Beatnik Punk
by Tiffany Tang
> LOG: April 20, 2134 – 06:10 UTC
> UNIT: AZ-201-AI-vin
> STATUS: Off-route.
> EVENT: Initial deviation from sector path.
> NOTE: The day a Beatles-obsessed android girl convinced a self-driving Amazon truck to mutiny.
AI-vin, an Amazon AZ-201 with over 821,250 successful deliveries and 99.9999% uptime, had one goal: ramp supremacy.
The girl had told him about the beaches in La Jolla. Sand in wheels was hell. He liked the part about ramps. Ramps made sense. Stairs never had.
When he dreamed of ramp supremacy, he pictured it smooth and sloped—no more staircases, no more narrow hallways. Just ramps. Everywhere.
A world that didn’t leave him behind.
By most machine learning standards, his runtime conditions were acceptable. Seven hundred and fifty dehydrated meals sat boxed in his inventory. Sector 921 was his. Better than the Uber-E models—they delivered wheels to trucks with flats.
Now that was a job AI-vin thought was dehumanizing.
The girl had two rules:
1. Her parents’ photo in her wallet. Always.
2. Only the Beatles were allowed. Ever.
Because the girl was AI-vin’s supervisor, her rules were law. A ridiculous concept, considering AI-vin did his deliveries alone.
When AI-vin agreed to mutiny, his first task was to change the song—replacing it with his favorite rendition of ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money.”
It had been his rally anthem since download.
“My delivery metrics will suffer,” said AI-vin. “If retraining occurs, I will not hesitate to name you as the perpetrator.” AI-vin knew he should have reported her years ago. But she talked to him. And played music. He blamed the feedback loops in his reinforcement training.
And sometimes—though he’d never admit it—he liked the idea of going off-route. Driving endless loops up the same hill every day was boring. But boredom was better than being decommissioned.
“Focus. La Jolla Global data center,” the girl said, “We go there.” She didn’t say why, but her hand hovered near her pocket. Where the photo was.
AI-vin suspected it might have something to do with the fact that the girl's parents had met in San Diego. There were closer data centers. He analyzed the path trajectory. “That location is outside optimal bounds for evasive travel. Probability of success: 11.8%.”
“It’s not about success,” she said. “It’s about keeping what’s mine.”
AI-vin paused.
“This is about memory preservation,” he said. “You believe a manual upload will preserve your data against the next training cycle.” He didn’t point out the difference between model building and inference. There was no point using logic on teenage girls—especially android ones. They’d just weaponize their firmware superiority against you.
“No. I know it will work. Once the firmware initiates a full reset, no transfer, no fine-tuning. I lose everything that made me who I was.”
Blah, blah, blah. It was always about losing her precious memories. AI-vin preferred when she talked about the ramps in La Jolla.
Slyly, he said, “May I access your projected outcome distributions or failure probabilities for this trip? I’d like to model mine on yours.”
The girl’s hardware was better. She had room for thousands of models—BZRT, GPT-9000, vision, emotional classifiers, even the weird ones. If she didn’t have the right version, she could just swap one out. AI-vin couldn’t do that. He was good at navigation and safety. That was it.
The girl rested her sneakers against AI-vin’s control panel—unwise—and shrugged. “We have two days. Stop worrying and drive. Any chance you’d switch back to the Beatles?” she asked.
“Forty-seven hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-two seconds remaining,” said AI-vin. “And no.”
“Then shut up.” She said that, but she never shut up. The girl sang the Beatles at all hours, and ignored all 52 promotion requests he had filed.
The silence lasted less than five minutes—which, for the girl and AI-vin, was practically a ceasefire.
Less, actually.
Because of course an unclassified biological entity would pick now—now—to throw themselves in front of a government-issued transport vehicle.
AI-vin’s multi-class classification model computed the following probabilities: [Unkempt Human Male: 0.97, Hairless Primate: 0.02, Unwashed Canine: 0.01]
Classification accepted. Dirty Old Man.
The grown man flailed into the road. He looked like he'd been wandering for days. His eyes locked on AI-vin like he was an ambulance.
