BINGO: migrant, as everyone on these ships is migration to/from Earth and Alpha Centuri
hot take who would have thought that a book about AIs and the limitations of their programming would touch my squishy organic heart so much and be the first thing in a while I’ve read that I genuinely didn’t want to put down, and which I didn’t know how it would end!
What a quirky little book that absolutely nails its gimmick from the get go. Our POV characters are varied, but the main ones are Demeter and Steward, a supercomputer navigation AI and a human-medical interface bot, both on the same ship (i.e., Demeter), who have experienced a series of unfortunate events and are forever dealing (badly, and then less badly) with the consequences.
You see, Demeter was doing a routine haul from Alpha Centuri Habitation 3 to Earth when she lost everyone on board. That is, 100% loss of human life, all dead, no one eating their nutrients or breathing their air. And then…she sees…Dracula? A shadow? Whatever it is, no one believes her, nothing is there on her video cameras, so she’s renamed and sent off on another route, teased by the other ships (they keep adding zeros to the end of her unit designation and calling her ‘ghost ship’) and pretty upset. Steward isn’t that happy either, because they’re stuck with her and her decisions, and she’s got priority command so can always override them and shut them down for a period of 12 hours.
And then…it happens AGAIN. Except that this time, it’s not Dracula, it’s…a werewolf? THIS time, though, Demeter is able to save two humans–Issac and Agnes–and shepherd them home. She’s all set to show her video of the event, and prove that it wasn’t her malfunctioning, except her video is deleted and no one believes her and she’s two strikes down.
ONE LAST TIME and this time it’s so-called fishy f*cks which Steward cottons on to and attempts to handle when everyone starts turning into fishy Shape of Water things trying to get to their mythical planet Hail Cthulhu. Three strikes and you’re out, no one is willing to believe that Demeter happened to have weird things happen to her a third time, and she’s left to stew and be powered down, because she’s clearly having issues and doesn’t understand what’s going on.
That’s a lot more plot that this review really needs, because this book is a genuinely heartwarming tale of people–AI people, but people none the less–trying to do their best within the confines of their programming and against some truly staggering odds. It’s a love story, it’s a story of found family, it’s a tale of a foster parent discovering love for children they never expected, it’s hilarious, it’s clever, I really can’t say enough good things about it. Things that frustrated me made perfect sense–kudos always to an author who’s also a reader and appreciates that threads should be tied up, even if the answer is just “people do things emotionally.”
That being said, I do feel a bit tricked in empathizing with AI. Or, after finishing the book for the briefest of seconds I felt some sense of warmth towards ChatGPT before remembering that no, not the same thing. Will also note that there are Murderbot-esque bits throughout, but this isn’t that even if it spends a lot of time in the narrative space of a sentient bot who doesn’t understand humans. We’re hard to get.