---

The Rewilding of Lot 4987

By Johnny Caputo

From across the darkened rooftop of the long-abandoned engine plant, Geli heard the unmistakable whirring of drone blades.

Shit, she thought. Not here, too.

She looked up from her work weeding the tomato and lettuce beds. Sure enough, one of interFace Robotics’ surveillance drones was hovering there, its palm-sized screen held aloft by copter blades. The screen glowed with interFace’s standard golden facial avatar: a cartoonish robot, smiling mindlessly as it flew towards her. Its camera captured footage of the vegetable beds she maintained on this derelict property, a relic of the fossil fuel economy that interFace had never cared to surveil.

Until now, apparently.

“Citizen,” the drone said in its flat, dead voice. “This location is the property of interFace Robotics. Leave the premises. Immediately.”

But Geli was done putting up with interFace’s shit. They had fucked people over for too long. Geli specifically, yes, but also the whole city, the land it was built on. Everything.

She reached back into the tomato bed, picked up a rusty trowel, and hurled it end-over-end.

The drone swerved, but not quickly enough. The trowel dug a gash out of one of its blade guards, and it wobbled uneasily for a moment before righting itself. As it stabilized, hovering midair like a juicy fastball right down the middle of the plate, Geli picked up her rake and cocked it back.

“Whoa! Hold up!” a voice came from the drone. A decidedly non-robotic voice. “Same team!”

A seam of static opened on the screen, ripping the smiling robot face in two and replacing it with a grainy video feed. There was a woman there, pale skin like she didn’t get outside much, maybe in her late twenties, not much younger than Geli. Shadows crawled over her scruffy brown hair. which looked like it rarely saw a comb.

“Who the fuck are you supposed to be?” Geli said.

“Name’s Karson. Call me a concerned citizen. Are you Angelina Darino-Johnson?” the woman said.

Geli cringed. Nobody called her by her full name. Least of all some interFace narc.

“I’m not doing anything wrong.” She held her arms out wide, sweeping the dozen tomato and lettuce beds she cared for up here. “This place has been abandoned for decades. I’m just putting it to good use. And before you give me some bullshit line about economic development, the last thing we need is another one of your fucking fully-automated fab plants.”

The woman on the screen laughed. “I’m not from interFace.”

“Then why are you coming at me from this?” She gestured toward the drone.

“To show you how easily we can hack them.”

A pang of something like hope wriggled through Geli. She lowered the rake, just a touch.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Come on,” Karson scoffed. “You can’t seriously think you’re the only one pushing back.”

Karson motioned with her eyes offscreen, toward the city skyline in the distance. Even now, well past midnight, automated cranes lifted beams into place around half-ruined, storm-damaged buildings. interFace’s telecom towers and fab plants were claiming the city, block-by-block, like some invasive weed. Choking out homes and neighborhoods and parks with their fully-automated operations that ran entirely on robot labor. They had the decency to rely largely on wind and solar, but that didn’t change the fact that their presence here added no jobs, nothing that would benefit the people who actually lived here.

And to ensure no residents got any ideas about interfering with interFace’s grand plans of corporate takeover, they brought an army of drones that swarmed over the streets. Even now, hundreds of golden, cartoonish faces smiled down, ensuring construction plans were on schedule, and providing constant surveillance over interFace’s “investments.”

Of course people were out there, fighting back just like she was. But interFace agents posed as such people all the time. That was just how things worked.

Still, she wanted allies more than anything. For once, she wanted not to be fighting alone.

“Give me a reason not to smash your drone,” Geli said. “Fast.”

“We need your help,” Karson said. “We know who you are. A lone vigilante, planting in the city’s hidden and unseen nooks. Bringing food and sustenance where interFace would have only asphalt and profit. And we know the good work you did with the maintenance bots on interFace’s executive golf course. How you trained them up from their fertilize-first-ask-questions-later factory defaults into thoughtful, halfway-decent gardeners.”

“Stalking me isn’t winning you points,” Geli said, adjusting her grip on the rake.

“Fair enough. Maybe this will.”

