The big evil corporation sends an AI controlled drop ship with 3 humans to grab some salvage from a colony ship that crashed onto a planet.
The planet is supposed to be unclaimed by others, uninhabited and safe for the humans and drop ship. But as with most evil corporations, the truth isn’t exactly on the menu when they want to recruit people for the job.
So the AI ends up with 3 humans that the AI is supposed to look after and control, but who have other ideas, especially when things don’t go according to plan.
At the heart of the story is Yudhanjaya’s favourite theme of literary AI’s/machines, and what happens when two AI’s evolved enough to be poets meet each other and how they deal with the meat puppets that are problematic for their way of communicating.
All in all, another fine story from Yudhanjaya, and if you haven’t got around to reading any of his work yet, i do humbly suggest you give it a try, you may be rather pleased to discover a wonderful talent in a quirky corner of sci-fi hitherto not explored much.
I did like snippets like this:
Humans react to shock in all sorts of unexpected ways. Hysteria and numbness are the most common patterns. Given a world that terrifies them, people either scream at it or stop caring. But there are other patterns. Anna seems to have gone through her scrubbing phase into what we call hypercompetence—adopting a set of behaviors that [or so the human thinks] will give them the greatest chance of survival. Some of the most famous survivalists in known space, for example—Wolf Bjorn, Dana Jayawardana—all had some deep, traumatic incident in their childhood that turned them into the kind of mad person that will happily land on a desert planet with no tools except their own fingernails and proceed to survive there for six months while making a reality-TV show out of it.
This story is followed up by Odysseus, which is set in the same universe.
