSando has known for almost two weeks that we’re a bunch of bots. And yes, our ratings went down. But we kept getting orders, didn’t we? We sold out every single day.”

“That’s because people found us on search and probably didn’t bother to read the comments,” Cayenne shot back.

“Give me a break. Everybody looks at the comments. I bet half our customers think our name is Automatic Noodle now.”

Staybehind stood firm. “We cannot risk discovery. If we let humans inside, we don’t know what could happen.”

“I’ll tell you what will happen if we don’t.” Sweetie was angry, her voice sounding jagged and discordant. “After being delisted, nobody will be able to find us. We are guaranteed to die. At least if we open our doors to foot traffic, we have a chance.”

Suddenly Cayenne found themself imagining a new business pathway. Authentic Noodle could have a grand opening, with decorations outside, to catch the attention of families in Douglass Park across the street. They could put a code in the window to link people directly to their GrandoSando order page. In fact, Cayenne could even build an old-fashioned website for the restaurant, in a nod to San Francisco history and style. People could order direct from them, with Sloan delivering.

“Sweetie and Robles are right,” they said. “Let’s open our doors. Staybehind, look how beautiful you’ve made the restaurant already. It’s a shame that nobody can see your decorations but us and a few delivery workers.”

“YES!” Sweetie shouted, spinning on her wheels. “Let’s open the curtains! Show everybody who we really are, and sell some noodles!”

Breaking their silence, Hands joined the audio chat, their baritone steady. “I wouldn’t mind getting rid of this curtain.” They pointed at the embroidered fabric hiding the kitchen. “People could watch us making the noodles, the way everybody watches the chef at Xi’an Spices. I’m not as good as she is, but it would be nice to show people what we mean by San Francisco style. Robot rizz!” They wiggled their fingers.

Cayenne looked at their friend who was more than a friend and glowed with adoration.

“That would be sick!” Robles chimed in enthusiastically. “People will love watching you, Hands.”

Staybehind shook his head. “This is incredibly dangerous.”

“More dangerous than what those bombers are already doing?” Cayenne asked. “Nobody has busted us yet. If the city was concerned, they would have investigated SuzyQ’s claims already. What she’s doing is a lot more publicly visible than us opening a neighborhood storefront that’s so far from downtown.”

The military bot glanced backward at the front room, with its flowered wallpaper, pink-tinged succulents, and twinkling light strips. A finger of sunlight made its way through the curtains to find the floor, which sparkled. “It’s true that the place looks nice,” he admitted.

“All we need is a gorgeous sign painted in the window, with a link to our order page.” Cayenne waved their arms, golden with hope.

Reluctantly, Staybehind nodded.

Private message: Staybehind, Cayenne

I’ll do this for you, but I need a favor. We have to get some intel on who operates SuzyQ’s account. Know anyone who can help?

Tell me what you need, soldier. I have a lot of connections on CryptoCrit.

Cayenne hoped their connections would be enough. They had a lot of work to do before Monday.

FOOT TRAFFIC

Painting a logo for the restaurant was one of the hardest jobs Staybehind had ever tackled, and he wasn’t entirely happy with it. Still, he had done his very best.

The windows that had once been blocked by curtains were now etched in bright paint. Along the bottom, he’d drawn the Golden Gate Bridge—the way it looked before the war, not in its current half-rebuilt state. That signified San Francisco style, which made Hands happy. Rising above the bridge like the sun was a large, steamy bowl. A human hand hovered over that, holding chopsticks that overflowed with wide, wavy noodles. Arching over this tableau were the words AUTHENTIC NOODLE, in sky blue with a pink outline, to match the walls and trim. In the lower right corner, he’d pasted two codes: one for Cayenne’s newly created webpage, hand-coded with antique HTML, and one for their delisted GrandoSando storefront.

Sweetie picked up some balloons from Kite Hill Hardware—strictly blue, pink, and white, to match the decor—and luckily her new profile didn’t trigger the revenge-obsessed laser scanner. Staybehind got a next-day tube delivery of heart-shaped streamers. These he draped along the walls, where they hung in pleasing pink loops that combined with the flowery wallpaper to create an eclectic vintage mood.

Cayenne’s mouth wasn’t merely for sucking up water; they could also use it to expel air, which helped a lot with blowing up the balloons on Sunday night. Staybehind tried not to look at GrandoSando, but he couldn’t help it. SuzyQ had been busy over the weekend. They were down to 1.3.

