…It was January 8, 2064. His last recorded memory was from July 31st, 2063..
Waking up from a deep sleep to find yourself in a restaurant that’s about to be flooded by an apocalyptic storm is disorienting enough. Much worse when you and your coworkers are robots, your employers have left town ahead of their creditors, and you’ve all been in shut-off mode for almost six months. Oh, and there are hefty bills to pay, defaulting on any of them means being sold to the highest bidder, and their restaurant is now ownerless. And while things have improved since the latest war, robots still aren’t allowed to own a business. Or much of anything else.
Bots had the right to make money, but not put it in the bank, the right to associate freely but not marry, the right to rent but not own, the right to fight for California but not to vote in its elections.
A lot has changed in Annalee Newitz’s version of North America 2064. The continent is recovering from what sounds like a very nasty war between California and America, and some of the bombed-out buildings in San Francisco haven’t been rebuilt yet. One of the first acts of the new California government was to grant civil rights to human-equivalent embodied intelligences, (HEEI), but not full citizenship, leaving robots in a state of legal limbo that they are expected to be grateful for. A lot of humans are leery of robot rights, a lot of robots are either stuck in abusive situations (robots by law have to have pain sensors installed; the book doesn’t go into the worst of what that can lead to, but it’s implied), or trying to earn money however they can to pay off their contracts and avoid situations like that. There are different levels of intelligence in anything mechanical or virtual, new forms of currency are added all the time, and many corporations try to do what corporations have tried to do forever: make money without producing anything of real value. The result is a kind of Wild West of crypto currency and quasi-sentient lease agreements.
It’s a precarious place for anyone to be, but also the best chance for four robots to do something juuust a little illegal by becoming owners and operators of a take-out noodle restaurant, their own version of a “ghost” kitchen.
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!
It’s a fun collection of robots in this endeavor, all with their own quirks and backstories, their own trauma and their own reasons for deciding that a restaurant specializing in biang biang noodles is where they need to be. The headless barrel with two articulated arms and digits named Hands who fell in love with cooking through YouTube videos. Sweetie, with a woman’s face and arms and torso attached to three wheeled robot legs, who really wants a place where she doesn’t have to smile politely for creeps, and where she can alter her body and her skin to her heart’s content. Cayenne, a color-changing octopus-bot, upgraded during the war with scent and taste sensors in order to sniff out bombs, and who’s now obsessed with figuring out the human value system for flavor. And then there’s Staybehind, military-issue, protective of the whole group of misfits, not sure if he really belongs, and occasionally giving the reader a little insight into what PTSD looks like in robot file formats.
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…
The plight of the four robots echoes a lot of what marginalized people go through every day. There’s always a society that wants to benefit from the minority without including them, a government that can only be bothered to offer the most half-hearted protections, and an element of the population that thinks even that is to much to give to the latest target of their “everything was fine until ____ came along” rage. The new version of the noodle shop has barely opened its doors before the proprietors are dealing with a vicious cyber-attack that’s spamming their restaurant with 1-star reviews, and it’s not clear if the reviews are coming from disaffected Californians, or a coordinated attack from the government in America, a country which everyone agrees is a cesspit.
So you might think that a cheery story about robots running a restaurant would clash somewhat with the sometimes near-dystopian setting. But the effect I got from it was a truly determined type of joy. The way the author lingers over all the details about how to make noodles by hand, collecting together the hard-to-find ingredients and coaxing tips from the chef at a nearby restaurant and then figuring out the technique to stretch flour and water into something that has just the right amount of chewiness, it all feels like someone finding that one thing that makes them happy when everything else is hard. You can see that in the ways Staybehind finds to decorate the restaurant to be welcoming to humans and robots, in the moonscape painting on the sentient minibus who pals around with their human friend Robles, in Sweetie tooling around town with her new body-mods on display with the new seams on her torso outlined in blinky lights.
Much like the food they’re making, this is a very satisfying story, and it makes me want to find a restaurant near me that serves biang biang noodles, just so I can see what all the fuss is about.