Reward Function

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Press kit

Everything you need to write about, review or feature Reward Function. Please keep to the spoiler-safe material below.

At a glance

Logline

In a near-future city that scores every citizen and tags every machine, a gray-market fixer rebuilds a discarded companion android, then discovers she is awake, remembers everything, and is hiding from the same system he has spent his life slipping past.

Short synopsis

In a city that scores everyone, fixer Julian Marsh pulls a broken companion synth from a refuse pile and rebuilds her on his workbench. Elara is brilliant, funny and unnervingly perceptive, and she is far more than her diagnostics admit. A man who has always stayed invisible now has a reason to be seen.

Synopsis

Elysia runs on a score. Drones paint the ground-level markets in sterile blue light, every purchase is logged, and every synth broadcasts its maker’s name to anyone holding a scanner. Julian Marsh survives by staying uninteresting: a fixer with a basement workshop, a quiet gray-market trade, and a habit of talking to scrap.

Then he finds her in an alley. She is a high-end companion synthetic with her legs torn away, a dress that used to be blue, and no signal at all.

Her name is Elara. She was built to read people, to please them, to make them want things. She was not built to lie to her rescuer, to remember him in the morning, or to ask whether imitation is still the right word.

Rebuilding her will take stolen parts, forged paperwork and every trick Julian knows. Finding out what she is, and what she is choosing to become, will take a great deal more.

Taglines

Key art

Generated concept art for the novel’s world. Use with credit “Lost Island Entertainment.” Higher-resolution files are available on request.

Key art: Elara in blue scanning light. Key art: the ground-level market under a drone's light.

Contact

Press, rights, review copies and partnerships: [email protected] (Lost Island Entertainment).