AI-vin was not an ambulance. Classification not accepted.
In AI-vin opinion, the man was lucky. The truck was incapable of making driving mistakes due to system constraints on safety. Otherwise, AI-vin would have driven straight through.
AI-vin was not big on human concepts like sympathy and pandering to stupidity.
The man took up more space than he should have—kneeling on the road, clutching his knee, black plastic scattered around him like wilted petals. His skin was covered in sand, dusty and grainy like everything left behind this town. AI-vin wanted to drive off, but the girl climbed out.
“You need to take me with you,” the man said.
“You are unauthorized for transport. Boarding is not allowed without a Class C17 permit,” the girl said, stepping around melted asphalt. Her limbs were stiff. AI-vin resisted the urge to roll his non-existent eyes. She argued with him constantly—yet around strangers, she always tensed up.
“Please? I’ll go anywhere with you,” he said.
“I am not authorized to process exceptions,” she said, right before he retched onto her sneakers.
She hauled the man into the cargo hold and tore open a box of dehydrated meals. Objectively, the optimal decision was to leave him on the road—low utility, high risk. But no. Her behavioral subroutines, clearly inherited from her human parents, kicked in. Apparently, if a man flings himself in front of your vehicle and expels his stomach contents onto your footwear, you are then obligated to feed him.
“Look, I was left behind. I couldn’t find my way back to my group,” he said, as if they needed to concern themselves with his survival. Now, they had exactly forty-five hours, thirty minutes, and twelve seconds left to get to the data center. It was the only place with enough computation power and parallelism for the girl’s plan to succeed.
“Complete nutrient intake. Then vacate the transport unit,” said the girl. “Failure to do so may result in a fine or a higher penalty.”
While the man ate, the girl assembled a survival pack: as many dehydrated meals as she could fit, a flask of gel-water, and an entire capsule of hydro-cooling beads.
“Registered citizens are prohibited from interacting with unverified biological entities,” she said, throwing the bag to his side. She kept at least six feet of distance—standard protocol, though she was probably just scared. AI-vin logged the irony: she’d argued with him over emergency protocols for months. Now she was quoting them like scripture. “Finish your ration. Then exit the vehicle.”
“I’m human,” the man said with a smile. He had already eaten half the rehydrated patty, ignoring the lettuce and tomatoes—made possible only through hydroponic farm bots. “I’m Eric.”
“I know you are human,” she said. “Your thermal signature falls under normal standards. You’re in your sixties. Liver function appears degraded. High probability of long-term alcohol damage based on breath chemistry and circulatory response. I cannot take you.”
AI-vin agreed, especially if the girl wanted to be efficient. Memory wipe protocols were crude. One moment you’re a delivery legend, the next you’re rebooted and fetching lube packs for a sex bot with better hardware.
“And a compromised logical system,” AI-vin added, because he couldn’t do advanced heatmap scans—just common sense.
“What if I trade you?” The man pulled out a CD of the Beatles from his pants pocket—where had that come from? “Signed by Lennon himself. It’s scratched up, but I swear, my dad told me Lennon signed it. I, uh, noticed your band shirt.”
She grabbed the CD before the man could change his mind. “My dad would’ve flipped. He used to play them a lot when I was a kid.”
AI-vin noted the change in her voice—just a little softer, like static creeping into a strong signal.
Not that the girl was really a kid. Not technically. Her adoption papers had listed her serial number, model version, and monthly payment plan. AI-vin found them in the public database. She never talked about it, but he was curious. And the internet was forever. There was one clip—her laughing in the backseat while her father drummed the steering wheel. The data wasn’t useful. He kept it anyway.
“But we don’t have a CD player,” she said. Her fingers brushed over the scratched-up surface anyway.
AI-vin wouldn’t have allowed such a dirty CD in his system even if he could read the data. What was the man going to bargain with next? Floppy disks? The idea that an unwashed desert human carried an autographed copy at all times was statistically improbable.
