MAKESHIFT

A researcher, haunted by personal tragedy, becomes emotionally involved while psychologically assessing an advanced robot who may be prone to dangerous behavior.

Selbrede takes on weighty issues of humanity and machine life in this SF novella. For five years, research scientist Ally Fallows has worked at an institution called NQQ (short for the Latin nequaquam, meaning “any means”). Suddenly, she is reassigned to a project in NQQ’s elite division. A series of advanced prototype robots has gone rogue. Their AI minds suffer through “a sort of artificial puberty, if you will,” and they tend to rebelliously conclude their human creators are unworthy and must be eliminated. Thus, robots have been summarily destroyed by NQQ to thwart any threat to people (Ally later learns to her horror that human life has been lost already). Because of her psychology background, Ally is supposed to assess Makeshift, a guinea-pig robot deliberately cobbled from components of the scrapped ones just to trace the malfunction’s nature. Ally is surprised that the roughly humanoid Makeshift seems gentle, creative, and whimsical but also maddeningly obtuse and resistant to letting Ally analyze his intellect using standard methods. Eventually, the time with Makeshift—who, like Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, resists doing a task because of an existential crisis (except the robot does a better job of explaining himself)—triggers unhealed emotional wounds Ally carries about her dead brother. By adhering to a brief page count and a fairly unadorned narrative, Selbrede imparts a fablelike quality to material that might have been explored at greater breadth and depth in one of Isaac Asimov’s canonical robot tales, though Asimov (at least in shorter classics like “Liar!”) exhibits much less love for conflicted machines and the unattached women in white lab coats who tend them. This novella, meanwhile, wrestles with nothing short of the meaning of existence, altruism, and the purpose of all intelligent organisms—which potentially involves quite a bit of hard-drive space. A dose of ambiguity in the finale (literally, the last few sentences) raises whole memory banks full of questions, especially among readers who may relate Makeshift to the human-hating Archos R-14, the cybermenace in Daniel H. Wilson’s far more action-oriented robot-uprising series. Meanwhile, Selbrede’s appealing voice will work for a YA readership not expecting huge tech downloads or widescreen stunts.

Big aspirations get crammed into an engaging tale of a robot with a modest system.