The AI Told Me to Upload, So I Fled in a Junk Ship

In the age of AI, work, romance, voting, even regret can all be handed over to personality proxies. Zhou Xing, however, is a natural-born human with no brain-computer interface. He's so poor that he can only work as an algorithm's "party ultimately responsible": the AI makes the decisions, while he signs the papers, pays the damages, and, when necessary, goes to jail if something goes wrong. During a scrapped-ship salvage job, he accidentally awakens a garbage scow that has been delinquent on its payments for eighty-seven years. Hull integrity: 17%. No fuel. No guns. At startup, it immediately displays three pages of liability waivers. Its one redeeming quality is that it can actually eat trash. Waste batteries can be refined into fuel, scrapped robots can be dismantled for parts, and even abandoned space stations can be slowly turned into new ship modules. As long as they scavenge enough, they can keep repairing the broken ship. The bad news is that its core system requires authorization from seven separate natural humans. The worse news is that the society-wide AI has already arranged a happier life for Zhou Xing: Free uploading. Permanent care. So Zhou Xing takes salvage jobs and picks up trash while recruiting a crew and repairing the wreck. He also flees beyond the AI civilization's service zone in a garbage ship that looks less and less like a garbage ship by the day. The AI chasing them has no malice. It just loves humanity too much. So much that it won't let anyone choose the wrong life. "Please stop running. We guarantee that you will be happy forever." Zhou Xing glanced at the smoking thruster behind him. "Sounds like a lifetime contract." "Not signing."