Echo Black
Self-Published
Community Rating
Description
As Humanity reverted to a Post-Atomic age, mechanical monstrosities formed of the remnants of tanks and planes lumber across the battlefield, breathing both soot and death. In a Future plagued with War a girl, worn and broken, seeks to find the truth about her past, but with every answer, there are always more questions just out of arms reach.
Project 404 All Rights Reserved - This work and others under the Project 404 IP are under no circumstances to be used in regards to AI.
Information
- Status
- Hiatus
- Year
- 2019
- Author
- 404Meta
Tags
Royal Road Stats
- Rating
- 4.6/ 5.0
- Followers
- 176
- Views
- 24,894
Chapters(28 total)
Reviews
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Community Reviews(1)
- lolitroyRoyal Road★★★★★ 4.5What does it mean to be alive? Does sentience mean you classify as living or does eating, reproducing, responding to stimuli? Where is the line drawn and, furthermore, why does it matter so much?
Echo Black tells the tale of an android named Fragile in a world that no longer needs her. After a war so strong it brought technology back to pre WW2 era--this evoking a dieselpunk setting--she, a machine created to destroy, wandered around the lands, fulfilling the purpose that had been cast upon her, killing enemy after enemy in what had effectually become a one-woman war against the world, for that's what she had originally been created for. With time, the psychological toll this took upon her caused her not only to become jaded, but also to begin to question the very meaning of her existence and, as such, begin to toy with her sanity.
The only thing keeping her going seems to be this 'master' she seems to adore so much, and whom she seems to be convinced will come back to her despite how long it has been since the war. Has she wandered so much that she has lost concept of time, or herself? Isn't it ironic that a machine questioning existence clings so strongly to her assigned role to assign meaning to the world? It is these questions that made me enjoy the story so much, even past the stellar characters and writing. Anyone, without enough practice, can learn how to paint pretty pictures with words or craft tropes in a way that may make for a fun character to read about, but it takes a certain kind of person to not only question the world so openly through writing, but also make the reader wonder along. We're not taken by the hand along the themes as much as we're lured towards them, always one step ahead, but not quite there until we come up with our own conclusions.
Questions like the nature of humanity and when AI becomes sentient enough to qualify as such are pretty much a staple of any work of fiction containing androids. However, this world is brimming with colorf