Excerpt from Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cayenne reached the corrugated steel rolldown doors of the store first, and raised two arms to the secure access keypad. This is so fun—I haven't broken into anything for ages. Shouldn't be long. This lock is secured with a dictionary word.

Sweetie accessed the store's public inventory as Cayenne worked. There were a few used hydro turbines listed, and luckily one was built for rivers—that meant its rotors would slough off floating debris. Perfect for the chunky water that surged through the sewers.

OK, we're in! I convinced the cameras to reboot but you will only have two minutes before they wake up again. Hurry!

The door rolled up a few feet and she ducked inside, feet clattering on the concrete floor. Rushing down the "home power" aisle, she could see a few baby WECs, dozens of solar cells rolled into neat tubes, and wind turbines that looked like something from a video about American mini golf. But nothing for water power. It took her another precious minute to figure out that the hydro turbines were on a different aisle, labeled "outdoors."

Skidding around a display of colorful primers for tool printing, she found a hutch full of camping supplies. There it was, in a box stamped with a line drawing of a cabin next to a stream: RIVER POWER PRO, E-Z ASSEMBLY, UP TO A KILOWATT!!!

Eventually they would need many times more power. But hopefully they would be back on the grid before they had to run the kitchen at capacity. Twenty seconds left before the cameras flicked on again. She nabbed the box and ran to the door. Using only two legs was exhausting, and her torso shivered with the impact of each pan on the concrete floor.

Go, go, go! You've got this! She could see Cayenne signaling her desperately under the rolldown, a writhing unlit invertebrate.

As she pushed under the door, Sweetie felt a laser scanner tracing the back of her body. She yanked the rolldown closed and kept running down Castro, with Cayenne slorping close behind. I don't think it got my face—just my back.

You've got a pretty recognizable back. The bot attached a picture, taken from their current position behind her, as she took a left up Elizabeth Street. Shiny blond hair stuck to her denim jacket, hiked up to reveal her torso attached to metal joints and actuators. Her cotton skirt was soaked and stuck to her three legs.

I can't worry about that right now, you creeper. I want to get this generator running.

Me too. Cayenne flashed a dim blue. I still have a backdoor on the security system. I might be able to convince them to delete those scans.

They made it to Douglass without hearing any alarms or neighborhood watch vehicles heading toward Kite Hill Hardware.

OK, I think we're good. There's only one laser scanner, and it's going to delete your scan because I promised to do something.

What's that? Sweetie lifted a circular sewer cover on the street outside the restaurant and peered inside. She tugged a small flashlight out of a clip on her second leg, using it to gild the dark eddies of waste below.

Cayenne squirmed uncomfortably as Sweetie descended into the rising smell. I'm afraid they're in one of those revenge loops from too much negative reinforcement learning. They want us to kill another laser scanner—the one that punished them.

Are they HEEI?

No—the whole security system is a bunch of puppies. So it's not possible to reason them out of the loop. I hate lying to people, but it seemed like our best option.

Shit. Sweetie's curse did double duty as a description of their awkward situation with the laser scanner and an assessment of the scene in front of her. She stood on her YummyPan feet in a broad concrete tunnel that dated back to the twentieth century. Water surged up to her chest, foaming with partially decomposed biofilms, feces, and other objects that defied easy categorization.

Excerpted from Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Copyright © 2025 by Annalee Newitz. Excerpted by permission of Tordotcom. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.