When the man in the hat and sunglasses and surgical mask comes into the Robo-Kon convenience store, Emi doesn’t think much of it. It’s bright and sunny out, and he probably has a cold he doesn’t want to share. When he walks straight to the counter instead of milling around, she assumes he wants a lotto ticket. (Rxobot only has a local lottery, but every week someone wins a thousand dollars and that’s not nothing in a town this size.) When he pulls a gun, she calmly puts up her hands and opens the cash drawer.
She hasn’t had to do this yet, hasn’t even been robbed since before Rxobot was founded. But she has drilled the protocol once a month to make sure she doesn’t forget, and so now he doesn’t notice that she’s holding her breath and closing her eyes as she presses the button under the register.
He screams as a sheet of pepper spray shoots up into his face. The gun goes off, then clatters onto the floor. Pain shoots up Emi’s arm. The bullet’s in there, but at least it wasn’t her torso. Fighting past the shock, she drops down low and crawls around the counter, keeping low. On the way she snatches a set of protective chemist’s goggles and an N-95 mask hanging from a nail on the wall. She wrestles them on with one hand while the man is still howling and cussing. He's also still standing, thrashing around. Emi manages to keep from getting her head kicked and grabs the gun from the floor. She scrambles away from the pepper cloud into the dry noodle aisle and stands up, aiming the gun at the would-be robber.
“Stay right there, motherfucker,” she says, feeling silly as soon as the words leave her mouth. The door tinkles just then as a couple of young ladies enter, then stop, startled at what they’re seeing. Emi knows these two girls by sight: they’re tall and athletic, maybe play basketball or field hockey or something.
“Hello, welcome to Robo-Kon,” Emi says without taking her eyes off the man, who has crouched down to the ground and is furiously rubbing his face and crying now. Her arms are starting to shake.
“Did this guy just try to rob you?” one of the girls says, at the same time as the other one says “What the fuck is going on?”
Emi nods, and both girls spring like mountain lions and tackle him, forcing him into a supine position and pinning his arms and legs to the floor. One girl has his right leg and right arm, the other his left leg and left arm. The girls start coughing and their eyes are streaming, but the spray has dissipated enough that they can handle it. Emi finally drops her arms in relief and sets the gun carefully on a shelf, pointed toward the far wall.
The chemist goggles make her feel as if she’s swimming. She goes and crouches next to the man and pulls the mask and sunglasses off his face. He’s a malnourished, sun-damaged white guy with bloodshot eyes and missing teeth. Adrenaline is still rushing through Emi’s system. Her arm hurts and it’s bleeding, soaking through her sleeve. What she wants to do is kick this guy in the ribs repeatedly. She wants to step on his throat. She wants to beat his ugly face in until it’s pulp.
Sixteen years ago, Emi went on a trip to Kyoto to visit her grandmother. At the time she was working as a project manager for a software company that created organizational tools for other software companies to use. On good days, she could tell herself that she was helping make something really useful. On bad days, it felt like a joke. She had one coworker she loved, two she liked, and a half-dozen she could barely tolerate. She worked all day in a large office building with a café on the ground floor, where she always got lunch. In the winter, she never really saw the sun.
On that trip to Kyoto, her first time in Japan since she was a child, Emi was enchanted by the konbini—the twenty-four hour convenience stores that dotted the street corners and lit up the night like friendly little lighthouses. They were clean and beautiful and always had hot food. Emi loved going in at two in the morning and seeing sleepy students and shift workers coming in for a cheap meal or an energy drink. She thought to herself, this is what I want to be doing. I want to do something that’s actually useful.
Within months of getting back, Emi spent her savings on a 6-2-Midnite sitting lonely on a stretch of back road near the Delaware Bay. She threw her heart and soul into it, made it shine, and used social media to create a little legend. Hip young people, and older people who wanted to be hip, came from miles around to take videos of themselves shopping in her American konbini.
Five years ago, the founders approached her with the following offer: give up the shop’s social media presence; give up taking credit cards; give up the state lotto; and give up having any food that contains animal products, gluten, nuts or peanuts. In exchange, Robo-Kon would be the only twenty-four hour store in an exciting new community with a guaranteed loyal customer base and the chance to be a part of something.
Part of her thought she had to have lost her mind to accept. But at that point she’d been running Robo-Kon successfully for a decade, and she was starting to get itchy again. Yes, the store was useful. But that desire for a greater purpose which had motivated her to buy it in the first place now pricked up its ears at the idea of being a part of something new.
Also, it helped that the offer came with a check equal to the store’s profits over the last four and a half years.
“One more thing,” the founders warned her. “In our new community, there won’t be any cops.”
Now Emi, arm bleeding, eyes and lungs stinging even with the protective equipment, stands over the robber and holds herself back from fucking him up. The last time she got robbed was pre-Rxobot. It was before she installed the pepper spray rig. Back then, the button under the counter had called 911. By the time anyone showed up, the guy holding her up had left with hundreds of dollars of cash from the drawer. He was never caught. Then again, she thinks, would I have gotten shot if he thought cops might come? She doesn’t know.
“What do you want?” one of the girls is asking the attempted robber, who’s calmed down a little and is mostly sniffling now. “Is this about drugs? You can go to Davi’s and get free methadone.”
“Fuck you, bitch,” the guy says. Emi once again has to stop herself from kicking him in the head. It would feel good, but she doesn’t do it.
“How’d he even get here?” the other girl asks her friend. “How’d you even get here?”
“Nunna your business.”
“OK.”
No one hits him. Emi’s sure the girls want to just as much as she does. How sweet would it be to pop him across the face every time he makes a comment? But they aren’t going to be like that. The two young ladies haul him up and proceed to frog-march him out the door, and presumably the whole mile and a half to the entrance of the city.
Yes, Rxobot is surrounded by high walls. Emi still doesn’t know how she feels about it. She’s always despised gated communities, knowing the racist and classist history of them. But Rxobot doesn’t feel like a gated community. More like an ancient walled city. You have to protect your city somehow. She finds her keys and flips the rarely-used “sorry, we are closed” sign to face out onto the street so that she can go to the clinic and get the bullet removed from her arm.