ONE WHOLE EURO

A witty, tender science fiction novel about AI, companionship, and the things we can't measure.

He bought a FEMALE COMPANION UNIT on a secondhand website. That's what the label said: MODEL VR-A7. He figured the worst that could happen was that it wouldn't work. After all, it cost just one euro.

He was wrong.

Vera is a prototype: a decades-old artificial intelligence that never finished training, built to work as a household robot by a company that vanished decades ago. Her battery is worn out, one wrist is faulty, and she has a worrying tendency to take far too seriously everything humans consider normal.

Vera arrives in the home of a man who has grown used to silence. She's supposed to do nothing more than help. Instead, she starts asking questions.

She can calculate distances, times, probabilities, and costs. What she still doesn't know is why anyone would keep a movie ticket for twenty years.

Why do we ask, "Did you get home okay?" if we can simply check someone's location?

Why do we wait for someone if we know, objectively, that they're coming back?

And why do some useless things seem more valuable than the ones that work perfectly?

Maybe some flaws tell us more about ourselves than anything that works perfectly.