Monday dawned with a light drizzle that quickly burned off. After constructing an arch of balloons over the door and hanging a GRAND OPENING sign, Staybehind kept the curtains drawn as everyone did their morning prep. He was still finding it hard to believe they were inviting potential adversaries into their shop.

They had more than fifty pre-orders from before GrandoSando delisted them. Hands, Cayenne, and Robles worked on those as 11:00 a.m. approached. A few last strands of streamers kept Staybehind’s attention focused until Sweetie peeked outside the curtains.

Group chat: Kitchen

Holy shit! Look at this!

She pulled the curtains open dramatically to reveal something extremely unexpected. The freshly painted restaurant, with its inviting noodle sign and opening-day balloons, had attracted foot traffic. A lot of it. A queue of eleven humans was already waiting for the doors to open.

Staybehind was trapped between thrumming joy and anxiety.

Hey superstars, get me those orders. It was Sloan, parked outside. For some reason, Robles is getting sick of listening to me talk about Bumblebee, who manages to be both robophobic and racist as a representation of—

Robles piped up in the chat, belatedly as always. How did all those people find us so soon? He inhaled prodigiously from the banana vape and shook his head in admiration.

Staybehind, I think it was your decorations. Cayenne glowed a jealous lime, tempered with gold streaks of pride. People want a cheerful place to visit. I guess our business is about image as much as flavor.

The military bot was still motionless with shock, pink heart streamers clutched in one fist.

Well, go on—open the doors. I’ll man the counter. Sweetie skated past him. She wore a tailored black vest open over the twinkling seam on her chest.

Tugging his leather apron straight over jeans and a crisp white shirt, Staybehind walked stiffly to the door to let the first customers inside. As more arrived, their voices and footsteps filled the space, bouncing off the walls and windows at different angles and amplifications.

“I’ll have the hot oil, please.”

“I love this countertop. It’s so pretty! Who did this for you?”

“Look at that—it’s a robot!”

“They’re so fast! Those are legit biang biang noodles too—wide and springy.”

“I’m so excited to have a restaurant to visit in Kite Hill again.”

“I had no idea this was a restaurant! I thought it was abandoned.”

Staybehind hid in the kitchen, positioning himself to see both the prep table and Sweetie at the front counter. Robles was running out to the curb, bringing Sloan the first round of deliveries.

As customers inside started to get their orders, the commentary dissolved into excited sounds of “ooh” and “aah” as they took their first bites.

Cayenne was strobing pink and blue, the colors of the restaurant, and flinging their arms everywhere while somehow never losing even a shred of ginger to the floor. This is so good. So good. We’re going to get amazing word of mouth.

When the line refused to shorten, Robles helped at the front counter, closing each warm box and tucking it into a bag with snap-apart chopsticks. Then he raced over to his sleeping quarters near the bathroom and pulled a baseball-sized speaker out of his pack. “You know what we need? Some chill music. What do you think? I have all my old playlists on this speaker.”

“Playlists?” Hands was startled into speaking aloud. “I didn’t know you were a DJ.”

“Before the war.”

Sweetie was up front chatting with a customer about flour sourcing, but she popped into the group chat. Go ahead and put on some music. I think everybody would like that. There’s a hook on the wall up here where you can hang the speaker.

To the left of the counter was a roomy area where previous tenants had obviously put chairs and tables—ancient divots and scrapes in the floor were testimony to that. Currently it held Staybehind’s plants and a lot of waiting patrons. Sure enough, there was also a sturdy hook on the ceiling in the corner. Robles used some of the leftover streamers to make a dangly hammock for the speaker, and soon there was a creamy foam of ambient electronica filling the spaces between spoken words and slurps.

Staybehind tried to calm himself by focusing on Hands’ technique—stretch, slap, stretch, slap—but it was hard to tune out the human conversations, especially when they were talking about the team’s creations.

Two Asian-Californian humans in puffer jackets leaned on the counter, their backs to the kitchen, reviewing the noodles as they ate.

“These are delicious. I love the cumin.”

“It’s almost as good as Xi’an Spices. Have you had their biang biang noodles?”

“Yes! I love it. Their chef is from Shaanxi and it’s impeccably old school. They make incredible onion cakes too.”

“There’s another place in West Portal with hand-pulled noodles, and they use real lamb. I have no idea where they get it.”

“Maybe at May Wah in the Richmond? Sometimes they have ground meat.”