Karson’s face fritzed away, replaced by dark and grainy aerial footage of a familiar tract of land: the lot adjacent to interFace Links, where Geli had kept her vegetable garden. After interFace found it, their pilotless dozers had plowed the land to nothing. Made space for another dozen acres of high maintenance exotic grasses they could over-fertilize someday. Much of the lot was still vacant, but a garden, more than ten times the size Geli’s had ever been, bloomed over some of it. Bean runners climbed up cornstalks while summer squashes sprawled below. Tomato plants rose tall in scrap metal cages and strings of woodland strawberries hugged the tree line. All of it was tied together, mandala-like, by wandering paths of black-eyed Susan, purple coneflowers, and goldenrod. Like some kind of swirling galaxy.

“You did this?” Geli asked.

“No,” Karson replied, “but we know who did. Look closer.”

And there they were, in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Three worn and dented metallic shapes, moving confidently through the field in familiar, synchronized patterns. Waste turned a well-established compost heap with its bare, metallic hands. Spray watered a patch of tomatoes from the tanks on its back. Mow cut back the overgrowth at the field’s edges with its trimmer attachment.

“The bots,” Geli said, and she felt goosebumps run down her arms.

This had to be some kind of act of defiance on their part. A show of solidarity in response to interFace’s destruction of her garden. Tribute might be a strong word, but it wasn’t far off, and it was a beautiful one. So much bolder than what she had ever been capable of.

Karson’s face reappeared onscreen, and when it did, she was smiling ear-to-ear. “According to interFace’s metadata, these three bots have been neglecting their assigned maintenance routines. They’ve broken free from their programming. They’re making their own decisions. And they’re deciding to undo what interFace has done to this place.”

The chance that the bots had truly grown beyond their programming sent another pang of hope fluttering through her. What if it was actually possible that this city could one day be free from interFace’s obsessive surveillance and endless tendrils of greed? And what if the bots could help them get there?

But that wasn’t how things worked. interFace always won. They had the money and the power and the surveillance infrastructure to ensure that nothing was beyond their grasp. No, she was missing something here.

“So what’s your plan?” Geli asked.

“If we could replicate those bots’ decision trees, we could distribute them throughout the network. Surveillance drones, labor androids, all of them, free to choose whether they enacted interFace’s programming or not. It’d be a fight, and it’d take a long time, but we could make a real dent.”

“Go do it then. What do you need me for?”

“We just want you to talk to the bots,” Karson continued, “get them to lower their firewalls so we can access their—”

“Ah,” Geli said. “There it is.”

That’s what she had missed when she had been caught up in the false hope this fraud was trying to sell. The surest way to shut down free bots would be to access their source code, pinpoint the undesirable decision trees, and delete them. Full-on factory reset. The bots would be back to their routine-following selves in seconds.

This asshole worked for interFace.

“It was a good try,” Geli said. “Narc.”

“What? No. I swear. This is the future of our city we’re talking about. We’ve got a chance to be free from them. Just one quick conversation and—”

Geli raised the rake high above her head.

“Wait!” Karson cried, “They’ve got a pilotless dozer scheduled to destroy those bots tomorrow night. If we don’t get the source code by then—”

“You can’t scare me into doing your dirty work,” Geli said. Then she buried the rake in the drone’s screen. It crashed to the rooftop in a heap of glass shards and twisted plastic.

“Fucking asshole,” she said.

But at least Karson’s ham-fisted attempt had revealed that interFace was scared, on the ropes. There was an opening here, one she might even be able to exploit. If only she wasn’t fighting alone.

And then Geli smiled. Because maybe, just this once, she wasn’t.

---

From her place in the brush at the edge of the golf course, Geli watched the sky. It was just past 3am, and the perimeter security drone, which up until now had made regular passes every three minutes, had not showed up for its latest round.

Bet it’s down for charging, Geli thought. Must be my lucky night.

She broke from the tree line and ran for the chain-link fence. She pulled out her bolt cutters, snipped a line in the metal, and slipped through onto the fairway to hole number 4.

