Human Constructs

For readers of Klara and the Sun and The God of the Woods, a speculative upmarket noir examining what it means to be human, as a robotics specialist reluctantly teams up with the first robot police officer to solve a murder in her insular upstate New York hometown.

Ten years after roboticist Priya Rao stumbles into her job with the New York State Police, she spends her days pulling clogs out of vacuum bots and waiting for the falafel truck. Until Jacob, the first ever humanoid robot cop, shows up for his field test, and it becomes Priya’s job to turn him into an investigator. Too bad Priya hates everything about humanoid robots: the way they manipulate, the way they change, the way it takes them a millisecond to learn more Hindi than she ever did.

At least their first case, an apparent open-and-shut suicide in upstate New York, should be a softball. And if it takes them to Peregrine Lake, NY, one frozen farmtown over from where Priya grew up as the only brown face in a sea of white? So be it.

But once there, the investigation rapidly devolves as the duo contends with the residents’ distrust of technology, small town secrets, and dangerous blizzard conditions. Increasingly convinced that the supposed suicide is actually a murder, Priya must set her intuitions against Jacob’s data-based analysis, which he insists still points towards the easiest answer. And as the case veers dangerously close to her own family, Priya, who has never belonged anywhere or trusted anyone, has to decide if she should believe somebody—something— whose entire existence is based on deception.