Michael Kube-McDowell - Odyssey

Massey survival pods are not equipped with windows. Instead they have a limpet pack, a disc-shaped sensor array capable of sliding across the outer surface of smooth-hulled spacecraft. The G-85 does not have a full environmental recycle system, and its resources are limited to approximately two weeks. They are also equipped with locator beacons, which broadcast the pods’ locations constantly. Massey survival pods are the primary safety system on most of the large commercial carriers, the equivalent of the lifeboat.

MONITOR 5: Supervisor robots are marvels of simplicity and elegance of design. Their structure is composed of flexible, inert, non-organic duodecahedral fragments capable of directed rearrangement (morphallaxis). These fragments contain kilometers of circuitry and megabytes of programming. With the right command codes the forms of these robots are infinitely malleable.

Supervisor robots are an infinity of specialized forms with one generalized package. Their skin is a metallic pale blue. The supervisors Derec encounters lack the customary red tracking marker that telegraphs the direction of the robot’s visual sensors. Like all robots, they are incapable of violating the Three Laws of Robotics. Their positronic brains are incapable of forgetting.

ALPHA: This robot is constructed by Derec from salvage aboard Aranimas’s ship. The basic data library is contained in five removable memory cubes in a compartment located in the chest area.

Its extensive positronic memory is reserved completely for the business of learning from experience. Its artificial intelligence is expandable and flexible. The positronic brain is a three-pound lump of platinum-iridium that is the repository for the fundamental postitronic potentials governing its activity, for the temporary potentials representing thought and decision, and for the pathways representing learning.

Like Derec, Alpha is an amnesiac, though in this case its memories were wiped when it was destroyed. As an essentially new construct, it has been reprogrammed. Alpha’s new arm comes from a Supervisor robot and is constructed of the same infinitely malleable material that all supervisors are composed of.

MICHAEL P. KUBE-McDOWELL

Michael P. Kube-McDowell was raised in Camden, New Jersey. He attended Michigan State University as a National Merit Scholar, holds a master’s degree in science education, and was honored for teaching excellence by the 1985 White House Commission on Presidential scholars. Kube-McDowell’s stories have appeared in such magazines as Analog, Asimov’s, Amazing, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as in various anthologies published in the U. S. and Europe. Three of his stories were adapted as episodes for the TV series Tales from the Darkside. He is the author of a highly praised future-history trilogy consisting of the novels Emprise, Enigma, and Empery.