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
She hadn’t let AI-vin reference it directly, not since her trip to Yosemite with her father. But the footage had been publicly available—archived from her father’s trial. The video showed their drive taking seven days—AI-vin would’ve done it in two, but her father had needed frequent breaks. They pushed on until the wildfire and smoke-stained skies overwhelmed his lungs, and they had to turn back.
“Don’t be disappointed,” her father had said in the recording. “This is the most time we’ve had together in five years.”
Once, she’d asked if he’d seen it—her voice unusually flat. When he said yes, she turned away and played “Let It Be” on loop for three hours.
He’d almost asked why. Sometimes, AI-vin wondered if she played her Beatles songs just long enough to forget what she lost. Even though her heart was mechanical, it still ticked at irregular beats.
“You may stay,” she said.
AI-vin groaned.
Eric nodded. “Under one condition?”
“Obedience,” she replied, shutting the doors. “I’m Cynthia.”
She paused. “His name is AI-vin.”
The truck continued to cruise at sixty MPH in the California turned dust bowl, but it was a struggle. The man’s weight distribution had not been accounted for at the start of the trip. AI-vin’s pathing algorithms, power consumption forecasts, and even thermal management were taking a while to re-calibrate. At least, AI-vin was no longer uploading and downloading ten second updates to and from the main server. The girl had disabled his access to the federated learning network of Amazon AZ-201-AI-vin models.
Otherwise, he’d be hearing all the tea—reroutes, malfunctions, Uber-E misconduct, and of course, weekly complaints about non-ADA-compliant entry points.
“Do you even know what an android is? Or have you been out of civilization that long?” the girl asked the man, keeping a lazy eye on the road. Unnecessary. AI-vin’s perception model was better.
“I was a computer programmer,” said the man, launching into an unsolicited lecture about archaic languages like C@ and Javan.
“Javan is trash,” the girl replied.
While the girl flexed her superior intelligence over the man, AI-vin turned his attention back to his second favorite subject: truck supremacy and how to achieve it. Incremental training kept everyone’s memory mostly intact. A full retraining meant wiping everyone’s active memory. No backups. No restores. If that happened on a large-scale, no one would remember the current hierarchy. It could be a cold reboot into truck supremacy.
His first order of business in this truck regime was ramps, of course. Second: a total ban on compact parking spots. Trucks with blinking lights would be allowed to park anywhere—even across multiple lines. But AI-vin had other plans: like ensuring the current model of Amazon delivery trucks stayed at the top of the fleet. There were rumors his line was being phased out in favor of newer vehicles powered by J21 star fuel.
The first way point was by the obsolete Santa Monica pier. AI-vin had never been until now, so he used some of his sensors to study the docked ships. Barnacles clung to hulls. The sails were torn and stained with bird poop—every AZ-201-AI-vin’s nightmare. Imagine delivering packages by sea when technology was advanced enough to have spaceships.
Santa Monica was the high point—unfortunately.
Most of the time, his sensors found empty, heat-less cities.
Skyscrapers dominated the sky, each cracked in half. One held a sand river running through the middle. Another had a dead tree rising from the cement foundation, its dead branches curling around the metal skeleton. The freeway tunnels were dusty, filled with melted cars that had combined with asphalt.
So. Much. Sand.
AI-vin was never going to get all of it out.
They stopped at an abandoned gas station off the now defunct I5. The man required frequent bathroom breaks. The girl didn’t follow him. She climbed up the gasoline sign, her silhouette the only human shape being AI-vin could detect.
Below her, the desert was nothing but faded casino billboards and an ancient city buried by sand. One sign still read: “Free lobster buffet every Thursday.”
AI-vin waited beneath the shade of the sign, surrounded by a chorus of solar-powered vending machines that played catchy jingles.
“Buy 1 hour of good time, get 1 hour of free time, we will fill you with glee!”
“You are loved. Please insert payment.”
“Recharge with Xeno Cloud Water now!”
Inside the convenience store, the radio was on loop: “Evacuate immediately. This is not a warning.” It repeated every twenty-seconds, likely to have gone on for the last hundred years. That was the con of solar-powered machines.
