NUMBER ONE EATER

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN nutritive gel for dinner, same as always, if I had not discovered stuck to my apartment’s front door a paper menu advertising the newly expanded delivery service of a neighborhood restaurant.

I was just home from work and my face felt brittle from stress—this wasn’t unusual—and I would not normally have been interested in anything unfamiliar. My nightly ration of Slurry waited within.

But the menu intrigued me. The words were written in a dark, confident script—actually, two scripts: each dish was described once using the alphabet I recognized and again using one I didn’t, vaguely Cyrillic-seeming with a profusion of dots and curling connectors. In either case, the menu was compact: available was the Spicy Soup or a Spicy Sandwich or a Combo (double spicy), all of which, the menu explained, were vegetarian.

At the top, the restaurant’s name was written in humongous, exuberant letters: CLEMENT STREET SOUP AND SOURDOUGH. At the bottom, there was a phone number and the promise of quick delivery. Clement Street was just a few blocks away. The menu charmed me, and as a result, my night, and my life, bent off on a different track.

I dialed the number and my call was answered immediately. It was a man’s voice, slightly breathless. “Clement Street Soup and Sourdough! Okay to hold?”

I said yes, and music played—a song in some other language. Clement Street was a polyglot artery that pulsed with Cantonese, Burmese, Russian, Thai, and even scraps of Gaelic. This was none of those.

The voice returned. “Okay! Hello! What can I make for you?”

I ordered the double spicy.

* * *

I CAME TO SAN FRANCISCO from Michigan, where I was raised and educated and where my body’s functioning was placid and predictable, mostly.

My father was a database programmer for General Motors who liked his work and had endeavored to surround me with computers from toddlerhood onward, and whose plan succeeded because I never thought of anything except following his path, especially at a time when programming was taking on a sheen of dynamism and computer science departments were wooing young women aggressively. It’s nice to be wooed.

It helped that I was good at it. I liked the rhythm of challenge and solution; it felt very satisfying to solve programming problems. For two summers during college, I interned at Crowley Control Systems, a company in Southfield that provided motor control software for one of Chevrolet’s electric cars, and when I graduated, there was a job waiting for me. The work was minutely specified and cautiously tested, and it had the feeling of laying bricks: put them down carefully, because you won’t get another chance. The computer on my desk was old, used by at least two programmers before me, but the codebase was modern and interesting. I kept a picture of my parents next to my monitor, along with a tiny cactus I’d named Kubrick. I bought a house two towns over, in Ferndale.

Then I was recruited. A woman contacted me through my stubby LinkedIn profile—her own identifying her as a talent associate at a company called General Dexterity in San Francisco—with a request for an exploratory phone call, which I accepted. I could hear her bright smile through the speaker. General Dexterity, she said, designed industry-leading robot arms for laboratories and factories. The company needed programmers with a background in motor control, and in San Francisco, she said, such programmers were rare. She explained that a software sieve had flagged my résumé as promising and that she agreed with the computer’s assessment.

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

Sitting there in my car in the little parking lot behind Crowley Control Systems on West 10 Mile Road in Southfield, my world cracked open a tiny bit. It was only a hairline fracture, but that was enough to see through.

On the other end of the line, the talent associate conjured difficult problems suited to only the fiercest intellects. She conjured generous benefits and free food and, oh, was I vegetarian? Not anymore, no. But maybe I could try again, in California. She conjured sunshine. The sky above the Crowley parking lot was gray and drippy like the undercarriage of a car.

And—no conjuring here—the talent associate made an offer. It was a salary that represented more money than both of my parents currently earned, combined. I was a year out of college. I was being wooed again.

Ten months into a Michigan-sized mortgage, I sold my house in Ferndale at a very small loss. I hadn’t hung a single thing on the walls. When I said goodbye to my parents, I cried. College had been less than an hour away, so this was the real departure. I set out across the country with all my belongings in the back of my car and my desk cactus strapped into the passenger seat.

I drove west through the narrow pass in the Rockies, crossed the dusty nothing of Nevada, and crashed into the verdant, vertical shock of California. I was agog. Southeastern Michigan is flat, almost concave; here was a world with a z-axis.

In San Francisco, a temporary apartment waited for me, and so did the talent associate, who met me on the sidewalk in front of General Dexterity’s brick-faced headquarters. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, but when she took my hand, her grip was viselike. “Lois Clary! Welcome! You’re going to love it here!”

The first week was amazing. Grouped with a dozen other newly Dextrous (as we were encouraged to call ourselves), I filled out health insurance forms and accepted a passel of phantasmal stock options and sat through recitations of the company’s short history. I saw the founder’s original prototype robot arm, a beefy three-jointed limb almost as tall as me, set up in a little shrine in the center of the cafeteria. You could call out “Arm, change task. Say hello!” and it would wave a wide, eager greeting.

I learned the anatomy of the software I’d be working on, called ArmOS. I met my manager, Peter, who shook my hand with a grip even firmer than the talent associate’s. An in-house apartment broker found me a place on Cabrillo Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District for which I would pay rent fully four times larger than my mortgage in Michigan. The broker dropped the keys into my hand and said, “It’s not a lot of space, but you won’t be spending much time there!”

General Dexterity’s founder, an astonishingly young man named Andrei, walked our group across Townsend Street to the Task Acquisition Center, a low-slung building that had once been a parking garage. The cement floor was still mottled with oil spots. Now, instead of cars in long lines, there were robot arms parked thirty to a row. Their plastic cladding was colored Dextrous blue, the contours friendly and capable with just the faintest suggestion of biceps—gentle swells marked with General Dexterity’s logo, an affable lightning bolt.

The arms were all going at once, sweeping and grasping and nudging and lifting. If it was supposed to impress us: it worked.

All of these were repetitive gestures, Andrei explained, currently executed by human muscles and human minds. Repetition was the enemy of creativity, he said. Repetition belonged to robots.

We were on a quest to end work.

And it would involve: a shit ton of work.

My orientation week ended on Friday night with celebratory beers and a ping-pong tournament against one of the robot arms, which of course emerged victorious. Then my job began. Not the following Monday. The next morning. Saturday.

I had the feeling of being sucked—floop—into a pneumatic tube.

The programmers at General Dexterity were utterly unlike my colleagues at Crowley, who had been middle-aged and chilled-out, and who enjoyed nothing as much as a patient explanation. The Dextrous were in no way patient. Many of them were college dropouts; they had been in a hurry to get here, and they were in a hurry now to be done, and rich. They were almost entirely young men, bony and cold-eyed, wraiths in Japanese denim and limited-edition sneakers. They started late in the morning, then worked past midnight. They slept at the office.

Copyright © 2017 by Robin Sloan

Map copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey L. Ward

The Suitcase Clone copyright © 2022 by Robin Sloan