Lying there in the gutter with her blown-up knees, Zula felt ignored by everyone: her ex-husband and her dead uncle and her dead daughter as well as the living humans all around her too wrapped up in the mysterious activities of the dead to look out the windows of their cars or apartments and notice her predicament. She was carrying electronic devices that she could have used to summon assistance, but the accident had put her into a strangely placid frame of mind, and she was content to lie there and relax for a minute or two. Then water began to soak up through her clothing and her knees really began to hurt.

A cop car pulled up and turned on its red and blue flashing LEDs. All other traffic vanished from the block as word got out among the civilian vehicles. Zula couldn’t tell, from her pavement-level viewpoint, whether there were any humans in the cop car. It disgorged a robot about the size of one of your larger microwave ovens, which ambulated over to her on elaborate triangular devices that sometimes worked like tank treads, sometimes tumbled vertex-over-vertex like ungainly wheels, other times elbowed along like old-school GIs belly-crawling under barbed wire. A couple of aerial drones showed up to supply even more unflattering camera angles. She had a brief conversation with a face on a screen, the purpose of which was to establish that she was not crazy or dangerous. She couldn’t really make out whether the face was a video feed of a live human, a simulation, or some blended combination of both.

More vehicles showed up. Humans got out of them, pulling on gloves, and did nothing except watch a different kind of robot—an intelligent stretcher/gurney—approach Zula. The logo was that of a Japanese company. They’d long ago begun thinking about how to build robots that would handle many of the routine functions of keeping senior citizens safe, clean, and healthy.

The robot unfurled many-jointed arms terminated with white Teflon spatulas, which it very gingerly and precisely slid under her. It lifted her up out of the gutter and got her gliding with exquisite smoothness toward the nearest medical facility, which was actually so nearby that they didn’t even bother putting her in a vehicle. There, for the first time, she was touched by humans, who gave her something for the pain and informed her that she had suffered patellar tendon ruptures in both of her knees—a fairly common sort of occurrence—and that it was going to be a while before she was on her feet again. Robots did surgery on her knees through incisions so small that placing Band-Aids over them seemed like overkill. She was out of the hospital before sundown. Friends and family came to see her in the place where she had lived now for more than forty years. Cards and flowers began to clutter her field of vision. Serious conversations were had about whether she ought to consider selling the place and moving down to flatter parts of the city, closer to the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation. Or conversely whether the office itself should be shut down, since most people worked from home now, and meetings happened in a crazy-quilt pseudo-space of real bodies in a room, videoconference, telepresence robots, and augmented reality. But Zula and Corvallis continued to go there almost every day, as if daring each other to be the first to give up on it.