It’s the year 2060, and California is struggling to recover from its war with the rest of the continental United States after seceding. In a war-torn San Francisco, a group of Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligences (HEEI, for short, or robots that have evolved sentience) have awoken in the abandoned restaurant where they had all been shut down. However, HEEI still aren’t necessarily afforded the same rights as everyone else, so they must keep the loss of their former corporate employers secret in order to stay together. So what should they do to be kept from being scrapped or worse - separated? Welcome to Automatic Noodle  by Annalee Newitz. Now I’m just craving noodles.  Since this is a novella, I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but I DO want to talk about three major themes (out of many) that resonated with me.  First, there is the idea that corporate culture focuses so much on the bottom line that they forget the people (or robots) that help make t...