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>Robot
Fuck.
Fuck! Giga's tired eyes upped from Snack2You's app offed interface and hardened into Fermi's paradox, her nostrils scrunched into a hostile grimace directed at the superstimulous-cute humanoid robot departing SoyCrab. The thing was a flawless neoteny: efficiently transporting what was surely a cheap crablike finger food imitation to some lazy bourgeoisie bitch in a penthouse 800 meters from the access point. The automata even had the audacity to stash the food in an airtight temperature-controlled compartment.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Giga looked it up on the internet like a good girl. The company advertised their straightforward integration of white-label vacuum insulated panels from China like it was the coolest thing since LLMs.
Orders comin' in were down 50% since robots had entered the scene, it was just one company, others were hot on the trail.
It was over.
She was over.
But she was not going out without a fight.
From her vantage point across a stoplight, Giga observed the naïve enemy rendevous with a rover and glide away: graphene omni-wheels calibrating a pleasant, oh-so consistent pace over the decrepit pavement — strewn with trash, lined by irregular overturned shopping carts. A homeless man sitting on the curb cursed and threw an empty soda can at the rover, which sped up and easily avoided it.
Giga swerved out onto the street on her bicycle and pedaled in the opposite direction.
...
In the brilliant light of day, Giga found herself on a stakeout at a chic cafe called CircuitBeans.
She took a contemplative sip of her absurdly imaginative 3D-printed matcha foam that resembled a tiny edible voxel forest.
Giga smiled slyly as the small humanoid robot entered the trendy battlefield-to-be across the street, ByteBistro. It held open the door for another customer as Giga held her breath. This was the moment she had been waiting for.
She licked her pointer finger and pressed 'Enter': launching a premeditated Python cloudstrike: a multi-GPU penetration testing suite swarmed vulnerabilities in the neighborhood's networks.
Simultaneously she strode up to the rover, which was waiting lovingly like a mother for a schoolchild, and blasted it with a homebrew EMP.
As the rover's circuits fizzled and popped, Giga felt a dissonant discomfort instead of sweet satisfaction: behind the glass of ByteBistro the delivery robot fixed its depth-camera-eyes on her with an unsettling awareness and tilted its head.
...
As she sped victoriously through a desolate stretch of road on a lucrative delivery later that night, her heart nearly stopped. In the glow of the moonlight, the robot was methodically laying out sharp, gleaming spikes on the road ahead.