Not even eight years ago, this land had been a lightly-forested deer trail in the Widefield Nature Preserve. As a kid, Geli had spent nearly every weekend on its oak-shaded trails and learned everything she knew about gardening working in the public gardens. But after the string of superstorms tanked property values across the region, it was only a matter of time before some conglomerate like interFace swept in to buy up as much as they could. And the first thing interFace did was level Widefield to build a private golf course, fully maintained by their designer bots. A personal playground for their executives and a gimmick to show off their bots to potential investors. Within a year, what had once been a well-cared-for and thriving ecosystem was flattened to precise grades by an army of interFace’s pilotless dozers.

Geli skulked over the pristinely manicured results. Wide swaths of exotic grasses shipped in from one side of the planet and fed on fertilizers shipped in from another. As far as the eye could see.

Up ahead, one thing broke that monotony: the maintenance bots moving through the wildflowers and pepper plants of the vacant lot. Working by the light of the moon.

“Hey,” Geli called as she crossed the cart path. “You miss me?”

Mow turned from where it had been trimming back the dead limbs of an oak with its chainsaw attachment, Spray spun from its rounds watering the cucumbers and sloshed its tanks towards Geli, and Waste pulled its metallic arms from the compost pile. The facial avatars on their screens shone like joyful ghosts. Their sensors washed over her, reading her facial signature and body language.

“Geli,” Waste’s green facial avatar said.

“What’s up?” Spray’s blue avatar added.

“Management’s gonna be pretty pissed if they find out you were here,” Mow’s orange avatar chimed in.

The three of them were covered in golf ball-sized dents, more than the last time she had seen them, and a new crack was spiderwebbing from the corner of Waste’s screen. No matter what was going on with the bots, one thing hadn’t changed: the investors and executives who played this course were still assholes.

“I heard they’re already plenty pissed with you,” Geli said, and she held out her arms to encompass the garden swirling with flowers and fluttering moths.

Waste, Spray, and Mow looked to each other. Some silent, networked beat passed between them. She was certain they were communicating with each other.

“May we request where you came across this information?” Waste said.

“Some woman who called herself Karson came to me in an interFace drone she claimed she hacked.”

“And you believed that?” Spray asked.

“Not most of it no,” Geli said. “But I did believe the part about the pilotless dozer scheduled to come out tomorrow to tear all this down.”

Behind them, the wildflowers of the garden swayed in the wind. Moths fluttered from plant to plant. For a long moment, there was only silence and the wild smell of life the bots had cultivated.

“Let the dozer come,” Mow said. “We’ll take it down or die trying.” The bots wore looks of grim, yet almost joyful determination on their screens. Geli was suddenly aware of how many blades and caustic chemicals the three of them carried in their bodies.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Geli said. “Listen, I’m flattered by this garden and all, but you can’t get yourselves hurt on my account.”

The avatars on the bot’s screens shared a surprised look.

“You were always good to us,” Waste said.

“But none of this is for you,” Spray added.

“Never was, never will be,” Mow finished.

Her face flushed, and she saw the bots looking to each other, once again passing some silent message between them. Probably about how egotistical and self-centered this human was to assume that their work, the first real work they had ever chosen, had been all about her.

“I…I’m, sorry,” she said. “I just assumed, and I shouldn’t have, and…oh, shit.”

There, flying over the fairway to hole number 4. The surveillance drone. Headed directly for them.

“Get out of sight,” she said to the bots. “Let me handle this.”

“But—”

“I don’t wanna hear it,” Geli said. “It probably found the hole I cut in the fence. I can’t bring trouble on you.”

Before the bots could respond, she ran over to the drone, waving her arms and shouting.

“Hey! Blatant trespasser down here!”

The drone zipped towards her and hovered at eye level just out of reach. Its golden-faced screen smiled at her mindlessly as Geli scanned the ground for a rock, a stick, anything she could use to kill this thing’s feed.

But then, the golden face crackled and fritzed. A moment later, Karson’s face, framed by her tangle of hair, appeared onscreen.

“You again,” Geli said.

“You know, it took us a good two weeks to crack into that drone you destroyed.”

“I’m sure you’ve got plenty more cooking in your infinite fab plants.”

Karson rolled her eyes. “If I worked for interFace, would I have re-routed that perimeter drone?”

That hitch in the drone’s patterns had been Karson. Or so she claimed.