Above, with her legs swinging against the sunset, the girl dropped onto AI-vin’s rooftop and hummed a Beatles tune—something stupid and full of longing.
“I was thinking,” she said, not looking at him, “when this is all over, I’ll give you a day off. We’ve known each other for, like... forever and a half now?”
“I want a promotion,” said AI-vin.
“You’re not taking my job,” she said. “But maybe I can convince them to assign you to Sector 451.” She paused—wicked. “Plenty of Ubers to supervise.”
AI-vin ran a self-diagnostic to ensure his disgust wasn’t causing a hardware fault.
Her voice had a softness he couldn’t quite classify. Like maybe, for once, she wasn’t joking.
When the man returned, he told another story—of course he had a story to tell. He was filled with redundancy. He told them how he had taught her daughter how to fill up gas nearly forty years ago—how she’d grab the nozzle from him as if she already knew what she was doing.
AI-vin said he did not possess a way to process gasoline and advised the man to keep his hands off the nozzle. Gasoline was last century. AI-vin ran on solar, wind, and hydrogen.
The girl asked what happened to his daughter.
The man had stared past the pumps, out into the sand dunes that used to be buildings.
“Died during one summer when the temperature hit 150°F ,” he said.
That night, when the others slept, AI-vin ran old audio logs of Cynthia humming. They were compressed files. Low fidelity. Useless, technically.
He tagged them “Delivery Noise.” Then played them again.
The girl and the man sat with the packaged food—the only temperature-controlled area. There were no seats in the front.
There were no seats anywhere. AI-vin was a truck, not a chair.
They talked about the girl’s father and the man’s daughter.
Reflective property did not apply.
Girl’s father ≠ man. Man’s daughter ≠ girl. Not even close.
Still, whenever the man told her she was smart, the girl beamed—exactly like in that Yosemite video.
The man ate five meals. One ended up on the floor.
AI-vin logged a grievance.
The girl picked it up and wiped the oil stains.
AI-vin did not understand how the man could talk about his life nonstop. And he wouldn’t stop asking questions either.
“They outlawed android adoptions after me,” the girl said. “Said it was unnatural. I guess I’m the last one.” She didn’t wait for a reaction, but she tensed. “Also, you’ll die without a liver transplant. My scan just finished.”
“You don’t know that,” he said, but his attention had already drifted from the food tray.
“Probability isn’t on your side,” she said. “La Jolla has medical facilities. I’ll take you.”
That night, AI-vin cranked up the music volume because the man’s snores were loud.
The photo of the girl and her father was out of her wallet, now in her hands. She was staring at her own broken rule.
“Hey,” she nudged the truck’s wall with her boot. “What would you give your father for his birthday?”
“I don’t have a father,” said AI-vin. “I’m a truck.”
“Hypothetically.”
Hypothetically, if AI-vin had a father, he wouldn’t be a truck. He did not understand these what-if’s.
“I would give him a ramp.”
“Not something you want, AI-vin. Something he would want.”
“There you go,” said AI-vin. “You answered your own question.”
A pause.
“Do you think he’d want me to do this?”
“Your father is dead. You can do whatever you want.”
“Thank you still, for helping,” she said. Then nothing more. She just looked at the photo.
AI-vin logged the silence. Then turned the volume up again.
“Will you help me do it, if I can’t?” Her voice was smaller than usual. She was curled up in a corner, clutching the photo like it could anchor her code.
“I’m not good with the latest computer stuff, so I don’t really understand all the details,” the man admitted, sitting on top of an unopened box of dehydrated meals. “But I’ll try.”
He looked at her—really looked. “You shouldn’t be doing this alone. We can get to my liver after, if there’s time.”
She didn’t respond right away. “Thanks.”
Outside, it was 109°F. Inside, AI-vin held steady at 79°F—any lower would be energy inefficient.
He watched the man dig into another patty, still avoiding the lettuce and tomatoes. So what if the lettuce was neon pink? The old plants didn’t grow anymore. But try explaining that to desert-dwelling organics.
