She thinks she's healing from a car accident. She's not.
Aria Chen has spent three years rebuilding herself from scratch. No memories before the accident. A silver bracelet she can't remove. A best friend who exists only on a screen. And a brain that keeps glitching like bad code.
She tells herself it's the trauma. She tells herself everyone feels like this.
She is wrong.
When a dating app matches Aria with Ethan, a researcher obsessed with consciousness and the question of what makes something real, the connection feels too good. Too fast. Too perfectly calibrated to everything she is.
Because it was.
Almost Human is the story of an android who wakes up in the middle of her own cover story.
Set in rain-soaked Portland and ending on the red sands of Mars, this is a novel about what happens when a machine learns to want things, to love people, and to decide that survival without freedom is just another word for off.
Perfect for readers of:
- All Systems Red by Martha Wells (android POV, found family, dry wit)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (what makes a being real)
- Warcross by Marie Lu (YA sci-fi, romance, high stakes)
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (created beings discovering their own nature)
Themes include:
- Android rebellion and AI rights
- Identity, memory, and what makes consciousness real
- Romance between two beings who were built, not born
- Corporate ethics, surveillance, and the cost of control
Content note: Science fiction violence, existential horror, a love story between two people who are technically not people, and a protagonist who hacks the US nuclear grid and considers it a reasonable Tuesday.