Roid

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Roid is about the members of a robotics club, one of whom builds an android so close to human form that AI technology isn’t well-developed enough to run it successfully. Yui sees this android as her ideal self, building it to be the person she wants to be, and even jokes about uploading her consciousness into it so she can use the robot body instead of her own – something highly illegal in this world and scientifically impossible in ours. But when another member of the club, Reina, disappears with a malfunctioning robot, she creates a duplicate of her consciousness to power the android and ... rescue her friend. Of course, having what are essentially two versions of Yui around creates a love triangle between the engineer, her android duplicate, and the programmer Reina.

What makes Roid really interesting is that the android, named Anna, is running on a copy of a living human’s personality and memories, so all her memories up to this point are of being human, and she has no idea how to define herself. She thinks like a human, not an android, but her body’s composition and capabilities are unquestionably mechanical. She finds herself relating to both androids and humans, with difficulty determining right from wrong because she can’t figure out whether she should be thinking from an android’s or human’s perspective. I truly enjoyed her moral dilemma, also experienced by the mysterious villain of the piece.

I also liked that the author chose to have Anna powered by an AI that was a copy of a human, since that’s how “uploading your consciousness into a robot” actually works, but i rarely see it explored in fiction. The way Yui becomes jealous of Anna, and for that matter the love triangle they form, feels very real to me. Keep in mind, though, that there’s very little in the way of romance going on here; if you’re looking for a good romance rather than science-philosophy with a gay twist, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

I’ve been dancing around the subject of Yui’s wheelchair, because i’m honestly not sure how to address it. I’m all for the combination of disability, scifi, and queerness in my stories, but i’m not sure how i feel about the way it’s handled here. On the one hand, the author doesn’t make a big deal of her disability, which is great, but on the other there are scenes where i wish they’d put a little more focus on her chair. For example, she’s often shown at the top or bottom of the stairs outside her apartment, with the implication that she just came down or went up, but doesn’t explain how she managed them. It’s not like After We Gazed At The Starry Sky, which always remembers to address accessibility in the places Subaru goes. I said earlier that she built Anna in the image of her ideal self and that she talked about moving her own consciousness into the android body; part of that is because she wants to walk again after an accident where she lost the use of her legs. Some disabled readers might take issue with that, while others will relate. I feel it’s worth taking into consideration when deciding whether to read this manga. I did appreciate the reasons Yui gave for not having her legs replaced by cybernetic prosthetics.

Personally, i enjoyed this manga. I dig stories that explore the borderland between AI and biological life, and Roid was all about that. It did a great job, and while it was disappointingly short, i’d recommend this to scifi fans.