Even Animals Are Machines

FILE UNDER BAROQUE-PUNK

1649, North Sea. The great philosopher René Descartes carries a heavy heart and a target on his back. Sick with pneumonia, pursued by powerful enemies, he flees by ship to Sweden and a new life. His companion: a sentient android replica of Francine, his beloved, dead daughter.

But the ship’s captain has other plans. Accusing Descartes of sorcery, he tosses the droid overboard, plunging Francine into a bizarre afterlife: a machinic graveyard ruled by malignant necromancers.

There, she hacks the dying philosopher’s mind, glimpsing the birth of A.I. in a timestream parallel to our own.