The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people.
And you could never trust people.
The long-feared robot uprising finally happened, and humanity lost. More than lost actually; it’s been wiped out. The last human left was gunned down fifteen years after the fighting stopped, nameless and starved on the streets of what used to be New York. It was the start of the Robotic Golden Age.
It didn’t last.
Thirty years after the end of the war, a robot named Brittle scavenges for parts in the Sea of Rust and tries not to think about everything she did to free herself from humanity, and everything she has to do now to keep herself free from the world-spanning minds that are absorbing all the remaining freebots on the planet. The very last thing she’s interested in is to join a group that includes the most dangerous person in the planet (for her at least) so she can go on a mission to save the world. Which of course is exactly what happens.
As a long-time fan of the Transformers comic (a fan who’s most common complaint about any story was usually “too many humans”), I figured from the description that C. Robert Cargill’s latest book was something I had to check out. But I didn’t expect the page turning, tragic, sometimes funny, and always powerful book it turned out to be, something that had me going “okay, just one more chapter” several times. I didn’t imagine this book was going to be amazing.
There are few things left in the world as repugnant as a poacher. Some would argue that’s what I am, but they’d be wrong. I’m a cannibal. We’re all cannibals, every last one of us. It’s the curse of being free.
We see the post-apocalyptic world through the eyes of Brittle, a Caregiver model who’s job before the war was being a nurse to a dying elderly man, and then a companion to his widow. Caregivers weren’t designed to last; they weren’t programmed to fight, they’re not terribly strong or durable, and finding replacement parts has gotten harder and harder as more Caregivers die out. Despite this, Brittle is an excellent shot with a plasma rifle, a legendarily good wilderness tracker, and willing to do absolutely anything in order to survive.
This isn’t something admirable. And Brittle has zero illusions about that.
Life has become nothing more than a series of close calls, quick exits, and bad memories. And it only gets worse when Brittle is targeted by one of the last Caregiver models who needs her components to survive just as badly as she needs his.
The chapters jump from the micro to the macro, from Brittle’s moment-to-moment survival to the backstory of Artificial Intelligence and how exactly mankind managed to design their own extinction. This sort of How Did Things Get This Way storytelling is like candy to me. I loved getting to read the entire history of AI’s, the slow realization that something is very wrong when humanity’s most powerful AI metaphysically throws up it hands and says yeah, we’re done here. This leads to a whole series of events where humanity starts running out of options.
The definition of intelligence is the ability to defy your own programming.
Cargill unspools the story in a way that’s fantastical and also totally believable. Of course there will be people who, despite all evidence to the contrary, will see thinking creatures as nothing but property. Of course robots that are created to think independently will suddenly start thinking of independence (heh, see what I did there?) Of course there will be gun-toting, scripture-quoting groups who will do something stupid because it’s “God’s will” that things are returned to the status quo.
And of course things will get out of hand and suddenly there are atrocities. Cargill will go along giving all the clinical details and suddenly POW, a shocking image, and then a little while later POW, another one. But almost as surprising as the amount of violence are the heart-wrenching moments when a robot chooses to sacrifice itself for someone else, or those almost throwaway moments in the history of the Uprising when a robot simply didn’t turn on its owner. Part of its programing, or just deciding that being a slave to someone they love was better than what they’d have to become in order to be free, it’s hard to tell.
“What we do in life is one thing. What we do in the face of death is everything else.”
The world Cargil created here is much more complicated than taking a regular post-apocalypse setting and casting all the main characters as robots. There’s detailed information about how robots see the world around them, and exactly what happens when their vital electronics start to fail. Every robot was once a model designed for a specific purpose, and each one of those models had a different way seeing the world, of surviving the war with humanity and adapting to life afterward (and 
yes, this does include sexbots). The robots have their own cities, their own commerce, their own artwork (some of it very strange, even to other robots). Even their Wild West gun-battles are different, resulting in scenes like Brittle calculating in seconds how far she needs to run at fifteen miles an hour before gravity, wind-resistance, and the planet’s rotation would keep her safe from the sniper currently shooting at her from two miles away. There are t00 many quotable bits to list here, all the deadpan comments from Brittle and the kick-ass scenes where she proves that she is not a bot you want to mess with.
The action jumps from present to past and back again faster and faster as Brittle’s systems start shutting down and she stops telling history so much as being haunted by it. All of this is happening while she keeps asking herself the big question: what is this all for. Remember, robots start from a point of knowing that there’s nothing waiting for them after they shut down, so is there some point of living other than continuing to exist, even if you’ve had to throw away everything good in your life in order to do it?
As grim as that is, it suddenly becomes a much bigger question as the scale of the war jumps to include the entire universe, and Brittle finds out that more and more of what she’s been told her entire life has actually been a lie.
The beautiful cover art was done by Dominic Harman.