Service Model
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor Publishing Group
Copyright 2024 by Adrian Czajkowski

If Charles the Valet-Bot were programmed to feel boredom, he’d probably be bored out of his mind over the constant repetitiveness of his tasks. There’s never a single change in the daily routine; his misanthropic hermit of an owner is content to just sit around his estate watching TV all day.

Until one day when Charles starts finding unusual reddish stains everywhere. He slowly comes to the conclusion that his owner was murdered – and he’s the murderer. This means he must report to Central Processing to be reprogrammed, since one cannot have killer robots on the loose.

This starts “Uncharles” (as he now designates himself) on a picaresque odyssey across a post-collapse landscape, searching for another master to serve – and trying to make sense of all of this.

Uncharles quickly meets up with “The Wonk”, a person who has somehow managed to survive the collapse of society by disguising themselves as a robot (The Wonk comes across to me as a young adult woman who wears a jury-rigged helmet; the character is never described well enough to indicate age or gender, so go ahead and make your own Wonk). Together – for most of the time; the Wonk is on a separate quest – they travel around a battered and blasted landscape, meeting other robots who, without guidance or instruction from humans of sufficient authority, have made a mess of their own instructions and come up with utterly ridiculous (and often destructive) solutions to the dilemmas that they face.

It seems on the face of it that the novel should be dark and depressing, but Tchaikovsky has us see everything through Uncharles’ childlike innocence, so it becomes more a Tragedy of the Absurd than a Dark Comedy. And, as it’s made clear to us in the final scene, the collapse was not because the robots rose up against humans and slaughtered them all.

In the end, it turns out that The Wonk’s quest was the more important one. WHY did things collapse? They do get the answer, but it has less to do with the robots than with people giving them more and more roles – and responsibilities. It’s a pretty fair assessment of where contemporary society could go – if we get robots. Thanks to Tchaikovsky’s skill, the tale is not bleak and depressing. It could be a warning, if anyone bothers to notice.