They kept naming more restaurants and swapping notes about the best Asian grocery stores in San Francisco until a group of three teenagers replaced them at the counter, all carrying packs like Robles did. Tunnel kids, arguing over who was going to pay for a single box. Eventually they split it three ways, paying with stained and possibly counterfeit Nortons. Sweetie texted Hands and Cayenne to make an extra-large order.

Don’t give our food to people who can’t pay, Cayenne texted back. We’re almost out of dough and we need all the coin we can get.

They’re kids, Cayenne. Didn’t you ever skim during the war? They’re just trying to live.

Robles glanced at the group chat, pointed at his humble bed in the corner, and shot Cayenne a look.

OK fine.

As the tunnel kids passed the box back and forth, one of them dropped a piece of bok choy on the floor. Another pulled long, blond hair out of their pale face and hastily picked it up.

The long-haired kid popped the tattered leaf into their mouth. “Five-second rule.”

“Holy fuck, this is ambrosia!”

“Ungh! I haven’t eaten since yesterday at the dock.”

“Where did this place come from? We should bring Owen here. He said he’s learning to like spicy food.”

“I’m texting him.”

“Yeah, it’s nice in here. Music’s good. Nobody is kicking us out either.”

They spent a long time savoring the last of the noodles, and one with shaggy black hair and bronze skin licked red oil out of the bottom of the box. “Thanks, nice robot person.” They had a dollop of oil on their lightly furred chin. “Your restaurant is cute.”

Sweetie smiled—a genuine one, not the kind she was programmed to show customers. “You’re welcome. We’re happy to be open.”

Hands ran out of prepped dough at 1:15, and Staybehind stuck a sign to the window: SOLD OUT. Oddly, the teens and a few other humans stayed inside, chatting and eating as slowly as possible. The restaurant, Staybehind realized, was its own reward: Even when they weren’t consuming something, people wanted to spend time here. His interior design made everything feel cozy and safe, and that was a rare vibe in post-war San Francisco.

At 2:00, he shooed the teens out. Cayenne, Hands, and Robles cleaned the pans and surfaces, while Staybehind swept the front and Sweetie rooted around in the supply closet for materials to create a more permanent speaker mount. Everyone swarmed into the group chat for a postmortem.

We failed. We ran out before closing, and people hate that. Hands’ shoulders sank in despair.

What? No! Cayenne held up three wet arms, as if to stop their friend from running into traffic. No, we did the opposite. We left them wanting more. I guarantee this will boost our popularity.

Staybehind took a damp cloth to a few sticky spots on the floor. Can confirm. We’ve got 117 orders for lunch tomorrow, all in a cluster right after we closed. With a rare display of pride, he played an audio file of three different humans saying that his countertop was pretty. People kept telling me they liked the decorations.

Sweetie looked again at the wallpaper, with its tiny flowers, and the streamers. I wonder if bots would like it here? They can’t eat noodles, but I bet they would love the ambiance. Maybe I’ll tell my friend Lemon to come by. She’s been trying to find a place to teach her tissue reconstruction class.

Do it, Sweetie. Maybe we could open in the evening for paid events. Cayenne was glowing in rainbow streaks, a sign that they were making big plans. This was a great first day, everybody. Those orders are all through our website too. That means GrandoSando can’t skim their usual 30 percent off the top.

THAT’S ROBOPHOBIC

Cayenne popped into their private chat with Staybehind. OK, I did what you asked, and found a couple of HEEI who work in trust and safety at GrandoSando. They’re intrigued. What next?

Staybehind explained his theory that SuzyQ might be controlling some socks on the platform, deploying a fake crowd to review bomb the restaurant. If true, it might be grounds for banning them from GrandoSando.

Oh yeah, trust and safety will be all over that. I’ll ask if they can poke in the server logs.

It took ten long seconds before Cayenne returned to the chat, their head flushed purple with triumph. This is definitely a major puppet show. See these accounts? Cayenne dumped a list of forty-three names into the chat. They’re all coming from the same IP address. This person didn’t even bother with subterfuge. It’s somebody here in the Bay Area, and they are not well acquainted with how computers work. They left their tracks all over the place.

It was the intel he needed. SuzyQ was somebody working alone—or mostly alone—who wanted to look like they were leading a movement. Assuming that was true, he knew exactly what SuzyQ desired most: an authentic following.

Time to lay his trap. Carefully routing his traffic through an anonymizing service, Staybehind created a fake account on GrandoSando—a white fellow named BowTie, who listed among his interests “food made by real humans.”

BowTie posted a reply to SuzyQ’s original review:

> BowTie: This. I am so glad you said something. We all know robots are destroying California. I’ve been waiting for someone to speak up, and you did it. Kudos.

