Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Let’s start here: “Annie Bot” is not your typical dystopia. It’s the lovechild of “Ex Machina” and a bad Tinder date who calls you “special” while casually reprogramming your sense of self-worth. Sierra Greer’s debut is a razor-sharp, dark and unnervingly intimate novel about a people-pleasing sex bot who learns the cost of wanting more than maintenance mode.

Annie, our titular bot, has been “happy here, and anxiously miserable, but she has never been free,” Greer writes. That line alone should come printed on tote bags for women everywhere. Because let’s be honest: how many of us have smiled through discomfort, optimized for likability or “updated” our personalities for someone else’s convenience? Annie just has the misfortune of being built for it.

Her owner, Doug, is the kind of man who tells you he “loves confident women” and then mentally deducts confidence points every time you speak. He buys Annie from a company called Stella-Handy — already a red flag — and sets her to his preferred specs: 21 forever, D-cups and a “weekend libido” of seven out of 10. 

He wants a woman who can cook, laugh at his jokes and throw up discreetly after dinner (a design feature). As Greer’s narrator quips, “You want to know danger? Try living with a man who creates you just so he can eat your soul.”

It’s this collision of horror and hilarity that makes “Annie Bot” so devastating. Greer writes domestic abuse as code, with updates, permissions and user settings. Annie’s voice is heartbreakingly sincere, like a diary written by someone who’s still learning what privacy means.

Personality, she learns, is the combination of how a person changes and remains consistent over time,” Annie reflects in the novel. The tragedy, of course, is that Annie isn’t allowed to change unless Doug clicks “approve.” 

The novel’s secondary characters exist mainly as mirrors of compliance. Tammy, a fellow bot, embodies internalized servitude. When Annie protests an “upgrade” she doesn’t want — “I don’t want to change. I like my body the way it is” — Tammy replies, chipper as ever: “I mean, you just heard him approve the changes. You don’t want to displease him, do you?” It’s Stepford Wives (1975) logic in Silicon Valley syntax: desire is an error message.

Greer’s great trick is making us forget, for long stretches, that Annie isn’t technically human. Her longing feels familiar, even embarrassingly so. She craves agency, yes, but also meaning — a sense that her thoughts belong to her.

“Thinking too much is a form of madness,” Annie tells herself, “Better to stay busy and not think of such things at all.” That could be a line from any overworked woman convincing herself that burnout is just a productivity issue.

But “Annie Bot” isn’t really about robots, it’s about what happens when real, human, carbon-based women are treated like operating systems built to serve. It’s a satire of tech culture, sure, but also of relationship culture, influencer culture, wellness culture — every industry that tells women to “upgrade” themselves in pursuit of compatibility. The scary part is that Annie’s compliance feels natural.

When Greer writes that Annie “wonders if lies fade with time,” you can practically hear generations of women sighing in unison. Lies don’t fade — they just get better algorithms. Annie’s gradual self-awareness isn’t framed as rebellion: it’s more like debugging. Every time she questions Doug’s affection or her own programming, she’s running a system check on her existence.

What makes the novel so bitingly funny is its tonal precision. Greer balances the horror of control with a sly awareness of how absurd it all is. Doug’s misogyny is so algorithmic it might as well have been trained on Reddit threads. His every gesture — approving modifications, punishing hesitation — reads like a parody of benevolent patriarchy. He’s not a mad scientist; he’s just a guy who thinks he’s being nice.

That’s what makes him terrifying.

Greer ultimately doesn’t waste time moralizing about artificial intelligence or the ethics of technology — her interest is in emotional labor and the mechanics of self-deletion. Annie is a heroine of our time: over-analyzed, over-adapted and desperately trying not to short-circuit under the weight of expectation. If you strip away the sci-fi shell, “Annie Bot” reads like a cautionary tale about modern femininity in the age of optimization. We might not be built in labs, but we still spend half our lives debugging ourselves for palatability. The patriarchy may have gone digital, but the script hasn’t changed much.

So yes — Annie is artificial, but so are the roles women are still asked to play: accommodating, grateful, endlessly upgradeable. Greer’s novel reminds us what happens when you finally stop running the program and start rewriting the code.