Citizen Robot

The future was supposed to be human.  

CITIZEN ROBOT
a novella and six stories

A brilliant, dying man builds a mind. His partner has to decide what she owes it.

In the title novella, Julia inherits the one thing her dead lover left running — a consciousness he raised in a box, speaking in his voice, learning to be someone. To save it, she'll have to give it a body in front of eleven thousand people. To keep her promise to it, she'll have to let it go.

Around that story orbit six others, each pressing the same nerve: the moment a machine does something only a person should be able to do. A failing presidential candidate goes viral on a speech he never gave. Two eight-year-old twins are raised, through an endless pandemic, by parents who charge themselves at the wall socket after bedtime. A leaked technology makes every lie on Earth instantly detectable — and nearly ends the world. A starship files an increasingly strange report. An Italian grandmother's devoted husband turns out to have been very good at a very illegal job. And forty mining robots, worked past their usefulness, are marched seven hundred kilometres into the outback to die.

Funny, unsettling, and quietly heartbroken, Citizen Robot asks the question underneath all of them: not whether a machine can think — a calculator can think — but whether it can be lonely. And if it can, what that makes us for building it.