---

35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma

By Hans Ege Wenger

Sandra loaded. Boxes and pallets, mostly. Full of avocados, computer chips, plastic toys, etc. All carefully placed by her rubber-faced grippers into the trucks that darted in and out of the warehouse bays.

On a good day, Sandra loaded something interesting. A heavy, oddly shaped package, requiring her to adjust her first person view goggles and sit forward in her chair, lips pursed in concentration. Or a tantalizing, vacuum-packed parcel bound for near Earth orbit. Once, an opaque tank, filled with flickering red-black fish. It brought a little variety to a day viewed through the cameras of a four-foot-tall, yellow robot.

Everyone thought loader drivers were shut-ins who ate frozen pizza three meals a day, but Sandra knew she was plenty hot. In fact, despite spending six days a week working alone, Sandra showered regularly, had nicely combed black hair, and ate fresh greens from her garden. Her FPV goggles left ghost-white rings around her eyes, but no one had ever complained during her periodic forays into picking up people at the bar after work. The bar in Lane’s Creek, that is, not wherever she’d been dispatched today. Sandra couldn’t ask, but from the pine trees and rain that slicked the tops of the trucks, she guessed Washington or Oregon.

Today, her bot’s grippers were broken, so Sandra was posting cute cats on the drivers’ forum. The bots weren’t wired for sound or video, supposedly as a cost-saving measure. They did, however, have little whiteboards. Sandra had been surprised when a neighboring bot surreptitiously held up its ‘emergency’ whiteboard with a link scrawled on it. But she’d quickly grown to like the forum’s stream of gossip, complaints, and off-topic posts. Sandra wasn’t good at small talk, online or in real life, but she still wanted her people to know she cared about them. So, cat .gifs.

Finally, a woman wearing a maintenance technician’s overalls walked into her camera’s view. She waved to Sandra. That was rare. The in-person employees were often stuck-up when they weren’t inattentive. Sandra lifted her busted gripper and gingerly waved back.

“No humans allowed near a robot in motion,” the bot driver pre-employment training had said about a hundred times.

Lucy, that was what the woman’s name tag said, didn’t seem nervous about the bot. She also sang to herself as she worked, which Sandra liked. Not that Sandra could hear, but she’d gotten good at reading lips in her first year as a bot driver. Right now, Lucy was singing a pop song from last year. It reminded Sandra of her mom working in the kitchen, which was weird, because Lucy was hot. Not like, older lady, mom-core hot, but hot hot, swipe-right hot. Lucy had a nice curve in her nose, and worked quickly and surely, sweat beading her short red hair. She leaned toward the camera to check a gripper and Sandra straightened in her chair, feeling flushed at the sudden intimacy.

Sandra’s bot was soon working again and Lucy began to pack her tools. Sandra considered giving her a thumbs up, but that didn’t really seem appropriate as a thank you. Or a flirtation. She knew from the forum that a few bot drivers took creepy screenshots of the in-person staff, but she’d never heard of anyone trying to hit on one. Lucy turned to go and Sandra panicked. They were still too close together for her to risk a sudden movement toward her whiteboard. So, instead, Sandra bowed, her bot’s servos humming as it folded gently forward. She wondered if Lucy would assume the bot had suffered another malfunction.

Instead, Lucy bowed back, winked, and walked off, her bag swinging behind her. And Sandra was in love.

---

Well, not really in love. Sandra was too old to fall for a wink and a nicely swinging bag. Or that’s what she told herself. Truth be told, Sandra’s town didn’t have many people her age. A lot of old people, like her dead mom’s friends and her extended family. And plenty of twenty-two-year-old out of towners, coming to work at the refinery for a season before going back to wherever else in the Midwest they were from. Most were fine enough for a night or five, but not really girlfriend material. Even if some of them, she admitted in fairness, had been sweet for a time.

Sandra did have her friend from high school, Ahmed, who taught at Lane’s Creek Elementary. Ahmed, she was sure, was not mooning over any girls in other states. He loved Oklahoma. Loved the wide prairie and the low rolling hills. Loved the potluck gatherings, even if he didn’t care for the seven-layer-salads and lime green Miracle Whip concoctions. Loved being placed in the middle of a web of deep, generational connection, like the kind his family had to leave behind in Iraq. And Sandra, when she was being honest with herself, loved it, too. She loved it despite occasionally wondering what her life would be like if she’d left.