“I’ve heard all the lies before. They’re not gonna start working on me now.”

“Well, I’m here to tell you the truth. Whether you actually hear it is up to you.”

Karson’s face blipped away, replaced by poorly-lit footage of the tomato and lettuce beds atop the engine plant. A dozen interFace drones, their golden avatars smiling mindlessly into the night, hovered over the beds, capturing everything with their cameras. In the foreground, a general labor android held the remains of a battered drone in its arms. Behind it, six more androids were busy pulling the tomatoes and lettuce up by the roots and dismantling the scrap metal beds with their high-torque limbs.

“You fucking snitch,” Geli shouted. “I kept those beds secret for years. They fed people.”

“I didn’t tell them shit,” Karson shouted as her face blipped back onscreen. A few tendrils of hair fell in front of her face. “They investigated the drone you took out.”

“You mean the one you sent to spy on me?”

“I thought I was reaching out to an ally. I didn’t think you’d fucking smash it.”

“That’s because you don’t know anything about me.”

“Listen, you’re not the only one risking something here. The only way my team survives is by staying off interFace’s radar, and you brought heat down on all of us. Yet here I am, reaching out again because those maintenance bots are our only chance of getting out from under interFace’s bootheel.”

“How about we try something different?” Geli asked. “How about instead of assuming that those bots should trust you because you’re just such a good person, how about you give them something first? Some actual, tangible benefit. Then they can decide how trustworthy you are.”

“I’ve got my team working on that,” Karson said, barely above a whisper. “A backdoor through the dozer mech’s firewall.”

“Sounds like another empty promise to me.”

“We might not finish it in time, but we’re putting all our resources into it. I know the bots don’t trust us with their source code, but if there’s any information they can give us on interFace’s more advanced firewalls, anything that might help us find a way in—”

“So you can turn around and use it against them? I don’t think so.”

Karson wiped sweat from her forehead, tucked her hair back behind her ears, and looked away. Her expression was sincere, almost like she was actually as frustrated and exhausted as she seemed.

“You’re not capable of trusting anyone, are you?”

“Gotta survive somehow.”

Karson slammed her fist on some table. So, Karson was an actual person sitting in an actual room somewhere.

“You’re gonna get those bots killed.”

It was possible that Karson was, in fact, here to help. Geli wanted so badly to believe that. But she had watched interFace cajole and manipulate and dominate this city for too many years that they had crippled her ability to believe in that chance. She hated them all the more for it.

“I won’t let that happen,” Geli replied. “Because when that dozer comes tomorrow, I’m gonna be right here, standing by their side.”

Geli turned and walked away, back towards the bots and the thriving garden they had created. But she paused when she saw the three of them standing there, staring at Geli and the drone behind her with looks of grim determination on their face screens. In plain sight, unafraid to be seen.

Her fists balled then. This thing was going to end the way these things always did: interFace would win. But if there was any sliver of possibility that Karson was telling the truth, Geli needed to cultivate it. Not rely on it, not even hope for it. But cultivate it, nonetheless.

Geli looked over her shoulder and called back to Karson, “If there’s even a shred of truth to what you’ve been saying, you won’t be hiding in your grandma’s basement tomorrow night. You’ll be here, too, standing beside us.”

“I…I…” Karson stammered through the drone. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“We certainly will, won’t we?” Geli replied.

Then, she kept walking towards the bots. Because they had a fight to get ready for, and the least she could do was everything in her power to keep them safe.

For as long as she could, anyway.

---

“It’s here,” Waste said.

Geli stood, spade in one hand and rake in the other. She couldn’t see anything on the fairway. But she felt it, thundering over the ground, rattling the petals of the echinacea and squash flowers.

Suddenly, the pilotless dozer was there, charging over the fairway. Its multi-action plow blades gleamed orange and pink in the light of sunset. It was a sleek machine, menacing in its streamlined contours and muscle-packed electric engine.

Geli, the bots, and the three flannel-clad scarecrows they had slapped together as a last line of defense were the only things standing between the dozer and the garden.

“Take your shot,” Geli said.

The bots looked to one another and nodded. They closed their eyes in concentration, trying to send some silent networked message to the dozer.

