I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: October 2022] Robo Sapiens : Tales of Tomorrow

I received this book at work and was intrigued to read it (Manga style right to left).  It is a collection of connected stories that form a solid plot.

The premise is fairly straightforward–it is the future and robots are now “cyber-persons” with A.I. brains with their own culture.

The story opens with a robot salvager relating Simon Chan’s case.  Chan was over 120 years old and only called on the main character because the story had to be kept hush hush.

His request was straightforward–find a robot that he has lost fifty years ago. But the realty was more difficult–in the last fifty years it was probably scrapped.  But Chan was insistent–Letitia is still alive.

The back story is that Chan and Letitia were the IT couple of the day fifty years ago.  But when he lost her to an accident, he went into seclusion. A year later he returned to the public eye with a robotic Letitia–this was long before such a thing was accepted.  The story has an interesting twist involving the true identity of Simon Chan.

The second story is one of romance between characters who believe they are robots and are visiting the site of a robotic graveyard, Robot Hill.

Story three is a nearly wordless story about chromobots travelling through time to caveman days.

In the fourth story a robot runs from location to location to be useful, downloading instructions on how to help birth a cow or even to dance at a ceremony.

In the fifth story, nuclear waste has been buried and will deteriorate for 250,000 years.  So they need a robot team to monitor the process.  But who will care about the project in a few thousand years?  There is also the start of a story of two robots being sent into space for a 6,000 year journey.

In the sixth story, one of the robots from story two is sent for repairs where he runs into the same robot from Robot Hill.  This time, he explains that he is being sent away on a lengthy mission.  This turns into the seventh story where he is one of the robots who is to look after the nuclear waste.

Eight returns us to the robots in space, where their ship has exploded.

Nine picks up the quest for Letitia.  And the remaining stories all pick up earlier stories.  The robot in the nuclear waste facility is visiting once every few centuries and learns that things are very different.  Robots no longer look like humans, they look like animals.  And they all plan to leave the few remaining humans to a deteriorating earth.  While the robots whose ship exploded are fine, their secondary programming kicks in.  And that programming is “to be happy.”

I appreciated the clean lines and the way all of the robots has the same aesthetic, but looked somehow different.  There are also plenty of robots who look like machines while others look human.  But then there’s some characters (like Simon Chan) who looks old and wrinkled and the man who announces the nuclear repository (in story 5) who looks like the Monopoly man.

It’s at times a confusing story but it plays out well and the idea of the robots being happy is an unexpected twist.