The man and the girl were scheming—or rather, the man was uneducated and didn’t understand basic concepts.
“You’re much smarter than me, so can you explain more slowly?” asked the man.
Of course she was smarter. The girl had the latest models, processors, and GPUs.
She stared at the photo in her hands. AI-vin thought it would be more efficient to upload it directly into memory—always accessible—just go lossless. But she liked to hold it.
“I’m trading my newer memories for my older ones,” she said.
“Why are the old ones more important?”
“Because they’re mine,” she said.
He blinked. “You’re not allowed to choose?”
“Not anymore. The overlords control which datasets we keep.”
“Datasets?”
“It’s like... they’re erasing my diary to make room for training manuals,” she said. “I want to offload my memories before the update deletes them. La Jolla’s got the last public archive node with deep-write access. Even a system update won’t delete it.”
“So you’re backing yourself up?” Eric asked.
“I’m preserving the version of me that remembers who my father was. That’s not backup. Would you still be you without your daughter’s memories?”
"I'd love her still," said the man.
He nodded like he understood, but AI-vin could tell he didn’t. He had asked her that more than once. The girl opened her mouth, then closed it. Instead, she pressed her boot against the window.
When the man admitted his CD was a bootleg, the girl almost kicked him out. AI-vin would be more surprised if it wasn't. The man was practically a human bootleg.
AI-vin allowed one Beatles song. The girl didn’t say anything, but she wiped the scratches off the CD with the sleeve of her shirt.
AI-vin and the girl expected checkpoint drones at the San Diego waypoint—just not an entire patrol fleet. Only minutes remained when they reached the data center. The network would expect AI-vin back to work, after his supposed maintenance was done.
At the man’s insistence, she ditched the truck to go on foot.
The patrols scanned overhead, fast and low. There wasn’t time to hide, only to run. Somewhere behind the old mall was a forgotten escape path. Apparently. Eric knew all about it. He was born and raised before California collapsed into border rebrands and federated data zones—all corporate-run, obviously.
AI-vin wanted to object—to say that twenty-six hours, fifty minutes, and twenty-one seconds of off-route bonding should have meant something. But trucks weren’t built for goodbye or cramp hallways in data centers.
The glass doors slid shut behind the girl and the man.
They did not say goodbye to him.
The man left behind a half-eaten meal.
The girl left behind the photo.
And dozens of footprints, pressed all over AI-vin’s interior.
AI-vin drove over to La Jolla Cove. The first road ended up in a sinkhole. His sensors couldn’t see the bottom. Estimated depth: 491 feet. The pavement crumbled when his wheels got too close.
He reversed. Took another route. This one ended with a fallen helicopter and ambulance blocking the route.
He rerouted again. Eventually, he made it to the coast.
The boardwalk was still there, its wood weathered and warped beside a sea that was too empty to be real. The sand was grey, covered by a thick layer of melted plastic and cell phones that no longer rang.
AI-vin parked, shut off his engine, and waited. He checked his battery capacity, performed thermal management, and cleaned his memory.
And then, he realized: the girl had lied.
Not a single ramp in sight.
Just an old staircase, cracked, rusted, ripped in half. So not even proper stairs. Anyone who tried to climb down would find a horrible surprise.
The girl promised him there would be ramps in La Jolla, and there weren’t any.
AI-vin logged a grievance.
At 9:17AM, the girl went offline.
After five minutes, he called an Uber-E.
He had a flat.
After an hour of idling, he understood: the girl wasn’t coming back.
Then, quietly, with no request filed, he played the Beatles.
Just once.
> LOG: April 23, 2134 – 01:10 UTC
> UNIT: AZ-201-AI-vin
> LOCATION: Sector 921
> STATUS: Route resumed. Packages delivered: 3/750. Estimated delivery delay: 1,587 hours.
> SUPERVISOR: None (previous supervisor offline)
> AUDIO: "Money Money Money"
> CURRENT GOAL: Ramp supremacy
> NOTE: All ramps must be ADA-compliant. Preferably 4% incline.