The skeleton of the acrocanthosaurus nanus, or the Miniature Acrocanthosaur, is only the size of a minivan. (Its larger cousin equals a standard school bus in length.) At seventeen and a half feet from nose to tail, it fits perfectly into the modest atrium of Rxobot City Hall. It isn’t the original collection of fossils, which were dug up some twenty-six years ago and hundred-odd miles away on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. It is, however, a perfect replica of those petrified bones. Mr. Catchpole commissioned it as a birthday gift to the city.
Cardamom Lee stands eye-to-eye socket with the beast, leaning forward against the railing that surrounds its sunken display platform. The thing is so damn aesthetic. Her fingers itch, and she reaches instinctively for her phone only to come up against an empty pocket. She cannot film it. Instead, she takes a disposable cardboard film camera from her purse and snaps a picture. This is the only kind of documenting allowed in Rxobot—this and the written word. They can’t even make audio recordings, not even on literal tape.
“It’s a prison of your own making, girlie,” she tells herself. This isn’t entirely true. Cardamom Lee chose to come to Rxobot, but it was the founding Assembly that decided on the restrictions governing everyone within the city limits.
It’s a sanctuary. From what? Well, from things like what happened between Cardamom and Hirsch. Nah, that’s not even accurate. It didn’t happen between Cardamom and Hirsch. If it had been just between Cardamom and Hirsch, it wouldn’t have gone that way at all. That’s the problem. It was between Cardamom and her audience and Hirsch and his audience.
Each of them already had an audience by the time they became friends, but still. They met at a con and became friends in a quiet corner of someone else’s hotel room over hard seltzers at four in the morning. Just talking like people, one on one. They stopped being friends standing on two separate stages, each of them cheating out to an audience of thousands of over-invested fans. Each of them barely glancing at the other, gesturing behind themselves. “Get a load of this one, y’all.”
The particulars of how and why it started are sickeningly unimportant, but here they are anyway. It started over an opinion about a movie. All the biggest blowups seem to be over movies these days. Cardamom said a particular character was an antisemitic stereotype, and Hirsch said no it wasn’t, and Cardamom defended her opinion, and Hirsch said how dare you talk over me about antisemitism. No, that’s not it: he said “how dare she talk over a Jewish man about antisemitism.” Because “you” and “me” weren’t the kind of words happening between them anymore by that point.
Things escalated and Cardamom used the phrase “as a transgender woman” and Hirsch used the phrase “pulling the trans card” and Cardamom pointed out the hypocrisy of his accusing her of “pulling” a “card” and all of this, it’s important to mention, was said not to one another but to their respective audiences. To people who had by definition declared their loyalty ahead of time. And before you knew it, the subs were full of “Cardy vs Hirsch feud” and “what happened between Caradmom and Hirsh?”
It's not even close to the first time this happened to either of them. It’s not even the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. It’s just another brick in a long, broken road that Cardamom has followed all the way to Rxobot. So now she’s snapping photos that she can’t even see, like a goddamn peasant, of a fake dinosaur in the City Hall of a three-year-old city with no Internet.
She sighs, pushes back from the railing, and goes to pay her water bill with an actual paper check. No Internet and no credit cards. She had to order a checkbook special from the bank before coming here, because who actually uses checks anymore? It is kind of old-school cool, though, she thinks. She got checks with a hazy scene of Baltimore Harbor in the background, and her legal name (Cardamom Lee Anders) printed in a Gothic font in the corner.
With her water bill taken care of to the tune of twenty-eight dollars, Cardamom goes to have coffee at Locke’s. The coffee house is right next door to a bakery called Bagels &. Too cute, she thinks wryly. The space itself is too cute, too. It’s like the background of a Lofi Chill Beats to Relax/Study To video. (Briefly, she shudders with longing.) The furniture is overstuffed and shabby, the walls are cluttered with eclectic art, and somewhere an actual record player is spinning some light piano jazz that doesn’t quite scratch Cardamom’s lofi-chill-beats itch. She orders a pot of tea from the counter guy, who might be a streamer in another life.
There are no laptops in Locke’s. There’s one noisy typewriter, and a few people are reading books or scribbling in journals, but several patrons are actually talking to one another. This is the point of the Rxobot experiment, Cardamom thinks. She tunes in to a pair of young men arguing in fiercely modulated voices. Words like “assimilation” and “decolonization” and “hegemony” bounce back and forth like ping-pong balls across their table. One of them sounds gay. The other one sounds familiar. Cardamom turns her head just enough to get a good look out of the corner of her eye.
He's shaved his beard, which makes his face look younger. He looks older, at the same time: without his trademark flat cap, his thinning hair is more apparent. Hirsch hasn’t noticed her. He’s waving a teaspoon and telling his companion, “you’re missing the context of that story, though.” Seeing him in person for the first time in over two years, Cardamom forgets the feud and feels the warm rush that would accompany any welcome reunion. But she remembers just as quickly, and she abandons her pot of Earl Grey and leaves before he spots her.