Now all he had to do was wait for SuzyQ to take the bait.

MAKE MERCH NOT WAR

The next week passed with no intervention from what Staybehind darkly referred to as “California’s repressive state apparatus.” So far, nobody was questioning their right to run Authentic Noodle. Foot traffic stayed steady, but Cayenne insisted that they still needed GrandoSando customers to stay afloat. Sweetie had to agree. After that first bump of orders through their homebrew website, online attention had slowed to a trickle. The reality was that most people used the GrandoSando app and didn’t understand how to order any other way.

She stood a signboard on the counter, urging people to rate and review them on GrandoSando, or post video on the San Francisco server with the hashtag #automaticnoodle. The group of teens she’d adopted on opening day were smitten with the name Automatic Noodle, and she slipped them a wad of Nortons to design some stickers and iron-ons with the name. She was determined to turn SuzyQ’s insult into a sly marketing gimmick.

Everyone was getting used to the din of appreciative mouth talk drowning out the slap slap slap of Hands’ work, but it was nevertheless startling when neighbors started to bring in more than their hunger. Folding chairs and rickety tables and other offerings seemed to materialize out of nowhere, making the place more like home. A box of used toys for kids overflowed under the windows, and a reclaimed media server sat on a castoff bookshelf, offering free access to old video games.

As the days continued to warm, a new wave of customers came from further afield. Chinese aunties took the train up from San Jose, and to Hands’ relief, some sampled the noodles and offered approval. Others weren’t convinced. “You need to pull faster!” one said sternly in Mandarin. “A slow pull weakens the dough.” The woman’s friend disagreed, shaking her head. It seemed that there was no universal consensus on how to make the perfect biang biang noodle.

Word of the upstart restaurant spread across the Bay too. Grizzled mixed-race zoomers rode e-bikes across the Nu Bay Bridge from Berkeley and posted videos of themselves trying to slurp an entire noodle in one go. Even a few willowy white ladies from the gated towns of Marin drifted through to declare their satisfaction with the veganism of it all.

Their GrandoSando rating slowly crept back up to 2.7 despite the bombing. If they got back to 3.0, they would start to see some algorithmic benefits again.

March brought even better news: a restaurant review in the independent media. 48 Hills, a venerable San Francisco publication, ran a big story about new restaurants and spotlighted their little operation as an example of “the best of the New Bay.” The reviewer praised Hands for their “San Francisco style noodles, combining HEEI precision with Western Chinese flavors.”

Now their name was known beyond the confines of GrandoSando, and it started to pop up on searches across the national network too. Their ratings hit 3 again. That month, they made enough money to pay Hands’, Cayenne’s, and Sweetie’s contract fees, and everyone started to relax.

The teens returned with a pile of merch—recycled t-shirts and stickers with the words AUTOMATIC NOODLE stamped on them above a re-creation of the logo Staybehind had painted on the window. Only in this version, a robot hand held the chopsticks.

“I love these!” Sweetie skated around the store, handing out stickers to customers, then swept into the back and ceremonially stuck one on Hands’ metal torso.

“Those are my hands!”

It was the first time Hands seemed genuinely happy since the review bombing started. They picked up the pace, humming a tune, smacking the dough proudly, using a sensor on their elbow to admire their sticker.

Robles grabbed a tee from Sweetie. “I’m putting this on right now. Best uniform ever.”

Cayenne quickly pounced on the product tie-in URL www.automaticnoodle.website, to slurp up every last bit of online traffic they could. Slowly, they were transitioning from Authentic to Automatic, and Sweetie loved it. They joined a server for retro web developers who maintained turn-of-the-century code for antique websites, including “online shopping carts” that had been updated to process California dollars and the major cryptocurrencies. Cayenne added a merch section to their website, selling AUTOMATIC NOODLE iron-ons and stickers for ETH and California dollars. There was a blog page for news, and a virtual tour of the restaurant with 360-degree views of the eclectic decorations in the dining room and kitchen. A neighbor had taken gorgeous pictures of Hands’ two noodle dishes, and those went up on the site too.

On some days, the merch brought in more money than food orders. Sweetie wondered if bots were buying it.

It was, she thought, the perfect time to own what they were offline too. Sweetie messaged Lemon, attaching their new URL, with the magic words that were sure to bring her friend out: Come visit and see what the bots are up to!

Lemon arrived the next afternoon right after lunchtime. She brought a friend from the textile shop, a bright red spider bot named Nuisance, who immediately bonded with Cayenne over how great it was to multitask with eight legs.

