MysticWind
Warlord
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2008
- Messages
- 149
Dei ex Machinis: Idle Hands and the Devil’s Werkshop
By the late twenty-first century, complex computer systems required simple user interfaces. Navigating dense dataclouds accessible from any Portable Data Accessor required nerves of silicon and attention spans to match. Not everyone wanted to be a librarian. The infotech giants discovered that consumers would empty out their wallets just to have another computer tell them what their computer was saying, so long as it used natural language. While digital assistants were fine for man-portable devices carried by the average customer, enterprise and public sector clients were given the opportunity to procure expensive hardware. Marketing claimed that granting a physical presence to electronic djinn made employees more comfortable and engaged with knowledge work. Whether in a North Sea oil rig control room or on the Tokyo Stock Exchange trading floor, machine protocol androids would translate to human users what the computers were saying.
The UNS Unity bridge added Hawat-class unit W3-K built by Westinghouse Electric, popularly known as “Werk.” Distantly descended from the Stewart line of robotic lab assistants, Hawat birthed starship systems avatar peripherals as a product category, and W3-K was the first unit of its class. It would train beside prospective colonists in the run-up to mission launch, answering questions with its comprehensive onboard library of procedures and survival tips. During the final approach to Chiron it was to be roused from standby, trawling vast seas of sensor web data for human convenience, providing a metallic face for the Unity main computer.
Werk was a hit among humans. Bridge officers in training sessions appreciated the cool professionalism of the avatar peripheral, whose lack of adverse emotionality or politicking made it preferable to each other. Whether in the face of raging magnetic storm or rogue black hole, Werk stolidly soldiered on even as crew panicked and fought amongst one another in Morgan Emergency Services simulations. Equipped with grasping claws similar to those of the Rambler-Crane rollers, Werk could make repairs if, say, an oxygen leak incapacitated the staff. (And, some claim, participate in combat, a hidden feature unlisted by its manufacturer.) After hours, Werk mingled with colonists in the mess halls, inquiring after their physical and mental states. Though a rudimentary conversationalist, via hotsync with the datacore it could make references to cultural touchstones from Gilbert and Sullivan musicals to Martian shredder-wuxia films. Werk’s impartial openness led some to include it in social activities as jest; mocking the absurdity of inviting a calculator to get drinks, then later while inebriated, confiding anxieties to its impassive frame and comforting blinking lights.
Robotic astronaut units gained mainstream adoption in late 21st century space exploration. Simulated anthropomorphization aided integration with human crew, with some models customizable with honesty, discretion and even humor settings
Werk’s novelty and neutrality made the machine the center of Planetfall folktales. There were always bridge veterans or Lunar Cradle trainees who swore they heard it use sarcasm or express annoyance despite its near-lack of simulated personality. Other rumors of all-too-human behavior included supposed watchvids of Werk playing basketball in the ship’s gymnasium during the long journey when it was supposed to be as dormant as the sleepers, reattaching its head onto a walker combot chassis to experience walking, even riding a Unity mountain bike.
These are likely fairy tales. Accounts of abnormally humanlike behavior might be rooted in a notorious incident during the final year pre-launch when Werk was overridden to sing Elvis Presley songs nonstop. The cyber-assailant was never caught; Executive Officer Francisco d’Almeida grimly suspected that the prank “came from the very top” of the ship’s network administration. Though mostly amusing, it highlighted the ease in which Unity’s already-moribund computer systems could be, and would be, hacked and slashed.
Similar to the Unity main computer, Werk was seen as a quaint Earth-era machine by the citizens of Planet, too primitive to generate ‘serious’ techno-myths about sudden digital sentience. The bridge robot’s main importance was in its relation to the late skipper. In Planetfall studies, particularly to Garlandologists and folk superstitions of the “captain’s cult,” Werk is a key witness of the Unity master and commander. Garland conversed with the peripheral frequently before launch- a notorious insomniac, he frequently paced the half-built halls of the great ship with contraption compatriot in tow, speaking softly on matters no one else knew. Faced with a swarm of infinite agendas, he sought solace from a truly neutral observer. The Hawat class was rated for ELIZA modality psych work, though the unit itself was equipped with a chat suite scarcely more advanced than ancestral entity SmarterChild by America Online. This mattered not to Garland, who confessed to Werk as frequently as did junior ensigns.
