Can you still have a teenage rebellion phase if you’re an embodied AI that your mothers constructed from scratch? Turns out you can. Meet Scorn, who is continually dissapointing zeir divorced moms while trying to pursue a story about corruption and violence against AIs on the moon.
Scorn awakens after zeir chassis was destroyed when the spaceship ze were taking was destroyed in transit. Ze have lost some time from their memories because, like humans, backing up as often as you should is a hassle. Scorn pursues the story through their tiny spider chassis and eventually through a very worn out second hand chassis ze end up kind of stuck with because they stubbornly refuse to rely on zeir mothers to bail zem out.
The story is told in present tense, which made it a little bit hard to follow for me at first. I haven’t read many stories yet that use neo pronouns so I struggled really hard to keep up with them. It was worth the work through because along the way we meet Scorn’s sibling and we meet other AI and it’s a very interesting world that Ogden has built.