 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with silver on the cover or in the title.
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. Despite the title, the bot on the cover is definitely silver. This book is a great start to Wells's The Murderbot Diaries series. This is a future I can believe: the bot belongs to "The Company," a perfect corporate combo of greed, cynicism and incompetence. The science mission requires the team to team to take a "SecUnit" (ie, security bot), and the "terms and conditions" include it eavesdropping on all their conversations and even personal logs, with the company getting any information that's useful for security or even marketing. And this particular SecUnit was tampered with on a previous mission, causing it to kill 57 people. But don't worry, it's all fixed now! The narrator, who privately calls itself Murderbot, does not yearn to be human. It's capable of emotion, but finds interactions with humans to be unbearably awkward, even (especially) when the humans are trying to be friendly. Murderbot has hacked its own system so that the Company no longer controls it, and all it really wants to do is watch human entertainment shows nonstop. The humans' idea of a "happy ending" looks very different from the bot's point of view. But deep down, despite its protestations, Murderbot does care about the humans.
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