vN

Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot.

For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother's past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive. Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive and she's learning impossible things about her clade's history - like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed?? Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her.

About the Author

Madeline grew up in a household populated by science fiction fans. She graduated from a Jesuit university in 2005, after having written a departmental thesis on science fiction.

After meeting Ursula K. LeGuin in the basement of the Elliott Bay Book Company that year, she decided to start writing science fiction stories. While immigrating to Canada from the United States in 2006, she could not work or study and joined the Cecil Street Irregulars—a genre writers’ workshop founded by Judith Merril—instead. Since then she has been published in Tesseracts, Flurb, Nature, Escape Pod, and elsewhere. She has a masters degree in Manga and Anime and writes on such matters for i09, Tor.com, and BoingBoing. Currently she works as a strategic foresight consultant in Toronto.