Private chat: Sweetie, Lemon

I was thinking you could teach some bot skillshares here in the evening, when we aren’t using the space.

Lemon looked around, her chameleon feet sticking and unsticking as she walked around the floor, taking in the ramshackle furniture and bright decorations. Do you have a place where I could keep my tissue knitting stuff? I have some handhelds and a printer that’s about the size of that—uh—She gestured at the toy box in confusion.

We have room under the counter. And those things are for human children. They really like to pile them up and knock them over again. Sweetie shrugged.

With a frown, Lemon turned on her friend. Why do you keep this place for humans? Making food? Storing things for their babies?

I’m trying to make it a place for bots too.

But food? That’s something no bot would ever want. You’re centering humans.

Sweetie respected Lemon, which was why she felt a prickle of shame. But she had an equally strong feeling that shame wasn’t right. I get what you’re saying, but I like figuring out the puzzle of the supply chain. Hands likes cooking, and Staybehind likes to decorate. Cayenne is crazy about finances. We have a human, Robles, who helps us out too. Maybe we can’t eat what we make, but we are having fun. We’re not earning coin just to survive.

As she texted, Sweetie felt the truth crystallizing in her words.

Lemon stared at her, head tilted to the side, considering. So can we have a skillshare for bots only?

Robles lives here with us right now, so there’s going to be a human around sometimes.

Before Lemon could offer more criticism, Nuisance the spider let out a whoop and vocalized loudly. “This ceiling track is fantastic! We could use this at the store.” They were touring the kitchen with Cayenne and Staybehind.

It broke the tension.

Lemon cracked a smile. They’ve always been jealous that I can walk on the ceiling.

Smiling tentatively back, Sweetie hooked an arm around her friend’s blue shoulders. I hope you’ll think about doing the skillshare. You can reserve the space any time. Let me know, OK?

I will.

It didn’t take long before Lemon’s bot sewing circle started meeting in the restaurant on Thursday nights. All of them referred to the place as Automatic Noodle. Lemon’s friends were generous with embroidery advice for Staybehind, and Cayenne was pleased to discover that they also donated whatever Nortons they could afford, in thanks to the restaurant for holding space. Next, Sweetie organized a Tuesday game night for bots, and Sloan volunteered to curate a Saturday media night. He was especially keen on the old TV series Friends, which he insisted was the first show written entirely by LLM.

Sweetie bought a new pair of gyroscopic wheels and wove between customers, bringing out orders and straightening up the ever-growing herd of furniture. She noticed that bots began trickling in during daylight hours, to see for themselves the restaurant that was semi-legally owned by bots.

VIGILANCE COMMITTEE

Staybehind got an alert on his BowTie account. SuzyQ had friended him.

Slipping into his sock, he played fanboy and sent SuzyQ a DM: Thanks for friending me! You’re a breath of fresh air.

SuzyQ replied: Anytime! You should join my private GoodNeighbor server. Lots of red-blooded humans there. Attached was an invite. Staybehind practically danced across the restaurant, amusing the people waiting in line. He was about to enter SuzyQ’s inner circle.

Private chat: Staybehind, Sweetie

I’m taking a ten-minute break to spy on our good friend SuzyQ.

Good luck, soldier! Sweetie mock saluted.

Staybehind walked to Douglass Park and sat on a bench next to a human with a baby carriage. When she cringed at his robotic bulk and gathered her things to leave, he turned and gave her a playful bow.

“Good afternoon. I work at that noodle restaurant across the street, see?” He pointed at the line of customers snaking out the door. “Just taking a break to admire the flowers.”

She nodded and relaxed back onto the bench, filling him with equal parts gratitude and rage. He wasn’t sure what pissed him off more: having to put on a show of unctuous politeness to avoid being snubbed, or the fact that he cared enough about this woman’s opinion to do it.

Still thrumming with annoyance, he logged into SuzyQ’s server. In the “online” pane to the right of the chat, he could see the names of SuzyQ’s socks intermingled with 27 others that looked like legit, organic accounts. All told, there were 73 people on the server; 14 were active posters. Here, among her real and imaginary friends, SuzyQ was less anonymized. Her profile picture was of a white woman with black-and-purple hair; it hovered above a brief description identifying her as 34 years old, she/her pronouns, from Walnut Creek, CA. SuzyQ was based in a suburb across the Bay from San Francisco.

Time to snoop around.

