Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

In every episode I handpick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories haven't come in is that I love them and I hope you will

too.

Well, y'all, I find myself coming back again and again to stories about artificial intelligence

and our relationship to it.

Today's story fits squarely in that category.

It's by the writer and Hugo Award-nominated editor, Breet EB Vita, and was first published

in Uncanny magazine issue number 37.

Now Breet is originally from Singapore and she now lives in Brooklyn where she's an editor

for Orbit Books.

Our main character in today's story is Iara and she has a retired military pilot years

removed from battle.

She used to have her own smartship and it was equipped with an experimental artificial

intelligence.

Now the AI wasn't supposed to act independently of humans.

Never is.

It was meant to simply assist them to learn, assess, make suggestions but not to run

the show.

But as the pilots worked with the ships, there were unintended consequences and the AI

ships were decommissioned and sunsetted.

This story causes me to think about the nature of AI and how humanity gets mapped onto

...