Author: Linda G. Hatton

Juniper’s steel-toed boots weighed down on the gas pedal like a cement anchor at the bottom of the sea, letting up only as she pulled her new fifty-thousand-dollar investment into the slot marked “service.”
She ducked out of the car as soon as the A.C. shut off and eyed the room. Then she saw him—the first man, or at least man lookalike—she had seen in weeks.
She examined his face for signs of his origins—pores or razor stubble. “I have an appointment for a knocking in my engine. I just bought the damn thing online last month. I’ve already had three issues with it.”
The salesman with his shirt half hanging over his fly, fingered his tie as he shouted out something about singing happy birthday. He turned to her. From the eyes up, he resembled “The Rock.” From the eyes down, he looked like Fred Flintstone. The droids had become so realistic, she couldn’t tell if he was real. “Who with?”
“Huh?” Her eyes darted from his nametag—Jared—to the blaring TV switching from a documentary about housing astronauts on the moon in new condominiums to a pirate cartoon centered on a hidden island and a map back to the “old world” that had been torn into three pieces.
The room, lined with ten black stiff-looking chairs resembling the polished heels of an army platoon standing at attention, was studded with tabloid-reading housewives that looked like they had been dressed by their toddlers. The first one, a smiling redhead, her legs tightly crossed, her hair thrown into a messy bun, refused to offer eye contact—only a master of body language could know she was hiding something. Was she harboring one of the few real men left on earth?
The next one shuffled through a handful of credit cards, sinking deeper into her seat as she pulled one from the pile, rubbing it like gold, then setting it aside. Once she had pushed the others all back into the empty slots in her wallet, she picked up her smart phone and hung her head low, her face glowing from its light like a candle inside a jack-o-lantern.
“Hey, Miss!” Jared slapped the counter. “Who is your appointment with?”
“I dunno. I didn’t get a name.”
“Right. I see it here. You were scheduled with the Perceptive Engineering Drone. Sorry to say we had a malfunction with that member of our service team. So you’re stuck with me today.”
She squinted and cocked her head.
“You know, a human?”
“Oh, right. I don’t care who handles it as long as I can take it home today.”
“We’ll see.”
After checking her car in, she hid in plain view in the back corner of the room under a spotlight where she had a panoramic view of the abundance of visitors to 21 Rosewood Street. Visitors so preoccupied with their own problems—and blank-faced droids gliding around in matching outfits, droids that had taken over the old way of life—that nobody noticed her until several hours had passed.
“Looks like you’ll need to leave it. We haven’t been able to quite figure it out.”
She scoffed. It figured.
They could develop a substitute human but not get her car to run right.