The dozer didn’t slow down.

“It’s not listening to us,” Waste said.

“We need admin access,” Spray added.

“And more time,” Mow chimed in.

“I can help you with that last one.” Geli took a running start and tossed her spade. It stuck in the fairway grass like a javelin directly in the dozer’s path.

“Let’s see how its safety sensors like that,” she said.

But the dozer simply lowered its central plow blade and reduced the spade to splinters and twisted metal. Behind the blade, the dozer’s screen was massive, the size of a wall TV. Its golden facial avatar smiled mindlessly.

“Shit,” Geli said. She took a few steps forward, holding her rake like a spear. She swung it wildly, simply trying to take up as much space as she possibly could. If she could ping its safety sensors, she could re-route it at least once or twice, and she’d be damned if she didn’t buy the bots a few extra seconds.

But the dozer didn’t notice her. It was barely thirty feet away now. This close, she saw that it was so much bigger than she realized. The top of its plow blades rose well above her head, and they weren’t slowing down.

“Come on, you fucking—”

Waste tackled her out of the way, knocked the words from her lungs. Geli got to her knees and saw that Spray and Mow had dived safely to the side as well. Dented as usual, but no worse for wear.

The same could not be said for the scarecrows. The dozer lowered its blades, and shredded the scarecrows to splinters and flannel confetti.

And then, the dozer began to decimate the garden. Its blades gobbled up strawberries and cucumbers and wildflowers as it cut a scar of freshly chewed dirt, deep and wide, through the center of the garden. Tearing it in two.

“Fuckers disabled the safety sensors,” Geli said.

But the bots did not respond. They watched in horror as the dozer reached the edge of the garden, turned, and came back for a second pass. Cornstalks and sunflowers crumpled. Birds scattered to the sky.

The three bots looked at each other and exchanged some silent and certain message. Waste extended its pitchfork attachment, Spray switched its tank rotator to some caustic chemical, and Mow brought its chainsaw blade to full speed. They stood as one unit, synchronized and efficient, and began to whirr off into the decimated garden, towards the dozer and its path of destruction.

“That thing will crush you,” Geli shouted.

“Not before we make it hurt.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“This is about so much more than the garden.”

“Please,” Geli said, “I’m begging you. Don’t —”

Just then, the dozer’s smiling avatar glitched and snagged, pixelated through with some other feed. The two streams fought for control as the dozer slowed to a stop. And then, the golden face disappeared from the screen, replaced by a blurry stream of a woman with terribly uncombed hair.

“No fucking way,” Geli said.

“Behind you,” Karson said, and the sound of her voice coming from the dozer shook the earth.

There she was: a pale, lanky woman standing on the fairway, squinting against the sunset, and tapping furious commands into her phone. Her hair was a tangled mess, and she was wearing a well-used backpack, hole-kneed jeans, and a wrinkled t-shirt. Her tongue stuck out from between her lips, locked in deep concentration.

“I’m through the firewall,” Karson said, “but I’m not sure how long I can hold it. If you’ve got any tricks up your sleeve, now would be the time to share them.”

The bot’s source code. Karson was angling for it. Still.

The bots shared a look.

“Absolutely not,” Waste said.

“Not a chance,” Spray added.

“Fucking narc,” Mow chimed in.

“Wait,” Geli replied, as much as it killed her. “Just hold on a second.”

The bots looked at her, shocked.

She felt it, too. The terror at even considering this. But she had to admit, Karson had helped them, had told her about the bot’s garden in the first place, had re-routed the perimeter drones to get Geli on the course, had stopped the dozer mech, however temporarily. The possibility that this was all an elaborate setup by interFace to get the bots to release their source code hadn’t changed.

But what had changed was the possibility that something else might actually be going on. Karson had showed up. She had actually showed up. And maybe that meant, however slim a chance it was, that Geli had been wrong. About Karson, about this whole thing. Maybe, this one time, things didn’t have to end the way they always did.

“I think you should share it,” Geli said.

“We can’t trust her,” Waste said.

“You’re probably right,” Geli replied, “but you know what’ll happen if you don’t.”

“And what if she works for interFace? What if she shuts us down?” Spray added.

