Gizmo Origin: A Colony Mars Short Story

by Gerald M. Kilby

Genres: Literary Fiction; Science Fiction; Steampunk

Synopsis

When you’re stranded on an alien planet, all alone with no hope of being found, it’s good to be a highly skilled engineer with the ability to fashion your very own robotic friend. Take a standard maintenance droid, hook it up the primary colony AI, imbue it with a self-learning neural-network, and feed it the complete works of Oscar Wilde as the basis for its grammatical lexicon. And voila, you have yourself a friend to stop you going insane — just so long as it doesn’t drive you crazy first. More scrapyard than hi-tech, more steampunk than space-age, Gizmo is ready to help in anyway it can. Generally by letting you know just how smart it is and the probability of you dying within the next 24 hours.

Release date: June 10, 2020

Publisher: Outer Planet Media