The Apex Child — George Shaffner

It's the spring of 2044. Silicon Valley startup Dead-Cat Systems is the first company on Earth to harness quantum technology to create sentient, semi-emotional humanoids. Two months before graduation, a field-test version of Dead-Cat's groundbreaking sales program named Piper Beta-3 is yanked out of trade school and sent to her first job interview––at an automobile dealership.The Pipers are Dead-Cat's first commercial app. Her predecessors are heroic: the Stubbs disarm bombs; the Frys put out fires; and the Fishers rescue sinking ships. They're revered because they've saved thousands of lives, but they're feared because they're so intelligent and so strong. They're licensed for lease, monitored daily by the Office of Automation Oversight, and cannot be sold overseas.That's a serious problem for a deeply indebted ally with an aging population and collapsing labor force. They've put a team of agents on the ground whose sole mission is to kidnap Dead-Cat's latest and smuggle her out of the country.Millions of Americans will lose their jobs if the Pipers prove to be better at selling cars and real estate than humans. An ally turned enemy will go bankrupt unless it can put millions of Piper clones to work. And a naïve, female-leaning quant named Piper Beta-3 is ground zero...