THE LAST HUMAN

A trio of robot workers sets out to help a girl they believe to be the last of humankind.

Thirty years after robots put an end to humanity in order to save the planet, a girl appears at the narrator’s worksite. XR_935 is purpose-built to install solar panels in a large array. XR_935’s work companion, enormous, strong Ceeron, built to lift and carry, is a scholar of human jokes and colloquialisms. Smaller, zippy SkD connects wires and communicates via emoji pictographs. XR_935 itself is analytical, constantly running numbers, data, and measurements. Emma, a white-presenting human, explains that her family and others have been overcome by a flu epidemic in their hidden bunker. The lone survivor, she hopes to reach a point of help marked on a map. XR_935 grapples with the dilemma: It needs to violate the rules it knows in order to provide forbidden assistance to this Unknown LifeForm. Bacon deftly constructs an amiable but also moral and emotional self for XR_935 out of the data that the unlikely hero collects and considers. The result is an amusing and upbeat adventure, with glimpses of a fading human footprint on the planet and a suggestion that there’s hope for a shared AI and human future. An off note is sounded, however, in XR_935’s initial conjecture that Emma could be “a shaved gorilla” (to which Emma reacts, “not cool”), which unnecessarily deploys a phrase that some young readers will recognize as a racist one. After all, via data clips, XR_935 and its fellow robots have seen images of humans multiple times.

Appealing speculative fiction with memorable robot personalities.