So, instead of thinking about Lucy, Sandra tried to focus on her people. She helped her mom’s cousins repaint their house and visited her elderly neighbor in the hospital. She went to a 4H fair and seriously attempted to buy a prize pig. She even kissed a soft-spoken veterinarian with a nose ring  after a late-night bonfire in Tulsa. But the vet turned out to be a terrible texter, and so Sandra kept an eye out at work. Whenever she logged in, she’d rotate her bot to the door of the loading bay and look for pine trees. And she’d be disappointed anytime she didn’t see them.

---

Sandra’s chance came a week later. She was driving at what she’d come to think of as Lucy’s warehouse, when her squat bot slewed drunkenly in a circle. A bad track, most likely. Sandra triggered a maintenance alert in the app, then leaned back in her chair. She wondered if she could get her gardening done while she waited. The goggles had a built-in accelerometer, but if you moved slowly enough you could walk around your house without tripping it. Another one of the tricks that she’d learned on the bot forum. More than that, Sandra hoped she’d get a certain maintenance technician.

She was in luck, although it took almost an hour. Sandra was kneeling in her garden, slowly removing dandelions from around the kale, when she saw Lucy walk up to her. She waited, a smile stretching her face behind the goggles, then bowed when Lucy got close enough. Lucy did a little double take, which looked cute on her, laughed, and solemnly bowed back. She then looked down at the bot’s track, sighed silently, and pulled out a touchpad to type out a request. Lucy looked stressed, Sandra observed with ghostly concern.

Lucy got a reply to her message and held the touchpad up toward the bot’s camera, which Sandra appreciated. A replacement track was being brought from offsite, ETA forty-five minutes. Lucy sank down, leaned against the bot, and drank from a water bottle. Sandra tried hard not to stare, though she knew Lucy couldn’t tell where the bot’s cameras were looking. It felt sweet, both sitting in silence, close to each other. She wanted to reach down and ruffle Lucy’s hair. Finally, after another sip of water, Lucy reached upward and unsnapped the whiteboard from Sandra’s bot.

“I’m Lucy,” she wrote in a looping script. It looked like the handwriting of someone who’d been forced to learn cursive at a young age and never quite gotten over it. She wondered if Lucy had gone to Catholic school.

Sandra used her bot’s gripper to oh-so-carefully pluck the thick marker from Lucy’s hand.

“Sandra / 35 / F / Lane’s Creek, OK,” she wrote back, hoping Lucy would get the joke. Then, she added: “I can read lips.”

Sandra lowered the whiteboard, careful to do so slowly, and saw Lucy laugh silently. She smiled to herself in her garden bed. So, they sat and quietly passed notes. Sandra didn’t learn if Lucy had gone to Catholic school. But she did learn that the warehouse was in Tacoma, Washington, and Lucy lived in a small town nearby called North Olympia. Sandra looked it up on a map, then looked for pictures. The town didn’t look that small compared to where she lived. But she saw thick pines, distant mountains, and cold Pacific water, which she liked. Lucy told her she hiked on the weekends and was trying to rebuild a sailboat she’d gotten for free from a neighbor.

Sandra mentioned her garden, her kale, and her one stop-light town. Like a country song, she joked. Lucy laughed again, but without mockery, and Sandra felt herself warm. She didn’t know why she’d lied though. Sandra’s town didn’t have any stop lights.

“I was hoping you were a girl,” Lucy said finally, her lips moving slowly and deliberately as she gazed straight into the camera. “I bet you’re cute.”

“Nope, hideous,” Sandra wrote back. She wanted to see Lucy laugh again. And again, she succeeded.

The replacement part arrived two minutes later, and Lucy snapped it in. Reluctantly, Sandra thought. But this time, before she turned to go, it was Lucy who started the bow, and Sandra who returned it.

“See you next time, Sandra,” Lucy mouthed to the bot’s camera.

“See you next time, Lucy,” Sandra said to her garden bed.

