Automatic Noodle

by Annalee Newitz

Staybehind

Cayenne’s

Sw...

Hands’

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.

Hands, who chopped and cooked while zipping between stations on a ceiling track, never dealt with the mouth talkers up front.

With patches installed, Staybehind scanned news from California, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. None of the nations were at war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—

“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.

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.”