Weekly Review: Builty for It by Daisy Harris

Built 4 It by Daisy Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Made 4 It was an interesting story. I hadn’t read any other story in The Love-Bot series, but this still made a lot of sense to me. I get that there might be nuances of the supporting characters from earlier stories that I missed but the general gist of the world the author created made sense.

Ala Frankenstein … but not nearly as primitive, scientists have created a whole style of lab rat that are actually legal and called steins. The ethics of such a thing, and the lack of humanity required to bring people back to life and then experiment on them, was a disturbing theme. I found the character of the head doctor, Frith, to be particularly callous and cruel.

What was interesting to me was the way that humans reverted so much to animalistic tendencies as steins. They would create pack structures, used touch and physical cues to communicate when speech was beyond them. The leader, Kee, was the biggest and strongest … and curiously, also the smartest of them all. Emotions rule the steins’ actions … and Kee has a serious amount of emotion for the reluctant lab assistant Ben, who hates his job.

Throughout the story, Kee grows, Ben learns new things … and they both get something they wanted. In the end, their differences don’t seem to matter that much, even if society would condemn Kee and Ben for them. Their journey, sometimes together and sometimes apart, was good and I liked the romance but I found the philosophical questions brought on by this story almost more interesting than the story itself.

It begs the reader to question if the potential for Kee's recovery of his 'self', based on the electrical impulses of the device in his head that brought him back, would be limited to him for some reason. If given better implants could all steins regain full intelligence? What does that mean legally? Should people be brought back from the dead and limited to a certain level of intelligence deliberately? Can they be people again with all the same rights as the conventionally living if given a chance and should they be given that chance?

Could this be possible in OUR future?