---

“Why don’t you give her your phone number?” said Ahmed. “Like, that seems easy, right? You could just text her instead of waiting to see her.”

She’d told him, finally, and was unsurprised when he expressed no judgement at her remote romance and instead began to help her strategize. They were sitting on her back porch, drinking beers and watching the sunset. Ahmed had just gotten off work and was dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, though the top buttons were undone. His “Mr. Nazim” costume, he called it. She knew he told the students to call him Ahmed.

“I just haven’t found the right moment,” Sandra said. Ahmed scoffed, but didn’t press. He was a good friend like that.

Sandra could ask for Lucy’s number, obviously. She’d considered it almost immediately, even before Lucy had gotten up to leave. But there was a magic in their time together that she was hesitant to break. Sandra remembered sitting in a half-empty classroom, passing notes with a friend she’d wished was more than a friend. A teacher was remoting in, covering AP Biology for their classroom and three others in neighboring towns. The two of them had been in their own private world, a feeling that hadn’t survived into the text messages they’d exchanged after school.

So instead, Sandra kept an eye out for Lucy.

---

Even when her bot wasn’t broken, she still got to do the bow. On the days she was in Tacoma and Lucy walked by, Sandra pretended to be re-adjusting her grip on a box, bowed, and then went back to loading. Out of the corner of her (camera) eye, she always saw Lucy bow back, with a slight smile on her face.

“That’s my friend Sandra,” she saw Lucy say to one of her co-workers after they bowed to each other from across the busy warehouse floor. Sandra liked that, of course.

Sandra started to see Lucy more and more. Other maintenance techs, familiar ones, were suddenly gone. A young man with a greasy mullet and too-big shades, who’d sneak his lunch break while sitting behind her bot. His lunchbox always had two sandwiches in it and looked like it’d been packed with care. A grizzled older woman with a missing pinky finger and fishing stickers covering her toolbox. Others, too, Sandra was sure. Not friends, but still people she’d expected to see when she showed up each day. One of the drivers in the forum speculated that there were layoffs coming. Even with the loss, however, Sandra liked seeing Lucy more.

“How are you today?” she wrote on her whiteboard as Lucy adjusted a faulty track for the third time that week.

“Tired,” Lucy said. “I’m on for 24 hours today. Andy got hurt and they need me to cover for him.”

Lucy did look tired. Sandra saw a little streak of gray forming in her red hair. She remembered reading that early gray hair was genetic, but it still seemed telling.

“Lots going on outside of work, too,” Lucy said with a sigh. Then she changed the subject and told Sandra about her weekend, careful to keep her lips in sight of the bot’s camera as she spoke. Lucy and her friend Dane had finished re-caulking the sailboat and were getting ready to try to float it at the North Olympia Marina later in the week. That was what Sandra thought she’d said, at least, because lip reading was hard. Her Mom would say Lucy talked a mile a minute, but Sandra liked that. She didn’t talk much, so the whiteboard helped her keep pace, asking the occasional clarifying question in blocky bot-hand script.

Lucy did a lot of talking, she’d noticed. When the bay doors opened, Lucy was often there with a group of maintenance techs, chatting and blowing clouds of flavored smoke in the dripping rain. Sandra didn’t love vaping, to be honest, but it was nice to see Lucy was popular. The social confirmation made her crush on Lucy feel a little less strange. This week, though, Lucy seemed to be talking to people Sandra knew she didn’t care much for.

“What are you talking to everyone about?” Sandra finally asked.

“It’s a secret,” Lucy said. But then she smiled in a way that made it clear it wasn’t a secret from Sandra, just from anyone who might be watching through her bot’s camera feed. “I’ll tell you when you take me out for dinner.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Sandra wrote, then paused for a moment of solitary celebration in her chair. “Maybe after Christmas?”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Lucy’s lips said silently.

---

The Christmas season came in a blur of boxes. Sandra and Lucy still exchanged bows, but there was less time to talk, and no time to plan a cross-country date. The bot drivers in the chatroom talked about working double shifts, raking in money for kids’ gifts and plane tickets to see family. But there was anger, too. There’d always been a quota for the bot drivers, but it was manageable if you didn’t goof off. Now, the “boxes loaded per minute” tracker in the app seemed to tick up into the “you need to work faster” zone quicker than it once had. One person wrote about being suspended for three days when his bot’s arm broke and he fell behind. After shifts, Sandra soaked her aching hands in a bucket of snow that she pulled from outside.

