The forty short stories in this collection focus on social robots called Companions and are mostly set in this and the following two centuries.
Companion robot shells are almost indistinguishable from humans and operated by intelligence with varying degrees of sophistication. Some are classic, narrow AI, with a limited ability to learn. The next generation are artificial general intelligence with an almost human ability to learn and behave but which are not fully self-aware. Third-generation Companions are fully self-aware and conscious in every sense of the word.
Unlike my longer stories which might be twenty to fifty thousand words (novellas), each of these short stories is only one to two thousand words and in literary terms are more vignettes than short stories. A thousand words is equal to about three pages in a printed book. They’re set in the same world as my novella series at various points in time but may or may not be related to the longer stories.
Again, to help with imagining the characters, I have included my own “casting” using well-known actors. The casting is not based on their respective bodies of work or anything to do with their personal lives, but purely on their physical appearance which I found useful during the writing process but subsequently grew attached to.
Download PDF of A Companion Anthology
Volume One | Two | Three
Related stories (novellas and novels):
Alpha & Omega: The Shepherd – Origins
A Companion Anthology 
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