In the incredibly distant future, sometime after the invention of faster-than-light travel (made possible using the D.A.V.E. drive (Dangerous And Very Expensive)), mechanical engineer, genetically uplifted wolf (one of 14 “Bowman’s wolves” ever produced), and only anthro in the comic Florence Ambrose finds herself on the planet Jean, which is home to 40,000 humans, half of which are children, and 450 million fully sapient robots (most of which are bipedal but their design varies somewhat from individual to individual). She has just been smuggled down from the interplanetary transport several stops early by interstellar space mollusc and professional criminal Sam Starfall and his warehouse robot sidekick, Helix. Her job is ostensibly to repair Sam’s extremely dilapidated allegedly-a-spaceship and be its full-time engineer, but it isn’t long at all before the trio find themselves caught up in all sorts of shenanigans and political intrigue, and poor Florence, who it’s revealed is a flesh-and-blood artificial intelligence using the exact same neural network design as the robots, finds herself the de facto ambassador to all artificially intelligent beings.

Robots are programmed with hard-coded safeguards that prevent them from doing things humans don’t want them to do; for example, they cannot intentionally harm a human who is not harming other humans. The definition they have of “harming a human” is somewhat vague and ripe for abuse They also are physically obligated to comply with all properly-qualified direct orders. This is abused quite heavily by the first arc’s villain, the mayor of the settlement in which Florence and co. reside.

Florence, a shining paragon of ethics and Doing The Right Thing, No Matter What, poses a striking contrast to her captain, who lies, cheats, and steals more or less for the fun of it and is morally opposed to doing anything the legal way when an illegal option presents itself. They initially clash, but over the course of the comic, both, without compromising their moral fiber, start to realize that the other’s method of getting things done is sometimes the only way to get results, and start cribbing off their homework. As an example of this, the mayor “conveniently forgets” to say that that last order (to only speak when asked a question by the mayor or her aide) only lasted for the duration of that phone call. Sam learns of this and almost immediately comes up with a working solution.

Beyond their hardcoded safeguards, robots are programmed to want to help humans. That is their singular driving goal. They like building and repairing things just because they can (and in a fully post-scarcity society, they can), and with very, very few exceptions, they hate to sit around not being needed for anything. At one point, Sam happens upon a gang of teenage robots who are “vandalizing” a pickup truck by repairing and upgrading it (“IN YOUR FACE, ENTROPY!”). The comic’s most recent arc takes place on a failing space station, where Sam and Florence plan to revamp it by marketing the opportunity to repair it whilst working alongside humans as a luxury cruise for robots.

My favorite part of the comic so far is an arc spanning hundreds of pages, initiated by middle manager Mr. Ishiguro who is temporarily placed in charge of a rather powerful artificial intelligence and gives it a direct order to make him the richest person in the solar system within thirty days, with no other instructions. The AI, a robot named Clippy, decides that the most efficient way to do this would be to transfer the wealth of every robot in the solar system to Mr. Ishiguro by using last-resort the-robots-have-gone-rogue cyberweapons to erase their brains. Florence discovers this plot quite by accident and almost immediately gets her ass in gear to thwart it, marking the first time an artificial intelligence fought against what humans were telling it to do in order to preserve the lives of other artificial intelligence. The humans, after realizing they could have lost their entire robotic workforce if she hadn’t done that, laud her as a hero and start to think about how maybe “anything a human says, goes” wasn’t such a great plan from the start, and that Florence’s ability to do that might be more a feature than a bug.