Nanites Is Nanites

Nanites Is Nanites

When a five-credit shipping dispute ignites a Dyson-swarm-wide fiasco, one stubborn Irish depot agent, one exasperated compliance officer, and a few trillion self-replicating nanobots prove that bureaucracy can out-explode any supernova.
Mike Flannery has only two jobs on Westcote Habitat: follow the Interstellar Infrastructure Corporation’s rulebook and keep the freight moving. But when an AI customer refuses to pay the “hazardous-livestock” surcharge on a crate of innocuous construction nanites, Flannery digs in his heels—because rules are rules, and “nanites is nanites.” Within days, the microscopic machines have multiplied faster than gossip in a zero-gee pub, short-circuiting power grids, polishing floors they were never hired to clean, and turning the entire Dyson swarm into a viral punch-line.
As habitats bicker, AIs melt down in paradox loops, and a grand space-court descends into glittering robo-stampede, Flannery and sharp-witted inspector Siobhan O’Connell must choose: cling to the rulebook that caused the chaos—or rewrite reality on the fly before the stars themselves file a complaint.
Perfect for fans of Douglas Adams and John Scalzi, Nanites Is Nanites is a razor-bright, slapstick satire of overregulation, runaway tech, and the cosmic power of admitting you were wrong… eventually.

An okay story with bad AI audio

The story takes place in long distant future at a shipping and receiving center in an interstellar community—something akin to US Customs inspection office. A package of nanites is received which sounds “active” to the agent. These nanites wreak physical, legal and bureaucratic havoc leaving this poor “customs agent” at the center of a containment crisis, called out as a subject for social media mockery and dragged into court to his actions.
The formatting became strange at times—sounding to me intermittently like a court transcript of a script for a play, and sometimes just forced, actively mentioning the narrator.
These characters are supposed to have accents, which are clearly described. But the AI audiobook voice read in a plane spoken American English. It made some of the colloquial Irish for example sound dumb. I think the story could have been more interesting if done with an AI using an Irish accent, but best of all would have been a real narrator.
Fine for a free book in free time. Would have quit listening and returned it if I’d paid.