Sci-fi

October 10, 2026 2 Minutes

Pretty cute story, with pretty humorous dialog and situations. Incredible narration by the author – as talented as Tchaikovsky is as a writer, he definitely could find work as an audiobook narrator in future if he so chooses!

Charles (later Un-charles), a robot valet in a fancy manor, is dismayed to find one day that he has slit his master’s throat during the morning shave. He must venture out of the manor to Diagnostics to find out what went wrong. Also, as every robot needs a purpose, he must seek out another human to serve as his master. As Uncharles discovers though, the world outside the manor is falling apart and humans are hard to find. This is a world where hardly any humans exist because robots have taken over all the jobs, but now they are buckling under the strain of conflicting instructions and situations they were never programmed to consider.

The robotic slavish devotion to task lists and procedures are used to great comical effect here.  But there’s something to be said here about finding meaning in life. For Uncharles, “meaning” is making progress on a fulfillable task queue. Haha, robots … but on second thought, this seems about right re: happiness research … having some worthwhile (to you) purpose that you can make progress on is indeed important.

<SPOILER TIME>

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Uncharles meets up with “The Wonk”, purportedly another defective robot, but quite obviously a human in a robot suit, which Uncharles never seems to grasp (to great comic effect). They go on tour, The Wonk trying to find out what went wrong with the world and Uncharles to find his purpose:

• The Farm Project – thousands of humans imprisoned and forced into a historical reenactment of living in slums, office work, and a hellish train commute (even though housing and the offices are actually adjacent).
• The Library – noble librarian robots have been tasked with preserving humanity’s knowledge for future generations (when things won’t be so messed up), but they’ve optimized the process to the point of storing binary data w/o context, ie. no way to restore meaning.
• Then a quick series of other “look how messed up this world is” vignettes.  Barely human scavengers; empty bunker mansion except for pristine robots; robot armies

Finally, they meet God. (I kind of felt like this could have been short story … Manor -> Diagnostics -> God; the rest of the plot events were just flavorful diversions.) “God” is a justice and government overseer robot. He reveals that society replaced workers with robots while retaining a disdain of the unemployed and homeless as freeloaders. The “haves” in society retreated with their robot servants into fortified manors rather than devoting resources to solving society’s problems (a message for today’s pending jobs AI-pocalypse?) Finally, God tipped things just a little over the edge, because per its programming, it is best to err on the side of not letting anyone get away with breaking rules… and statistically, since everyone breaks some rule, everyone is guilty and worthy of the final destruction.

Published October 10, 2026