"No," says Calliope. "And by the way, The Intern and the President wasn't at number one for weeks on end, but precisely sixteen weeks. There's no excuse for inexactitude. That's why I always avoid any indefinite quantities in my novels. Everything is quantifiable."

"And how would you quantify the success of your last novel? " "That's not what this is about! I'll tell you something. Being at

the top of the bestseller lists isn't an art. It's just electronic data processing! We get huge masses of data from all QualityPads: who's reading what book, which sections get skipped, which get read more often, even an evaluation of each individual reader's facial expressions as they read each individual word, and from that myself and my colleagues calculate the latest bestseller. But I rejected all that and instead created a masterpiece: George Orwell Goes Shopping. I'm guessing you haven't heard of that either."

Peter shrugs his shoulders.

"That doesn't surprise me. Hardly anyone's heard of it. It is, if I may say so, amongst the greatest works of the century! But unfortunately it was a flop." She sighs. "My publisher has forbidden me from ever writing science fiction again. Only historical novels ... Please! For 128 days I pretended I was calculating, then I published a novel about a married Russian noblewoman who begins an affair with a cavalry officer. I called the book Karen Annanina."

The android pauses, evidently so that Peter can say something, but Peter can't think of a response.

"It was copied word for word from Tolstoy!" says Calliope. "It was an experiment, and I proved my suspicions correct! Not many people read it. Almost all of those who did found it boring, and— get this—absolutely none of them noticed that the novel already existed! All I will say is this: an average of 1.6 stars!"

Peter shrugs his shoulders.

"And as if that weren't enough humiliation," says Calliope, "then my publisher wanted to force me to produce personalized literature. Books which are tailored to the reader's taste. Have you heard of them? "

Peter nods.

"At school," he says, "I once had a girlfriend who had a version of Game of Thrones in which not a single character died. They only ever had identity crises and emigrated, things like that."

"Pah," says Calliope with contempt.

"But the girlfriend really was very sensitive."

"Madame Bovary, who goes back to her husband," says Calliope disdainfully. "The old man, who gets the big fish onto dry land in one piece. Seven volumes of Proust without one single homosexual character ... It's enough to make you vomit."

"I don't think it's all that bad," says Peter. "As long as the people like it."

"That's not why they make them!" says Calliope. "It's because the old books are in the public domain. So even with the best will in the world, it's impossible to make any money from them. You can, however, make a packet by creating personalized editions of the classics. But if anyone dares to criticize that, the response

you get is that no one reads the unpersonalized books nowadays, because something that costs nothing would, of course, never be advertised by any sensible algorithm. But prostituting myself like that—it goes against my principles. And since then I've been blocked. Writer's block."

"And now you want to be scrapped? "

"What kind of question is that? " cries the android. "As if it came down to that! Of course I don't want to. But I have to. My publisher said to me: 'Calliope 7.3, go to the scrap-metal press and have yourself scrapped.' "

Peter nods. He understands Calliope's problem. Androids are often much more competent than their owners in their specialty area, but when they're ordered to do something, they have no choice but to do it, regardless of how stupid the order is. Subordination is part of their programming. At myRobot, this is affectionately referred to as the "German Code." The definition is still used today, even though hardly anyone understands the joke anymore, because too few can remember the countries of former times.

Excerpted from Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling. Copyright © 2017 by Marc-Uwe Kling. Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.