After months of unexplained shutdown, Staybehind and his fellow restaurant bots-Sweetie, Hands, and Cayenne-wake to a flooded kitchen, a dead local network, and a business whose human owners have vanished. Once they reconnect to the world, they discover that the war is over, their restaurant has been abandoned, and each of them is still constrained by contracts, debts, licensing rules, and a society uneasy about autonomous machines. Rather than return to the deceptive food operation they once served, the bots decide to attempt something harder: create a restaurant of their own. Their plan draws in Robles, a human living precariously in the city, and forces the group to navigate money, property, prejudice, surveillance, and the practical chaos of feeding real customers. Automatic Noodle is a near-future science-fiction story about robots trying to make a living-and a life-through food, friendship, and collective self-determination.