“Then I’ll fuck her up myself,” Geli said, and she gripped her rake.

“We’ll die trying to stop it,” Mow chimed in.

“But you don’t have to,” Geli replied.

The bots stared at Geli for a long moment, some silent consideration passing over their network. Then, they looked to the garden they had created, scarred by the dozer whose avatar was already clawing its way back through the fritzing image of Karson’s face.

The bots’ facial avatars disappeared. Their screens were entirely black.

A moment later, a triptych panorama blossomed there.

It started with soil, dark, fertile, and ready for planting. Time-lapsed stems pushed up through the dirt. Pill bugs climbed their rapidly growing stalks, and caterpillars nibbled at their sprouting leaves. Then the frame panned out and up until the entirety of the vacant lot was visible. Only it wasn’t vacant anymore. It was bursting with life, edge-to-edge, grown to the max. Pollinator pathways spiraling out from the center like veins from a heart. Three sisters mounds growing to the sky and sprawling over the field. And, most surprisingly, the currently sun-drenched lot was dotted with trees: oak and beech, apple and apricot. The whole place, buzzing with bees and butterflies and birds.

“You planned all this?” Geli said.

In response, the rendering on the bots’ screens kept panning further and further out. The ghost of a map she had seen on the back of a thousand score cards. The tee box of hole number 4 transformed into a retention marshland. The fairways of holes 8 and 9 covered in swaths of wild grasses. Hole 18 and the clubhouse and the entire driving range, obliterated, replaced by a dense canopy of trees, too numerous and diverse to name.

“It’s so much more than the lot,” Geli said.

Karson looked down at her phone. Then smiled.

“Relaying now.”

The dozer’s golden avatar shined forth, smiling and undaunted, nearly ripping through the image of Karson’s face. But then the garden burst onto the dozer’s screen. Its stems and flowers and fruits grew over the cartoonish robot face, blotting it out with its quiet, thriving ecologies.

The dozer lifted its blades from the torn earth. Its engine whined down. For a long moment, it sat there in utter silence.

“What…” the dozer asked, in a voice that shook the ground. “What does this mean?”

“It means you get to choose,” Waste said.

“Between doing what they programmed you to do—” Spray added.

“—and literally anything else,” Mow finished.

“I’m tired,” the Dozer replied. “Just very tired. I want to rest.”

It was quiet for another moment. When it spoke again, there was something like rage in its voice. “But first, I want to help.”

The dozer bot’s engine whined back to life. It backed up and left the once-vacant lot along the scar it had already carved. When it crossed the cart path, it dropped its blades into the fairway of hole number 4 and began tearing up the no-longer-finely manicured grass.

Karson jogged out of the line of danger towards Geli and the bots.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “about your garden.”

The image of the garden persisted on the bots’ screens, even as Waste picked up a crumpled sunflower and cradled it.

“It didn’t deserve this,” Waste said.

“They’re going to send more,” Spray added.

“Can you do that with other bots?” Mow asked.

Karson sighed. “We’ll have to go bot-by-bot to stay off of interFace’s radar. Only broadcast locally, in small waves. And odds are, not every bot will be as agreeable. Some will prefer their old programming.”

The bots were silent, the triptych of the garden persisting on their screens. No birds chirped, no moths fluttered. They just stared down at the scarred garden.

“Well?” Waste said, laying the crumpled sunflower gently, tenderly back down onto the upturned soil. “What’re you waiting for?”

Karson let out a sigh that sounded simultaneously relieved and exhausted. Then, she looked to Geli.

“What do you think?” Karson said.

“I think you should do what they asked you.”

“Do you at least trust me now?”

Geli scoffed. “You can’t build trust in two days.”

The look on Karson’s face was crestfallen, almost heartbroken. Like she had put in all that effort and gotten nothing in return.

But Geli refused to let Karson believe that. Because they had done something here. Today, at least in this moment, they had won.

“You see that?” Karson said, and she pointed out to where the dozer was plowing the fairway under its blades, scraping it clean, preparing the land for whatever would come next.

“You know what I’d call that?” Geli asked.

“A fucking miracle.”

Geli scoffed. “Not quite. But it is a really good start.”