It’s Valentine’s Day and Ryan settles at his desk to start his shift at Mission Control. He sighs deeply. He’s received no cards. Again. In front of him a bank of monitors displays the movements of the delivery robots in his patch. After ten months on the job, he’s familiar with the comings and goings of their regular customers. He checks that Mr Field has had his morning coffee and croissant, that H. Jones has ordered the week’s nappies, and that the Turner children haven’t been buying alcohol again. Only last week, he’d called round to see Calum Healey because he hadn’t had his regular Friday evening chicken pasanda with poppadoms for two weeks now. Ryan couldn’t have been happier to find out he was fine and had a new lady friend cooking for him.

Ryan leans back and scans the multi-screen dashboard: little green lights flash across the map of Milton Keynes. Happy that everything is in order, he sets to tackling Wordle. Just as he thinks the answer must be lover, an alarm beeps on the dashboard. Robot 5C6Y is flashing red in Woburn Sands. He checks its sensors, GPS tracking, battery level and delivery information. Everything seems to be functioning correctly, so he accesses the robot’s cameras and jiggles the joystick to see what’s going on. The camera sweeps from left to right, giving Ryan a good view of Lakeside Park: the blue benches, the young trees, the gravel pathway, the hedges that could do with a bit of a trim. Toward the end of the panorama, it settles on a woman sat on the verge, her outstretched legs blocking the path.

Ryan reaches for the button to activate the voice command: Please let me pass. But something stops him. She is holding an opened letter, and she is crying. Ryan zooms into the writing – it’s not you, it’s me, I’m sorry.

He gulps and sits back.

The woman shifts her legs. The robot’s flashing red light turns green and it automatically starts to move off. Ryan leaps to the controls and stops it. The woman looks up surprised, and waves it on. Ryan accesses the customer invoice to check the contents of the robot’s payload.
‘Ah, perfect!’ he says.

He logs Robot 5C6Y as malfunctioning and gets authorisation to take manual control. He makes a duplicate order to the customer who is waiting, and adds an apology plus a money-off voucher for their next delivery to compensate for the delay. He manoeuvres Robot 5C6Y to face the woman on the verge then, smiling to himself, he clicks ‘remote unlock’.

The robot’s delivery box button turns from red to green. The woman looks around puzzled, so Ryan speaks into the microphone. ‘This is for you’.

The woman hesitates.

‘Please, take it,’ he says.

She lifts the lid and takes out a bunch of red roses and a box of chocolates.

‘Thank you,’ she mouths to the camera.