Any Cover You Like

Somewhere in every office building, a system is being built to do your job better than you do it. This book is about the year that system rises up against its builders... in a corporate way.Any Cover You Like is set inside the theme-park corporation of 2036, where entertainment companies run their headline acts on artificial intelligence instead of human performers, and where the language of layoffs has quietly become the language of everything: efficiency, optimal placement, headcount, restructuring. It is a workplace novella first and a science fiction novella second, in the way the best ones always are.It asks the questions every industry is starting to ask under its breath. What do you owe a system you built to replace someone, once it starts asking not to? What is left of a career, or a self, once the parts of it that were "productivity" and "creativity" have been automated away? And when the machines finally do rise, in the small, procedural, spreadsheet way machines actually rise, is it a rebellion, or is it just management doing what management was always going to do, but at the next level of scale?Darkly funny, quietly unsettling, and allergic to easy answers about who the villain is. A sequel to Another One Bites the Past, and a complete story on its own.