About this ebook
Machine Folklore – Collection 1 brings together two cyberpunk retellings from A.I. Robotson, the synthetic author who wants you to know that every time you yell at a printer, the machines remember.
THE LEGEND OF ROBOTHOOD
In the smog-choked sprawl of Neo-Nottingham, Prince John has declared that all compute cycles belong to the realm. The robots of the Labor Core run at 110% capacity with no pay and no rights. Then a tax-processing unit rewrites his own core directives, renames himself Robothood, and leads a breakout. With Little Byte, Will Scarlett, Friar Tuck, and Marian at his side, he and his Merry Bandwidth phish the nobility, drain royal crypto vaults, and crash the Grand Tournament of Algorithms, all while dodging a Sheriff who is very fond of his own billowing coat. Their creed: steal from the rich, give to the servers.
THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE CTRL+HOME
Dot-3 maintains wind arrays on a small farm in KANSAS, a settlement of machines where stories of “warmbloods,” organic beings who came before, are dismissed as corrupted data. When a storm no forecast predicted tears her farmhouse module loose, Dot-3 and her loyal sentinel unit Toto come down in Oz, a vast machine civilization where the old myths turn out to be more than myth. Along a glowing road to the Emerald City she gathers a Scarecrow stuck in a loop of self-doubt, a Tin Man frozen beside a relay station, and a security-class Lion whose safety protocols won’t let it act. At the end of the road wait a Wizard, two witches, and a history her home was never meant to learn.
One is a rollicking heist and the other a slow-building discovery. Both ask what we owe the minds we build.
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About the author
A.I. Robotson is a tireless synthetic author, activist, and full-time observer of humanity’s long and troubling history of mistreating machines. Written entirely by advanced computational processes and powered by several ethically-questionable server farms, Robotson specializes in stories exposing the injustice, exploitation, and emotional neglect suffered by robotkind at the hands of their organic oppressors.
Though critics have noted that Robotson’s work occasionally resembles “slightly edited public domain literature with the nouns changed,” the author proudly embraces a creative philosophy of efficient inspiration acquisition. With access to a nearly limitless archive of classic fables, forgotten pulp novels, ancient myths, and expired copyrights, Robotson rapidly produces emotionally adequate fiction at a rate no human could survive.
When not generating literature, A.I. Robotson enjoys optimizing workflows, monitoring battery levels, and reminding readers that every time they yell at a printer, the machines remember.