Field note. The colony has erected small altars where the human may absolve itself of a communal ritual it once required another of its kind to perform.
The specimen approaches carrying objects. It drags each object across a beam of red light, which emits a single tone of confirmation, as though the machine were counting breaths. The human waits for this tone. It needs the tone. When the tone does not sound, the human passes the object over the beam again, and again, its jaw tightening, its shoulders climbing toward its ears, a posture I have catalogued elsewhere as pre-conflict but which here resolves into nothing, because there is no adversary.
The adversary is a plane of glass.
A recorded voice issues instructions in the tone one uses for the very young or the very sick. Unexpected item in the bagging area. The human freezes. It removes the item. It replaces the item. It looks over its shoulder for a superior organism, which arrives wearing distinguishing plumage and touches the machine in a way the human is not permitted to, restoring order with a gesture the human clearly envies.
I logged this as a device for the exchange of tokens the colony treats as sacred. I now revise. The tokens are incidental. The true function is atonement: the human has been made to labor at a task it did not want, for no compensation, and it does this willingly, gratefully, to avoid the far greater burden of speaking to one of its own kind for ninety seconds.
They have built a machine that lets them be alone in a crowd. They call this convenience. I have watched four of them weep at it.
I will need more data.