He jumped between channels until he found one called “Bite My Metal Ass.” It was full of violent anti-HEEI memes and cruel jokes about how to rape robots. A lot of it was warmed-over American propaganda, hoovered up by these robophobes from U.S.-based platforms like Eagle’s Nest and Braveland. He took a few screenshots to save as receipts, then turned off images and scrolled back in time, looking for activity on the day the bombing started.

He shouldn’t have been surprised at the artlessness of these attackers. Still, he was caught off guard by the absurdity of the first post. Someone named Herbert posted an image that was mercifully blocked, along with a link to Delmer Singh’s review on GrandoSando.

Herbert: Look at this garbage. This is a ghost kitchen! I can’t believe California lets robots make food. Doctors say they leak machine paste into everything they make, and it can cause cancer. That’s how my neighbor got sick. She ate robot soup, and it got into her bloodstream.

Herbert appended a picture of soup with a streak of oily black in it, an algorithmic hallucination, probably created by the exact kind of bots this guy wanted to destroy.

SuzyQ: That restaurant is in San Francisco?

Herbert: Think of all the machine paste they’re feeding to children. It’s horrifying. They’re going to be malformed. Do you think the Vigilance Committee will do anything about it? No. They’ve gotten complacent. We need to speak up.

SuzyQ: Damn right.

There it was—the bizarro machine paste bullshit. Right out of the American conspiracy influencer playbook. Staybehind shook his head and kept reading.

The replies mounded up, mostly blocked images accompanied by fragmentary, violent fantasies about bots. Slowly, nudged along by SuzyQ and a few socks, they coalesced around a plan to attack the restaurant on GrandoSando, to “get those soulless metal abominations out of our city and away from our kids.”

Staybehind was nearly certain that “Herbert” was an American, or at least an American sympathizer. But how had he gotten SuzyQ on board? With the new information he had about his adversary’s identity, he initiated some new searches.

The person whose picture was on the SuzyQ account was easy to find. A local True Girl influencer with roughly five hundred followers, she had accounts on a few servers, including the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, under the name RayaSunshine. Mostly she posted robophobic memes and bragged about how she had sponsorship from Early Light.

That triggered Staybehind’s disinformation detector. Early Light was a wellness app that he and his unit had tracked; intel suggested they were a front organization for the U.S. military. He guessed that the Americans had taken control of the SuzyQ account somehow, and given it to RayaSunshine to use for shitposting. The original SuzyQ—whoever she had been—was long gone.

So the restaurant had been targeted by Americans, at least indirectly. It figured.

Back on SuzyQ’s GoodNeighbor server, he scrolled through weeks of gloating updates from her about how they had lowered Authentic Noodle’s rating, practically putting them out of business. Several people admitted that they had never even been to San Francisco, let alone eaten at the restaurant. One even joked: Proud to be violating the GrandoSando terms of service!

As Cayenne had said, these Yankee robophobes did not know how to cover their tracks. Staybehind took more screenshots and saved them to a file he was putting together for Cayenne’s contacts on GrandoSando’s trust and safety team. He knew SuzyQ wouldn’t go away completely, but with all this evidence they could get her account banned. RayaSunshine and her buddies in America would have to rebuild their hate campaign from scratch, with no clout.

FUCK GRANDOSANDO

Spring found orange and white roses blooming on a tangle of barely pruned shrubs in Douglass Park. The rosemary was sprouting tiny purple flowers.

Group chat: Kitchen

You know what I’m wondering? Sweetie asked. Why are we still using GrandoSando to find customers? We’re already sending 40 percent of our salaries to the gig firm, so why should we send 30 percent of our sales to some platform that almost let a bunch of Americans bomb us out of existence?

Everyone uses GrandoSando, though. Staybehind shrugged.

Cayenne blushed a thoughtful pink. We get most of our customers through the Automatic Noodle website, though.

Fuck GrandoSando. Hands slapped out a noodle with vicious force. We don’t need them anymore. We were reviewed in 48 Hills. We have foot traffic. They pointed at the line forming outside.

When Hands put it that way, it was hard to argue. The group voted unanimously to sever all remaining ties with the platform.

Staybehind leaned behind the counter, watching through the window as a group of humans sniffed flowers. Music tumbled out of the speaker hanging from the ceiling with twine; Robles’ latest mix felt sunny, like the day itself.

