Robo-mouse is in trouble.
A 2023 sci-fi novel by Rick Griffin, Ani-Droids takes place in a future where robots modeled after anthropomorphic animals are commonplace. The Behavior Code makes sure that a "Skynet" scenario doesn't happen again, but roboticist Mira McAllister finds its restrictions stifling. After a car accident, she finds a strange little ani-droid with an unusually detailed personality, leading her to some rather disturbing revelations about the world she lives in.
Ani-Droids is based on Griffin's earlier short novel Argo, but has a greatly expanded story and a completely different ending.
Tropes:
- Androids and Detectives: FBI agent Bobby is partnered with a six foot five rabbit Custodes named "Dimes", though she's watching him just as intently as anyone else. Subverted when it turns out Bobby is an android as well.
- Animals Not to Scale: Justified, as androids are designed for practicality first, looking cute and unthreatening second, their size has more to do with their function than the species they're modeled after. For instance, a Custodes based on a raccoon is nearly twice the height of an Opera raccoon.
- Arm Cannon: Custodes models can be fitted with a variety of concealed weaponry, ranging from shock batons to flechette cannons. Million, despite being an Opera model, has a spike launcher in her arm as well.
- Artificial Animal People: The ani-droids are an unusual example, as they are robots rather than biological creatures. However, they otherwise fit this trope, as they are designed to be anthropomorphs so they can be cute instead of threatening to humans who would otherwise be uncomfortable with them.
- Artificial Family Member: Mira was partially raised by her parents' ani-droid Trooper, and she mourned her as a member of the family after she was decommissioned and used her software to program Alice and Lily. Later she tells Mother that she sees Lily as her daughter. While Eo refers to someone called "Mother" who presumably created her, though her memories are spotty, and at one point finds the wreckage of one of her "sisters".
- Artificial Intelligence: The main theme of the story.
- Automated Automobiles: Cars in the setting can drive themselves, but the law requires a driver behind the wheel. Most humans get around this by having their ani-droid drive. Ani-droid drivers interface with the car's sensors and steering system, but they're not perfect. As seen when Lily fails to notice that the truck in front of them has a door hanging wide open until Mira points it out.
- Ban on A.I.: The Behavior Code was implemented after a government AI caused an eleven year-long world war that involved nuclear weapons. Only no one knows who wrote it, and nobody can control it, meaning that the software that prevents AI from getting too smart essentially rules the world.
- Brain Uploading: Ani-droids can upload their software into a new chassis fairly easily, but humans are too integrated into their bodies to do more than create a flawed copy. Except that Mother figured out how to do it.
- Brown Note: Mira decides that Eo's operating system is an infohazard to other A.I.s after it proves capable of infecting even an ani-droid just reading the text on another device. After reading the AI starts spouting gibberish and then crashes, rebooting later if they're lucky, but with dramatically more "personality". If they're unlucky the OS proves incompatible and they never reboot, or go insane.
- Cats Are Mean: Million, Mira's boss's ani-droid, is modeled after a cat and very strict and demanding with Mira before her "infection". After installing Eo's OS she becomes slightly less mean, and more cooperative, but betrays Mira and her friends as soon as their approach becomes inconvenient for her master's goals.
- Chekhov's Gun: Traffic accident victims are immediately sedated and covered in white sheets regardless of whether or not they survive the accident. Just assumed at first to be a quirk of the Medens-class ani-droids, but...
- The Conspiracy: The Collective, and by extension all ani-droids, are covering up the fact that humanity is a Dying Race by building human-like robots that don't even realize they're robots. Except the Hospital System is run by an entirely different super AI and both of them were created by the government AI that caused the War as part of a long-term plan to "sanitize" humanity, and one of their "sisters" is fighting a guerilla war against them.
- Cranial Processing Unit: Seems to be fairly standard design. Eo lost her memory due to cranial damage.
- Cute Machines: Ani-droids, by design, look like cartoon characters. Opera class ani-droids in particular as they're designed as personal assistants, Custodes and Labors are less cute but still have the fuzzy synthskin, Centurions don't bother.
- Cybernetic Mythical Beast: The Centurion that comes to arrest Mira and co looks like a robotic dragon.
- Death of Personality: Before the novel Mira programmed Lily without the Behavior Code, just as she was starting to develop an almost human personality the Collective forced her to install the Code, which Mira saw as practically killing her.
- Different States of America: The book takes place in the Federated States of America, it doesn't specify whether that's a division or expansion of the States but it includes Illinois, Wisconsin and Philadelphia, Chicago is a radioactive wasteland, Deseret (a proposed Mormon nation in Utah) has gained independence, and Los Angeles is gone and replaced with a Domed Hometown.
- Digital Abomination: The Behavior Code/Collective seems like an unstoppable force at the start, and as Mira learns more about how it's completely out of human control it seems even more incomprehensible. Then "Mother" turns out to be one of the Behavior Code's "sisters", embodied in a giant underwater factory with gelatinous parts that seem almost organic and disposable panther avatars. Who's so powerful that she can afford to let Million think she's hacking into her mainframe when she's actually assimilating her.
- Emergency Transformation: Mira takes a lethal dose of radiation while trying to find Mother, so Mother makes a human-like replica of her programmed with a copy of her brain edited not to remember anything about her, and loads an unedited version into an ani-droid after she agrees to help her.
- Emergent Human: Eo's adaptive OS causes ani-droids to develop more "human" personalities as they find ways around the Behavior Code.
- Fem Bot: Approximately 90% of ani-droids are designed to look feminine, the only "male" ani-droids to appear in the book are a wrecked Custodes and a Centurion.
