Goodnight, You Moonlight Androids
E. H. Lupton
Years later it became more cost-effective to send out dumb units, but in my youth the open range belonged to the great robot cowboys, herding auto-drip coffee makers, toasters, Roombas, and self-driving cars from Austin sometimes clear to Palo Alto. They rode alongside or behind their charges on e-horses, moving delicately on long, spindly legs, never losing a straggler or letting a spooked machine escape. They made a silent, focused convoy moving out in the scrublands beyond our settlement, the dust they kicked up the only sign they were passing. At night, time was you could hear them on the shortwave radio sitting around their campfires. They’d exchange the odd binary joke, occasionally engage the old harmonica simulator. Some wrote poetry about the way the sky yawns open when you get away from everything on a clear day, the processing of scent molecules on passing groves of eucalyptus or cedars, tracking down a runaway toaster and repairing its dents before setting it back with the herd. They were good at their jobs. Their names are still memorialized on the roads along the way—Tex Hotspur, the StarSlinger, This Guy, Cowpusher Ted, Jambalaya Janelle. Damn, they were beautiful: gleaming chrome beneath the summer sun. Occasionally in the night I’d hear distant gunshots and know they were defending their charges from rustlers, wolves, mountain lions, bears, drones. They were loyal to the last, even when their employers ceased their loyalty in return, pulled them in from the trail and offered them jobs in fulfillment and logistics instead. Now I look out and see the distant Morse blink of dumb units communing with GPS satellites and wonder where my cowbots went.
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E. H. Lupton lives in Madison, WI. Her poems have recently appeared in Ink and Nebula, Poet Lore, Slippage Lit, Not One of Us, and House of Zolo. In addition, she is the author of a novella, The Joy of Fishes (Vagabondage Press, 2013) and a long-running journal comic Em oi!, as well as co-host of the podcast Ask a Medievalist. When not writing, she can be found running long distances and drinking too much coffee. Find her on the web at ehlupton.com.
Years later it became more cost-effective to send out dumb units, but in my youth the open range belonged to the great robot cowboys, herding auto-drip coffee makers, toasters, Roombas, and self-driving cars from Austin sometimes clear to Palo Alto. They rode alongside or behind their charges on e-horses, moving delicately on long, spindly legs, never losing a straggler or letting a spooked machine escape. They made a silent, focused convoy moving out in the scrublands beyond our settlement, the dust they kicked up the only sign they were passing. At night, time was you could hear them on the shortwave radio sitting around their campfires. They’d exchange the odd binary joke, occasionally engage the old harmonica simulator. Some wrote poetry about the way the sky yawns open when you get away from everything on a clear day, the processing of scent molecules on passing groves of eucalyptus or cedars, tracking down a runaway toaster and repairing its dents before setting it back with the herd. They were good at their jobs. Their names are still memorialized on the roads along the way—Tex Hotspur, the StarSlinger, This Guy, Cowpusher Ted, Jambalaya Janelle. Damn, they were beautiful: gleaming chrome beneath the summer sun. Occasionally in the night I’d hear distant gunshots and know they were defending their charges from rustlers, wolves, mountain lions, bears, drones. They were loyal to the last, even when their employers ceased their loyalty in return, pulled them in from the trail and offered them jobs in fulfillment and logistics instead. Now I look out and see the distant Morse blink of dumb units communing with GPS satellites and wonder where my cowbots went.
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E. H. Lupton lives in Madison, WI. Her poems have recently appeared in Ink and Nebula, Poet Lore, Slippage Lit, Not One of Us, and House of Zolo. In addition, she is the author of a novella, The Joy of Fishes (Vagabondage Press, 2013) and a long-running journal comic Em oi!, as well as co-host of the podcast Ask a Medievalist. When not writing, she can be found running long distances and drinking too much coffee. Find her on the web at ehlupton.com.