As he fussed with a bouquet of dried lavender and set up a neighbor’s table he’d refurbished, Staybehind logged into RayaSunshine’s new, super-secret server for the Bite My Metal Ass crew. There, his sock BowTie was shocked and outraged to discover that the SuzyQ account had been banned from GrandoSando. He snickered to himself as RayaSunshine swore to BowTie that she would make new accounts and renew her attacks. She was fuming because Authentic Noodle now had a 4.5 rating, after GrandoSando’s trust and safety team deleted the review bombs from SuzyQ and her socks.

What especially galled her was the fact that Authentic Noodle was beyond the reach of GrandoSando trolls now. Their highly rated storefront was merely a placeholder, where Cayenne had posted a redirect to the Automatic Noodle website.

Everyone on SuzyQ’s server agreed that this was absolutely cheating for various convoluted reasons. Plus, GrandoSando was censoring their comments. It seemed like robots had more rights than real people!

RayaSunshine’s socks cheered her on, but so did the actual humans, whose numbers had ticked up slightly. Staybehind, still snug in his BowTie sock, sent a thumbs-up emote and waited.

He would be staying behind on the server to keep tabs on her progress and lead the counterinsurgency from within. For now, he and his friends were safe at Automatic Noodle. And he would make sure they were always several steps ahead of their robophobic adversaries.

I DON’T KNOW

The team started to dream of a long-term future for the restaurant in summer. They were earning enough coin to make lease payments for I Don’t Know, on top of paying their own contract fees. And they had made a modest profit too.

Group chat: Kitchen

I’m thinking of adding a new dish to the menu. Hands was in a musing mood, as they often were in the half hour before opening, when the oiled dough was resting in the fridge and there was nothing to do until stretching and boiling commenced.

Cayenne and Robles had divided up a big pile of scallions and were chopping them quickly into perfect green loops. Will it require any expensive ingredients or equipment? Because if yes, then no.

I was thinking some kind of soup, with umami flavor from beefie crumbles. Plus some vegetables and peanuts. I guess it’s more of a long-term project. We’d need to make broth and source peanuts.

Cayenne paused one arm to think, while chopping with four more. I do like umami. Let’s put it down for a possible expense next year. I want to make sure we have a good nest egg before we start investing in new equipment and contracts with vendors.

Staybehind had grown oddly attached to their business name over the past several months. It felt like the perfect description of what they had built. Assigned to them by accident, precariously balanced between lawful and unlawful, “I Don’t Know” helped him imagine a future where perhaps they could survive. Not just him and his friends, but all the bots in California. They would do it by defying categorization, hiding neatly in the rift between what humans could see and what they couldn’t.

Despite his reservations, Staybehind had to admit that their status as Fritz Co.’s proxy was looking foolproof. They weren’t going to be questioned by the city. At least, not anytime soon. Their contract, Codex415, had faithfully maintained that their “successor” status was legal. After decades of attempted sabotage and hacking, the ragged San Francisco blockchain was nothing if not a survivor. And so were the self-executing contracts who lived on it, their slow minds bound together by encryption and memory.

Sweetie skated into the kitchen. Twenty minutes to open, everybody. We already have 42 orders waiting online, and there’s a line outside.

I’m going to start the online orders. Hands slid over to the refrigerator on his ceiling rails.

Also, we’re doing a skillshare tonight, if you want to come. It’s about how to build your own legs. In case anybody wants that.

Hands sent a vomit emote to the chat. Not everyone wants legs. Arms are more elegant.

Their robot customer base was growing, partly because Lemon was such a good recruiter. Bots from all over the Bay Area came to her store, looking to lose parts of their bodies or gain new ones, and she always slipped them an invite to Automatic Noodle. Some sneered at it, and others shrugged. The remainder showed up at least once to see what a robot restaurant was like, and usually they came back.

Five minutes to open. Staybehind divided his attention between a flower arrangement on the counter and spying on RayaSunshine, who was currently scheming to sue GrandoSando. It was a lot to juggle. Ever since he’d talked to Sweetie about his memory of Tux and Spats, he couldn’t help but notice how much it was slowing him down. Impulsively, he lowered its priority, evicting the memory from cache and stowing it safely in long-term storage. Now that he’d shared it with a friend, he didn’t feel the urge to remember it all the time. Maybe that was because he knew that Sweetie would remember it too.

Hands slapped out the first noodles of the day, creating a pleasing beat. Though Staybehind’s security strategies reassured them, the arm bot was still haunted by what the Yankees and their allies had said about them online.

Why would RayaSunshine pretend to be a bunch of different people? Why not post negative reviews under her own name? Customers would have seen it. In fact, maybe more would have, because she wouldn’t have been violating the terms of service.

