Cog looks like a twelve year old boy but in fact he is a robot or a biomaton. He lives with Gina. She teaches Cog new things each day:
"I am programmed for cognitive development, and to learn by consuming information with my sensors, which are similar to human eyes, noses, ears, tongues and skin. I am capable of learning through reading, through smelling, through hearing, through tasting."
Things are going well for Cog until he is badly hurt in an accident with a truck. When Cog wakes up he finds himself in a science facility. It is there that Cog discovers the truth and this discovery is truly terrible for Cog, his sister ADA, his new friends and even more importantly it could mean the whole world is in danger. Nathan has plans for world domination and be warned he has plans to insert computer chips in human brains too.
I love the word placement in this book. Take a look at these sentences
"Nathan smiles, but it is a very different kind of smile. It is a smaller kind that shows no teeth. I am unfamiliar with this kind of smile. It does not convey happiness or excitement or agreeability."
"The man strikes Proto with the hockey stick. Thwack. Proto clatters to the ground."
"So first we're going to gouge the X-module out of your brain."
I should mention the characters from the front cover are Cog, his sister ADA, and their new friends Trashbot and Proto the dog. The other important character is Car and he is heroic but also very funny.
Blurb from author site: Cog looks like a normal twelve-year-old boy. But his name is short for “cognitive development,” and he was built to learn. But after an accident leaves him damaged, Cog wakes up in an unknown lab—and Gina, the scientist who created and cared for him, is nowhere to be found. Surrounded by scientists who want to study him and remove his brain, Cog recruits four robot accomplices for a mission to find her. Cog, ADA, Proto, Trashbot, and Car’s journey will likely involve much cognitive development in the form of mistakes, but Cog is willing to risk everything to find his way back to Gina.
You may already know that I am drawn to books about robots. This is because they are often funny (there is a terrific supermarket scene in Cog) but these stories are often also dystopian and occasionally even political and always seem to be about the misuse of power. Cog contains all of this and more.
If the theme of world domination interests you try to find The Seven Professors of the Far North and The Girl who could Fly. Here is Greg van Eekout's web site and here are some companion reads about robots:
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