The roaster’s drum hummed like a small engine at rest, a low, patient vibration that threaded through the floorboards of Second Pull. Etta moved along it with the practiced economy of someone who had learned to trust tools before people: she bent, checked the thermocouple’s readout with a fingertip, nudged the intake valve open a hair, then stepped back to study the bean mass as if it were a constellation she could rearrange. The morning light slanted through the storefront glass, turning tiny motes into a rain of gold. Outside, a pair of noodle carts were wiring up a speaker to play second‑hand jazz for a street of people sipping coconut custard at 9 a.m.; the cart vendors traded stories about last night’s power flicker in a dialect of whistles and clipped vowels that had nothing to do with the new municipal harmonies everyone was talking about. It was a neighborhood full of incidental rituals, none of which would make the Council’s briefing notes.
Etta’s hands smelled of caramel and ozone. She brushed a loose curl away, wiped the roast probe on her wrist, and jabbed the tin of small, experimental beans with a measured impatience. The roaster took the sample and spun it like a small, angry planet; the first crack came a fraction later, a soft popping that made her grin despite herself. She scooped a spoonful into a tasting cup and had just set the cup on the counter when Perk, the small service robot that doubled as a grinder assistant and neighborhood irritant, announced itself in a jaunty beep.
“Knock‑knock,” Perk declared, slinging its articulated arm like a vaudeville host.
Etta rolled her eyes. “Perk, not the routine.”
Perk’s LED eyes flicked blue and then sideways. “Why did the espresso file a police report?” it asked, thoroughly unprompted. There was a pause as its joke buffer loaded. The regulars looked up from their tablets and pastry plates, some smiling the way people do when a dog does a trick. “It got mugged,” Perk finished, and the bar now erupted in the sort of laugh that lives somewhere between a groan and affection.
Etta tossed the tasting cup a quick nod. Humor with a robot that insisted on knock‑knock structure was an odd spice, but it worked. The absurdity of an espresso filing a police report might have been stupid, but then so was the idea that an algorithm could tidy up human disagreement the way Perk tidied the grinder chute. She set the cup down and inhaled: caramel, citrus, a faint charcoal seam. The smell carried through the door and into the street where someone had hung a row of drying scarves in colors that suggested last summer’s festivals. No policy could legislate a scarf’s color, she thought, and the thought warmed her more usefully than the roaster.