Book: Life Artificial (by David A. Eubanks)

This is a free-to-read e-Book that deserves to be better known.

The setting is a near-future dystopia. It is written from the point-of-view of an “artificial”, a disembodied PDA (personal digital assistant) who has to earn its CPU time. Did you know that reboots are painful and disorienting? Good thing people wear masks with cameras. It is a criminal offense not to transmit your stream in public.

The world is on the brink of collapse because of climate change and waves of viruses like mySARS. I know what you’re thinking now, but no: this book was published around 2012. Climate change wasn’t even a news topic when I first read it. And anyway, this is just the setting. The plot is about surviving in a surveillance city-state, and the inner struggles of an artificial being.

Later books have more action-packed fights for technology and power inside and outside of the city, while some of the more nerdy elements are dropped (like keeping track of the PID that is running the artificial).