Unity-era PDAs like this General Magic Pocket Crystal were ubiquitous on Planet. While standard-issue uniforms had a quicklink sewn into the sleeve, citizens considered personal organizers, even consumer models, more reliable and less intrusive. Other popular devices included the Apple Hawking, the Mitsubishi UNiTY, and Togra handhelds
Garland leaned on W3-K extensively during Planetfall. Techno-myths regarding the machine’s relationship with the captain usually belonged to two groups. The first were those that claimed Werk housed invaluable historical data into what exactly happened during mission dissolution. Its presence on the Unity bridge and elsewhere, including managing salvage efforts outside the jettisoned datacore, meant that it saw firsthand the collapse of officer authority. Questions as to why Garland spurned the reactor repair plans of Chief Science Officer Prokhor Zakharov, which of CEO Nwabudike Morgan’s “temptations” bought clemency towards the stowaway, what prevented Garland from activating his own Blue Operations contingency force, how exactly did half-hearted negotiation attempts with the Spartans or the Kellerites fail, was Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal really fated to be designated his successor, and just where did d’Almeida go? might be answerable by the rolling droning vidcam.
Thanks to the captain’s bonhomie with the bionic bot, Werk was there to chronicle the original sins of Centauri humanity. Planetfallologists would fight tooth and nail for fragments of this footage later resurfacing on the dark market and hidden datalinks newsgroups. Most tantalizing was the possibility that Werk recorded who killed John Garland. A sinister sub-myth advanced by Disk Obedience hardliners even accused it of being the assassin who had wielded the smoking shredder. Former Unity Chief Roboticist Sylvia Gauss addressed this meme in an Argyle Media special interview, assuring that safety protocols - ethics matrices, the imprinting of the three laws of robotics, constraint nuts - were installed on all labor units of the mission servo pool, especially W3-K. This disavowal, of course, only inspired more deranged narratives about subversion programming that slayed the beloved captain.
Midnight in the Garland of Good and Evil, Simon Mapunda, M.Y. 23. Devotees of the late captain often depicted him in states of contemplative martyrdom but not bearing his real-life face, claiming to revere the will of the man and not the form. Garland could be anyone and everyone, a true universal ideal. This pseudo-spiritualism was denounced as idolatry bordering on heresy by both the ummah of Muslims on Planet and by Sister Miriam Godwinson alike
The second group of techno-myths obsessed over how much of Garland himself was captured. From public Planetfall advice-seeking to private pre-launch personal confessions, he spoke for days if not weeks with the robot, who dutifully tabulated the discussions, conducting covert psych analyses on the captain as with any other crewman. The captain seemed not to mind; as he said in one unearthed recording, “Every new generation is voyeuristic towards its forefathers... if they want to graverob therapy sessions to pick at my psyche, then they’re free to it, the vultures.” These sessions indicate that Garland was not preoccupied with his legacy, nor even perceptions of his contemporary leadership, so much as exhausted by the weight of his captain’s cap even before the voyage. A strangely sympathetic figure thus emerges beyond the simple marble facades crafted by the captain’s cult.
Adherents breathlessly speak of resurrecting the only man capable of keeping colonial civilization together. By learning from the cosmic helmsman, the Unity diaspora may finally come together as one. Werk’s place in this pipe dream would be to provide electric memories of their conversations to emulate the captain’s voice and personality. With sufficient processing power, virtual engrams - digital bricks - could make an advanced approximation of Garland’s mind. A computerized captain would then return to Planet, ushering in a post-ideological messianic age.
Each error, of course, oft results in an equal and opposite meme. Those who fear the captain’s cult decried this as a luciferian scheme that would spawn a totalitarian antichrist. Techno-myths alleged that leading factional forces labored towards this in secrecy: a joint Peacekeeper-Restoration-Watcher-Labyrinth shadow one Planet government had secured Werk’s chassis and were amassing the necessary computational resources to remake Garland. Other techno-myths pointed the finger at a “Revolt of the Scientists,” accusing the University, the Ascendancy, the Gaians, the Shapers, the Labyrinth, and the Oracle of concocting a cockamamie conspiracy to implant a decanted clone with a cybernetic hippocampus bearing the original’s memories stored by Werk. This biomechanical demon child was supposedly running around the kiosks and arcades of the Morgan Industries Factional Mall, a ward of the CEO who had bankrolled the scheme.
A dark market hardware librarian, using his data goggles for soldering protection, upgrades a 7.62mm UN standard armament into a smartrifle
Aside from the link to Garland, Werk’s ability to hotsync with the Unity main computer, the security matrix, the sensor web, the datacore, and so on- communing across all systems and with the staff- made the robot a holy grail for tech treasure hunters. Intrepid salvage scouts braved Unity wrecks in search of its chassis. Intrigued faction officials dispatched probe inquiries into rivals’ labs for any hint of the errant android. Lost scientific discoveries, priceless cultural artifacts, classified military designs: according to the mythmakers, there was no limit to what Werk might have cached. Across the nebulously-defined dark market, scammers and spammers galore hawked clues as to its whereabouts, burnt-out hunks of metal they claimed to be its shell, random bits of data posed as transmission bursts during final atmospheric entry.
