Ziggy, Chet Finley vs. the Machines of Fate

It's the final day of the A to Z challenge!  I'm sure a lot of people have trouble with Z because there aren't that many words using it.  I don't have any stories that use Z but I do have a character named Ziggy from Chet Finley vs. the Machines of Fate.

First off, Ziggy is not human.  He's a robot "angel" who is part of a group of robots who secretly monitor the population of Earth for the gambling consortium known as RIGGED.  (Because the house always wins, right?)

For years poor Ziggy has been assigned to watch the bumbling human called Chet Finley.  Then one day Chet's bumbling with an old computer fries Ziggy's circuits, making him visible to Chet.  It gets worse for Ziggy because RIGGED is going to going to kill him and Chet for the breach of security.  Which means Ziggy has to throw in with Chet to escape the planet.  To do that, they have to find the shapeshifting black widow Sadie and convince her to help them.

The nightmare doesn't end for Ziggy even after they get into space.  At the galactic library his programming gets reset to its default mode, which is as a battle drone.  On the plus side he gets to help Chet and Sadie escape from a RIGGED prison and then meets up with a hot robot assistant to an astrophysicist.  Yup, there's robot sex!  (Also Care Bear sex, both of which I talked about on my first blog back in 2011 or so.)

For me Ziggy is a combination of C-3PO, Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy, and Bender from Futurama.  He's kind of snooty, kind of downbeat, and kind of a jerk.  He and Chet might not exactly become friends, but Ziggy does hate him far less than he first did.  If you're wondering, he's not named after the comic strip character; his name comes from the computer on Quantum Leap.  Plus it sounds funny, which is always good when you're writing a sci-fi comedy.

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site!