I found this through a File 770 article as a finalist in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, and the story of a gentle robot trying to protect a child in the robot apocalypse sounded oddly uplifting and it turned out to be so. After the robot uprising when his best friend/owner is killed and the hotel he calls home is destroyed, cleanerbot Block leaves Chicago looking for somewhere else he can clean in peace, and maybe find someone he can watch movies and play chess with. What he finds instead is a baby girl, that, for some reason, the superintelligence behind the robot uprising wants. Block has to carry the infant across the country, trying to get to the haven of New Denver, hiding from both humans and AIs alike.
I’m not a big fan of post-apocalyptic novels, but this was a lot of fun. Block is a flawed character who makes a lot of mistakes, and, unlike, say, Murderbot, he doesn’t have the skills or the kit to protect himself, at least not without being really inventive.
Nova, the human maybe-soldier he teams up with is an interesting character too, although we see her through Block’s eyes, with his spin on things, and he’s not exactly the most reliable narrator and has a tendency to think the worst (and, let’s be honest, to panic as well). The mystery of why everyone is after the baby is the thread that keeps you going throughout the book, the only explanation coming from one of Block’s pursuers near the end which raises many more questions than it answers.
The worldbuilding is fairly broad-brush but it’s a fast-paced entertaining read. The AIs seem very human in their thought patterns, and while Charlie Stross explained this away in his Saturn’s Children, there’s no explanation here. Even the non-human AIs, such as the smart cars seem to think like humans.
The book ends on a cliffhanger, which is a bit annoying, and I would have liked some more of answers in this book, but it didn’t annoy me enough that I won’t read the next one in the series.