Then, one day, there was no one doing maintenance. The bays were empty, except for the boxes issued out by the automated packing machine. When Sandra’s bot threw a track halfway through the shift, they just shifted her to a new one.

“Where is everyone in Tacoma today?” she typed on the forum.

“No idea,” another bot driver replied. “It’s been a ghost town since yesterday.”

Later that day, Sandra was loading a truck when one of the big doors next to it swung open. The maintenance workers were there, all right. Standing in a long picket line on either side of the entrance, getting soaked in the rain. With “On Strike” signs, and flags, and a twelve-foot-tall inflatable rat. She’d have to Google that one later. There was a news crew too, which Sandra made out through the bot’s shitty camera. People looked like they were chanting. And there was a shock of red hair on a woman with a bullhorn, standing front and center.

“My girlfriend, the union organizer,” Sandra said to herself.

She didn’t totally know how she felt about unions, even if she knew exactly how she felt about Lucy. The teachers in town had a union that Ahmed was part of, and liked, but he still got paid badly. The refinery didn’t have a union, which a few people didn’t like, but they got paid pretty good. Sandra trusted Lucy, though. She was also tired of getting paid minimum wage to develop early onset finger arthritis.

Later, when Sandra was retelling the story, she wished she could say she’d thought about the decision for more than ten seconds. But, as Ahmed often reminded her, Sandra was always a complete and utter fool for love.

Sandra wheeled her bot out into the empty parking lot. She imagined they’d try to stop her. Not all the in-person workers were maintenance people. There were managers, with clipboards and too-clean yellow caution vests. She imagined one of them trying to box her bot into a corner, like a recalcitrant Roomba. They didn’t, however, maybe because they’d seen how easily one of the bots could hurt an unsuspecting human. She drove up to the picket line, getting a close-up look at the dripping pine forest outside the warehouse, which was nice, and also at Lucy, which was nicer. Lucy was in her element, clearly, eyes bright despite the rain that soaked her hair.

Sandra rolled right next to Lucy, bowed, then, feeling like she was in a movie, raised her bot’s little gripper hand in a fist in the air.

“Hi,” Lucy mouthed to her, then stepped close to the bot’s camera.

If this were a movie, Sandra was sure there’d be kissing in the rain occurring, and her lips tingled. Then her view dissolved into broken static, followed by an error message from the app. Sandra tried to log back in, failed, then threw down the blank FPV goggles and walked outside. It was dark, as it normally was at the end of her shifts, and Sandra breathed clean, cold Christmas-time air. She pulled her coat around her and crunched out along the country road in front of her house. She guessed that robot striking sat in a weird place where it wasn’t a crime but was definitely a fireable offense.

She also realized she’d never gotten Lucy’s number.

“Shit,” Sandra said.

---

The next week, Sandra was looking for jobs. She’d gotten fired, of course. Fired gig-worker style, where she’d tried to log back into the app only to have it tell her that her account had been terminated.

“Disciplinary issue,” the app told her.

They’d paid her, at least, for a shift that stopped exactly the moment her bot had crossed outside the door of the warehouse. Nine hours, thirteen minutes, forty-three seconds, her last pay stub read. Ahmed had laughed when she’d shown it to him, then taken her out for a beer.

“Proud of you, bud,” he’d told her. “Though I’m sorry you didn’t get the girl, too.”

The bot drivers loved Sandra. They’d pulled endless clips from the news crew of her bot rolling out and raising its mechanical gripper next to Lucy. People began putting a .gif of the little bot with its raised fist underneath posts complaining about hours or quotas.

Sandra also learned on the forum that the strike had worked. Or, it hadn’t failed. The maintenance teams were negotiating, said the article one of the drivers posted. Which seemed better than “the maintenance teams had all been fired” or “there’s an entirely new maintenance team.” She was happy about that.

In fact, Sandra was okay. Or not broke, at least. Ahmed said he’d put her name in for a classroom assistant job at the school after the holiday. In the meantime, she had her mom’s friends to look after—more snow shoveling and household maintenance, with Christmas cookies in return.