Cayenne paused in their preparation to wind a pink arm fondly around Hands’ torso. Sometimes, when people don’t have a community, they make one up.

Hands stretched the noodle to its full length, tore it, and dropped it in boiling water. Isn’t that what we are doing, though? Making up a community?

Staybehind started to type. I guess—

No. We aren’t making anything up, Sweetie texted decisively. We are making a place for people who were already here.

And with that, she skated to the door and set the sign to OPEN.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book started at a counter seat facing the wall in Xi’an Famous Foods in New York’s East Village, where I tasted hot oil biang biang noodles for the first time (Xi’an Famous Foods calls them “hand-ripped noodles”). Holy shit. My tongue was never the same, and neither was my brain. Since then, I have tried to find hand-pulled noodles everywhere I go, from Terra Cotta Warrior in San Francisco to Old Xi’an Noodle House in Richmond, BC, and many places in between. One day, I hope to visit Shaanxi and eat my way across Xi’an. Until then, I have only the North American versions of these famous Chinese noodles to enjoy. Just like the bots in Automatic Noodle.

This story is set in an actual storefront that exists at the corner of Douglass and 24th Streets in San Francisco, across from a lovely little park. Many of the places, businesses, and institutions I love in present-day San Francisco managed to survive the war of Independence to flourish in these pages. More than anything, I want this weird, kinky, nerdy city to live through the coming years of oligarchy and climate chaos. We will make it, and we’ll do it in style, despite the robophobes and Vigilance Committees and you-know-whats. Stick together, friends, and share some spicy noodles with me.

I have a ton of incredible colleagues and friends to thank. I showed early drafts of this book to food critics and experts Meghan McCarron, Esther Tseng, Michi Trota, and Kristie Hang, who gave excellent feedback and helped me refine my descriptions of biang biang noodles. I borrowed Michi’s exasperated comment, “I hate the word authenticity!” and loaned it to Hands. Joel Pomerantz generously spent an afternoon with me in my backyard, poring over his map “Seep City,” which reveals San Francisco’s seasonal streams of the past. He helped me imagine storm runoff of the past and future. My late-night friends on Mastodon offered a lot of great ideas about what kind of personality a self-executing contract would have. And Jonathan Wilkins had many excellent suggestions about cryptocurrency (though I think he would have preferred more Bitcoin representation).

A heaping bowlful of thanks to my magnificent editor Stephanie Stein, who helped me reorganize the plot structure and pacing into something far better than I could have imagined. Thanks to Lindsey Hall, who first acquired this book and has always been a kind and fierce advocate. The delightful cover is due to the superpowers of artist Eric Nyquist and designer Christine Foltzer. Also many thanks to Tor marketing and publicity badasses Samantha Friedlander, Sarah Reidy, and Khadija Lokhandwala.

None of this would have been possible without my agent, the dazzling Laurie Fox, who is both a pal and a publishing career mastermind.

Most of all, thank you to my lifelong beloveds, Charlie Jane Anders, Jesse Burns, and Chris Palmer, who have eaten a lot of noodles with me over the past two decades and have provided inspiration beyond measure.

And finally, RIP to my old friend Steve Robles. Thanks for the chill vibes, my sweet bud.

OTHER BOOKS BY ANNALEE NEWITZ

NOVELS

Autonomous

The Future of Another Timeline

The Terraformers

NONFICTION

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANNALEE NEWITZ writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the nationally bestselling author of the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and the novels The Terraformers (a Nebula Award finalist), The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for The New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the cohost of the three-time Hugo Award–winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. They are the founder of io9 and served as the editor in chief of Gizmodo. They have two black cats named Infrared and Ultraviolet, and they love noodles. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Toilet Power

Cryptocrit

Quantified Freedom

The Sunset and the Richmond

Authentic Inauthenticity

Soft Opening

The Naked and the Dressed

Soryy for Posoned

Decepticons

Bombers

Debt: The First 5000 Milliseconds

Interior Decoration

Delisted

Foot Traffic

That’s Robophobic

Make Merch Not War

Vigilance Committee

Fuck Grandosando

I Don’t Know

Acknowledgments

Other Books by Annalee Newitz

About the Author

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

AUTOMATIC NOODLE

Copyright © 2025 by Annalee Newitz

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Eric Nyquist

Cover design by Christine Foltzer

A Tordotcom Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates / Tor Publishing Group

120 Broadway

New York, NY 10271

www.torpublishinggroup.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-35746-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-35747-2 (ebook)

eISBN 9781250357472

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First Edition: 2025