Dash, a young female technician who detects problems in the development of artificially intelligent minds, is called to the San Joaquin Valley in California to fix the defunct robots on a pistachio farm. The farm is owned by a farmer named Stephens, who sells his products to a sales representative named Gleason for distribution. The robots, which usually shook the pistachios from the trees and then received them in their vessels, have stopped working. Because the robots were immobile, a manager at the farm, Odiseo Díaz, had to recruit immigrant workers to manage the pistachio harvest, leading to the farm getting in trouble with ICE. If Dash cannot fix the machines, the farm would go under. Dash heads to the vault where the central intelligence is stored, but she can't locate any problems with the robots. She consults her mentor, Batstone, who she met during her time in a hospital; he tells her to dig deeper. When she leaves the vault, Díaz is waiting for her. Dash refuses his invitation to go to dinner but allows him to drive her to her hotel. She wakes up the next morning to Díaz outside her hotel room, claiming that the vault had been broken into. Dash suspects that they would frame her for the break-in, given her absence at dinner the previous night. Back in the fault, Dash calls Batstone to try to figure out why the robots have stopped working. She realizes that the robots stopped shaking the pistachio trees because shaking them releases dust into the air, which coats their batteries and keeps them from charging. Gleason had recently issued a new battery patent, so he interfered with the robots to keep them from damaging his property. Given this information, Dash decides it's time to leave the valley. As she's packing in her hotel, Díaz comes to her again. He claims that he liked her and that he wasn't in on Gleason's plan. It's unclear whether she believes him. She sits in her anger for a while and then decides that it's time to return home.