Cardinal Machines

Graduation is closing in fast for Zoey Collins and she's facing tough choices when it comes to what to do to support herself. Being the great niece of mother of A.I., Katherine Cardinal, doesn't mean she's rolling in green. But the Collins family is rife with penetration-testers and Private Eyes, a gene Zoey's inherited in spades. Zoey's trying to make it on her own when her great aunt dies, leaving her a prototype Cardinal Machine called Ocean. Both beautiful and buttoned-down, this machine ends up installed in Zoey's now-empty front room. What does a girl do with a sweet custom android like Ocean? Why, what any girl would do. She takes him out to pick up bail jumpers that'd otherwise be a problem to apprehend. And he's a natural! Because the Ocean models were designed for federal investigations and general law-enforcement. However, when she takes on the case of a bail jumper who would be her biggest bank, a man who would have bagged Zoey 5000$, she finds out her skip is dead in a seaside park. The Sheriff's Department rules it an accident, but her Ocean's assessment of the scene calls it murder....

The prototype android left to Zoey Collins turned out to be precisely the 'hotshot' Cardinal Machines lawyers described, when they tried to persuade her to sign away her rights to him. With Cardinal Machines like Ocean harvesting mineral-rich asteroids and terraforming the moon, Zoey sent Ocean where he could do the most good: back to the LAPD SWAT team and the FBI. Why would she check with Ocean about that? But when the luminary suddenly begins to rebel, it's time to ride to the rescue. Maybe an ace like Ocean doesn't belong in Zoey's penny-ante world of private investigation? Or maybe he has the exact right skills to dig into the fragmented and overlooked case of a woman's suicide in an Android Depot. Either way, Zoey's faced with winning back the trust of a now defiant android -- for whom she's developing the most curious feelings -- at the same time she must venture into the strange and unseen world of artificial existence! Cardinal Machines is a bit like Veronica Mars meets Detroit Become Human in a near future setting where mankind resists change, and wholeheartedly believes in traditional human values like good, old-fashioned murder. Thanks for reading! You can join me for more at https://www.tracyeire.site/joinforces.