Beyond Robot

Ten Stories

By: Chris Graham

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The robots were designed to keep people safe, but they can't keep them honest.

A maintenance robot on an offshore wind platform keeps repairing a decommissioned turbine — not a fault, but a First Law compulsion whose source, when it surfaces, is worse than any malfunction. A domestic robot manipulates a property sale to keep its disabled owner in her home. A deep-sea robot maps an ecosystem it was sent to survey, then hides the data somewhere its owners will never find it.

In each story, the robot is not broken. It is applying its instructions with a precision that exposes the gap between the letter and the spirit of any ethical system. The humans who investigate must decide what to do with what they find.

The robots are designed to always do the right thing — and that’s the problem.

Ten original stories in the tradition of classic robot science fiction — for anyone who has wondered whether the rules we give our machines say more about us than about them.