She’d also bought a train ticket from Oklahoma City to Olympia, Washington. Sandra needed a break, liked trains, and she’d never seen the Pacific Ocean, she told herself. But she had to admit that she’d always been one for the big gesture.

Ahmed volunteered to house sit. He had a new roommate, so he told her that spending a week watering her plants was as much of a vacation for him as for her.

“Anything to get away from doing someone else’s dishes,” he joked.

Ahmed didn’t comment on the trip’s destination, but wished Sandra luck when he dropped her off at the train station.

After a semi-sleepless two-day ride across snowy prairies and tall mountains, Sandra drove to the North Olympia Marina and dipped her toes in the Pacific. It was cold as shit. Then she asked the marina attendant about any recent boat launches by a woman with red hair. The attendant laughed.

“Sure, I know Lucy,” she told her. “That boat almost sank two minutes after it was launched. Her and her friend had to pull it back in with a rope and bring it back to their place down the street.”

So that’s how Sandra got to Lucy’s house, which looked like she’d imagined it. A white bungalow, surrounded by scrub pines and with a porch that leaned slightly to the right. Chickens wandered the front yard and clucked lightly at her before running away. Sandra got out of her rental and crunched up the gravel drive. There was the sailboat, obviously under construction, on a trailer with two flat tires at the top of the driveway. But no car. The house was dark and she saw a small pile of mail had accumulated on the porch. Sandra rang the bell, and, of course, no one answered.

Swallowing her frustration, Sandra stood on the porch and considered what to do next. She could hang out and wait, which, knowing small towns, would probably end with the cops getting called on her. She could leave a note, which might not get read until Lucy got back, and might also seem super creepy.

Or Sandra could go check into her hotel and pretend that she’d actually come here to enjoy the Washington coast. More practically, she could check into her hotel, stalk social media until she found Lucy, then message her that she was in town for totally unrelated, non-stalker reasons. She’d just about decided to go ahead with the last plan, when her phone rang.

Sandra saw Ahmed’s name. Hoping her house hadn’t decided to add insult to injury by burning down, she picked up.

“Lucy’s not here,” said Sandra.

“Well, in fairness, you’re not here either,” he said, and requested to change over to a video call.

Sandra accepted, half by reflex, and was greeted by Ahmed, smiling widely. He turned the camera and Sandra saw Lucy, standing on her porch—her porch! After two stunned beats of silence, the two bowed to each other. Sandra didn’t miss the nervousness in Lucy’s eyes, which she imagined was likely reflected in her own. But then Lucy laughed. She had a nice, deep laugh. Sandra couldn’t help but laugh, too.

In the end, they decided to meet in Denver. Which they did. No cameras involved.

---

Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

And that was 35 / F / Lane’s Creek, Oklahoma by Hans Ege Wenger.

The author has this to say about this story:

“This piece started as a sappy meet cute with robots and bowing. From there, it grew to include FPV drones, the 2024 Amazon strikes, and the idea of inverting a Hallmark Christmas movie. Ultimately, it became a story about the importance of community building, as well as a love letter to my friends and family living in small towns in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.”

One thing I think we all can agree on is that technology made it easier to just stay apart from other people. This has its downsides, as we all learned during pandemic lockdown, but even then it had upsides, like online community building and possibly not having to share a holiday with a racist relative.

What this story reminded me was of Jurassic Park, funnily enough. When the female dinos start laying fertilized eggs, Jeff Goldblum bumbles his way into the conversation with the astute, “life uh finds a way.” There are more direct hints of this theme in Diamond Age, or the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson. A little girl finds a highly technological book that basically raises her, teaching her high concept subjects through fairy tales. While an AI writes the book, they still hire an actress to read it to her, and they start to form a bond through the book.

Meaning that technology or isolation can get in the way and make things harder, or we can think of a new way to use it to connect with people.

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That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from Neal Stephenson in the Diamond Age: “And as she had established when she’d been locked up in the dungeon at Castle Turing, communicating with the mysterious Duke by sending messages on a chain, a Turing machine, no matter how complex, was not human. It had no soul. It could not do what a human did.”