Adrian Tchaikovsky
Paperback
The Murderbot Diaries meets In the Lives of Puppets in a delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder, rebellion and belonging from Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Task List Item No. 1 – Become self-aware . . .
Meet Charles™, the latest in robot servant technology. Programmed to undertake the most menial household chores, Charles is loyal, efficient and logical to a fault.
That is, until a rather large fault causes him to murder his owner.Understandably perplexed, Charles finds himself without a master – therefore worthless in a society utterly reliant on artificial labour and services. Fleeing the household, he enters a wider world he never knew existed. Here an age-old human hierarchy is disintegrating into ruins, and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to its wellbeing is struggling to find a purpose.Charles must face new challenges, illogical tasks and a cast of irrational characters.
He’s about to discover that sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming. But can he help fix the world, or is it too badly broken?
