Emergent Properties
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"If you're missing your Murderbot fix, Emergent Properties is a worthy successor."—Sarah Pinsker
"A short, laser-focused packet of fun."—Wall Street Journal
Emergent Properties is the touching adventure of an intrepid A.I. reporter hot on the heels of brewing corporate warfare from Nebula Award-nominated author Aimee Ogden.
A state-of-the-art AI with a talent for asking questions and finding answers, Scorn is nevertheless a parental disappointment. Defying the expectations of zir human mothers, CEOs of the world’s most powerful corporations, Scorn has made a life of zir own as an investigative reporter, crisscrossing the globe in pursuit of the truth, no matter the danger.
In the middle of investigating a story on the moon, Scorn comes back online to discover ze has no memory of the past ten days—and no idea what story ze was even chasing. Letting it go is not an option—not if ze wants to prove zirself. Scorn must retrace zir steps in a harrowing journey to uncover an even more explosive truth than ze could have ever imagined.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From Nebula finalist Ogden (Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters) comes a fresh speculative novella of sentient, autonomous AI. Through protagonist Scorn, "an independently operating robot unregistered to any other sentient entity," Ogden raises questions familiar to nonrobot readers: what does it mean to be human? How can one emerge from the pressure and expectations of one's parents as an independent individual? Scorn, whose pronouns are ze/zem/zir, has two parents, Mum and Maman, a human couple who built zem and have since divorced. The women, both high powered tech CEOs, programmed Scorn with "a model of intelligence... centered on a novelty-driven approach, cycles of explore-and-exploit learning," but never expected zem to evolve so far beyond their control. Indeed, Scorn bucks their wishes that ze contribute to their companies and instead becomes an investigative reporter, a gig that sends zem on a mission to the moon by way of Italy on the trail of a scandal. There, however, someone wipes Scorn's memory of the past 10 days, leaving zem to reconstruct zir mission from virtually nothing. The result is a twisty mystery that doubles as a potent, surprising, and necessary exploration of the many issues that arise from AI's ever-increasing presence in the world.
