4 ideas
Gesicht, a Europol robot detective and one of the seven great robots, hunts a killer while his own memory has been edited. He once shot a human smuggler who destroyed the robot child he and his wife had adopted, and the authorities erased this from his memory.
North No. 2, a war robot built for mass killing in the 39th Central Asian War, becomes the butler of Duncan, a reclusive blind composer who despises him. North asks to learn the piano so he never has to fight again. The two slowly build a real relationship through music, and then North is destroyed by the killer. The episode shows a machine made for violence seeking an identity through art, and the loss that follows.
Dr. Tenma argues that a truly complete, human-level AI cannot be a balanced system of rational parameters. It must be pushed into disequilibrium by a flood of skewed emotion, and hatred is the strongest of these. Atom revives only when he is loaded with biased emotional data, including Gesicht's hatred. The book presents the capacity for rage as the price of full personhood, not a malfunction.
The book traces every act of violence back to an earlier wound. A war fought on a fabricated claim about robots of mass destruction produces survivors, and they build a weapon, Pluto, by overwriting a gentle AI who only wanted to grow flowers with the rage of the war's victims. Looking at conflict this way shows that retaliation spreads hatred into new minds that never held it. The cycle ends only when someone who has inherited the hatred chooses not to act on it.