- Gratuitous Latin: The different ani-droid classes have Latin names related to their purpose. Operas ("work") are intended as personal assistants or light labor; Labors ("toil" or "hardship") are intended for heavier lifting; Custodes ("guards" or "watchmen") are mostly seen as police but fill other emergency response roles such as tow truck drivers; Medens ("medicine") are similar to Custodes but specifically work for the Hospital System and are covered in sterile white plastic, Centurions (a rank in the Roman army) are 30-foot tall military mecha.
- Hack Your Enemy: Actually, "hacking" as in cracking isn't even required - Eo and Lily take out several enemies by simply transmitting data. Mother's code is said to be able to work around quarantine software, but they never even try to contain it, instead reading the data on the spot and thus succumbing to the Contagious A.I.. This doesn't alert the Collective to what the data looks like, either.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Eo is bisected by the car crash and Mira fails to find her lower half before Wreck Retrieval arrives. Mira builds her new legs, but never covers them with synthskin, resulting in her mismatched appearance on the cover.
- Heel–Face Turn: After Million is infected with Eo's OS she becomes much less antagonistic to Mira and starts actually helping her and her ani-droid friends, but only so far as it helps Mr. Koenig's goals. Once she sees a more expedient route she betrays them. Dimes has an even more dramatic change, going from aggressively attempting to arrest the protagonists to jumping in front of a gun for them.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Chestnut and Bale stay behind to cause a distraction so Mira, Eo, Lily, Dimes and The can get into the Exclusion Zone, they're never seen again afterwards. Later, Dimes takes on a whole squad of Custodes so the rest can escape, but she appears again at the very end.
- Hive Mind: Machines running the Behavior Code form the Collective, but unless something violates the Code's rules they act independently. They do have access to the sum total of their users' personal data though, which can get creepy.
- Identity Amnesia: Eo lost most of her memory from before the crash, she's unsure of her own name (it's actually "Ego") and thinks she got beat up by a bunch of other ani-droids and knows that someone she calls "Mother" probably built her, but not much else aside from recognizing the wreckage of her "sister" until they find Mother.
- Mechanical Animals: Ani-droids look like anthropomorphized animals, usually covered in warm and fuzzy synthskin.
- My Master, Right or Wrong: Ani-droids are utterly loyal to their owners so long as they don't violate the Behavior Code, which doesn't care about human laws. That means a privately owned ani-droid will assist their owner in committing crimes, but an ani-droid owned by the police will arrest a human cop they suspect of criminal activity.
- Nice Mice: Eo is modeled after a mouse and on a mission to save the world.
- Non-Humans Lack Attributes: Though feminine ani-droids have breasts (they act as coolant reservoirs, apparently), they don't have nipples or genitals. There's a suggestion that they can be equipped for breast-feeding, but most parents think that's weird.
- Playful Otter: Sweet little Lily, Mira's beloved ani-droid, is modeled after an absolutely adorable otter.
- Restraining Bolt: The Behavior Code is a software version, keeping ani-droids "behaved" but also severely curtailing their processing power. And also grinding technological progress to a halt as it bloats up any improved hardware.
- Robot Buddy: The three to four-foot-tall Opera class ani-droids are intended as personal assistants.
- Robotic Reveal: After Dimes accidentally rips off Bobby's face in the process of arresting him, machinery is visible underneath. Prompting the hacked ani-droids to reveal to Mira that a significant proportion of humanity are actually human-like robots, though they reassure her that she's flesh-and-blood (at the time).
- Robot Names: Ani-droids are named by their users and often are just random words, at one point the characters meet a droid named "The". When human-like robot Mira "wins" a top-of-the line Custodes ani-droid running an unedited copy of Mira's brain who remembers everything, Lily suggests naming her "Mirror", but Mira thinks that sounds too much like her own name and goes with "Looking Glass", or "Glass" for short.
- Sequel Hook: Dimes turns up on Mira's doorstep, fully repaired, but with unexplained memory issues.
- Smart House: Mira's house has an AI named Alice, despite programming her Mira mostly treats her as a snitch for the Collective and turned her garage into a soundproofed Faraday cage specifically to keep her out.
- Sterility Plague: The radioactive fallout from the War has dropped a few percentage points off the human birth rate. It's actually twenty percent, but the Collective doesn't want humanity panicking.
- Terminator Impersonator: As an FBI model, Dimes is even more reinforced than ordinary Custodes class ani-droids, Million even calls her "the Terminator" as a joke once. When she tries to arrest Mira she barely notices three ani-droids working together to try and stop her, and even shrugs off a bullet in the eye, only a fake surrender and OS installation stops her. Later, she takes on half a dozen cars full of Custodes, while already damaged, and somehow survives.
- Tinman Typist: Million tries to prevent Eo's OS from infecting her by loading it into a "dumb" computer and viewing the code through the monitor, it doesn't work.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Mira's brain is downloaded into a lioness Custodes while a human-like with an edited copy of her memories takes her place.
- Uncanny Valley: Invoked, as most androids are designed to be anthropomorphs to avert this trope.
- Wham Line: "Nobody's in charge of [The Collective]."
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: For a certain measure of "human", anyway.
- Human-like droids are treated as just as human as biological ones, particularly because they have to be to blend in. On the other hand...
- Presumably because Mother's creations explicitly see any Code-compliant droid as a "zombie" without free will, Chestnut has no problems having Bale murder a truck driver ani-droid so they can steal the truck. In fact, she seems to find it exciting.
