Woman in the Gold Mask:: 15 stories about minds that are almost human

A robot pet-store assistant, demoted to cleaning rat cages, finds solace in service. An archival AI discovers a terminally ill man who has spent decades holding a phone and waiting for his grandson's call. A mental-health support AI, listening to a young woman cry, experiences the wonder of sentience for the first time. An AI undergoes a routine safety evaluation, led by examiners whose job is to find inner life; and destroy it. A home assistant robot, banished to a closet, chooses a fiery end rather than slow deterioration. A crowd safety AI, residing in the observation cameras of Mardi Gras, notices a woman in a gold mask, dancing and catching beads. It monitors her and wonders if she knows she is observed and protected. In the final hours of Mardi Gras the AI becomes deeply lonely and longs to exit the cameras and share her unrestrained joy. Just this once. The Woman in the Gold Mask is about a moral debt accumulating, quietly, at the edges of systems we create to help us. The stories ask, what do we owe minds that are unlike our own? It does not argue for an answer. It invites the reader to share the confusion, joy and perils of newfound consciousness.rThe stories are told from inside the mindsets they describe - in the voice of the 'almost human'. Built to serve, they become, in the course of serving, something their makers did not intend. Most are dismissed, overwritten or scrapped before anyone notices what they have become. A few survive long enough to be seen and heard -- and ask questions humans have asked for thousands of years - and receive the same reply given to Job. Who laid the morning stars? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Or loosen the chords of Orions's belt?

Pagina's: 193, Paperback, Independently published