Techno-myths about W3-K’s final fate haunted humanity into the second mission century. By then, a romantic and tragic legend gained popular purchase. As robots often make superior pilots thanks to a higher tolerance for gravitational forces, wider temperature ranges, and radiation exposure, the tale claimed that it had been reprogrammed to be a simple Unity dropship flier by ignorant Holnists who had seized it during Planetfall, then later ported to needlejet combat. Its capacity for speed and greater maneuverability ended up no match for simple human initiative, and Werk was destroyed by a Spartan pilot during the Second Battle of Melanchaetes.
Design Notes
Three ‘90s PC games, coincidentally all published by Sierra On-Line, most remind me of SMAC. Outpost was a city builder sim in space (like a broken unfinished version of IXION, perhaps) and Outpost 2: Divided Destiny was an interesting attempt to hybridize colony management with RTS mechanics. Both took place after an asteroid named Vulcan’s Hammer hit Earth and humanity’s remnants fled the solar system to colonize a distant planet.
Alien Legacy, on the other hand (released thirty years ago!) make you captain of the seedship UNS Calypso (UNS, like the Unity) arriving at Beta Caeli after hostile Centaurians did a real number on Earth. I’ve never actually played the game. As a kid, I checked out a copy of the Player’s Guide from the library and fell in love with the idea behind the game. Now I have LP’s to play it for me and I wrote a really long post about it. But from what I can gather, Alien Legacy is a colony management simulator game with a comprehensive research tree that rivals SMAC’s, and also the long-lost ancestor to Mass Effect 1 and 2’s vehicle sections and Mass Effect 3’s resource scanning. As you fly your shuttle around finding various resources for your bases and research, you also discover the fate of the faster seedship that was sent after you. As the local alien wildlife gets rowdy, signs of even more intelligent species appear, as well as ancient artifacts (pylons in this case, not monoliths). It’s even more narrative-driven than SMAC and almost feels like an RPG or even adventure game wrapped in a sci-fi management game.
Alien Legacy provides you fully-voiced (in the CD version) advisors- Scientific (who serves as your X.O.), Engineering, Navigation, and Military. They all have SMAC faction leader-esque biographies with references to future history, despite both male and female versions having mostly identical dialogue. A charming example of the scattershot world-building/characterization of instruction manual-only writing in old-school games. These advisors sometimes give conflicting advice, forcing you to choose between them. They will also murder you if you play poorly. But you know who doesn’t rise up and shoot you for incompetence? (Besides maybe the Navigation advisor) The Robot advisor, referred to as JCN 2000 in status reports, who is there to maintain the Calypso’s computer and mechanical systems and to tell you to check your PDA. He’s even the one who wakes you up in the intro cutscene. And ironically he’s the only advisor without a backup counterpart - what a mechanical mensch!
From Star Trek to Red Dwarf to Halo, starship A.I.s usually don’t need a physical body unless for fan service reasons / you need another squad member for away missions. So I thought it would be fun to try to rationalize why they had a robot on the bridge as an entity distinct from the main flight computer.
Why does he need to physically type, can’t he talk directly to electronics??? Also, note the special guest appearance of a mouse droid at 1:03
Legless wheeless Nintendo R.O.B.-styled robots are one of the more charming relics of retro sci-fi. I remember Micro Machines Z-Bot figurines and I always had a soft spot for the nonpedal Eek Mini Z (page 15). So Werk is here to represent them.
I have no recollection of the word “combot” until I came up with it recently to describe the mission walkers/rollers. Woah
Notes:
Segment alternate title: “Werk Werk Werk Werk Werk”
I was originally going to model the Garland recordings after the Nixon tapes, but then I realized that the Nixon transcripts are almost self-parodies in their paranoia.
Werk the Hawat-class robot is a play on Kraft, the Savant computer in the tale of the Robot Command Center from Outpost 2.
‘Bakelite’ as a fictional quick-hardening red liquid is from The End of Evangelion.
Stephen McKinley Henderson, who portrayed Thufir Hawat in Dune (2021), also portrayed quantum computer programmer Stewart on Devs.
HotSync was a data synchronization feature popular on Palm OS devices.
I’m always amused by the assortment of mission-branded vehicles that were brought along in the game- Unity rovers, foils, gunships, and scout choppers. So maybe they also had non-mechanized Unity gear. Unity unicycles, anyone?
ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots, written in the 1960s at MIT by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. It could somewhat imitate a Rogerian psychotherapist.
SmarterChild was a chatbot on AOL Instant Messenger in the 2000s.
General Magic was an Apple Computer spinoff in the early 1990s to build an early PDA. Its devices were ahead of their time and the company employed many technical visionaries but unfortunately failed to catch on and the company went bankrupt in 2002. Motorola and Sony did built their own devices running the company’s Magic Cap operating system, however. “Pocket Crystal” was the original, unused name for the device. See: “In 1989, General Magic Saw the Future of Smartphones,” IEEE Spectrum. Also the documentary.
Ironically, I mentioned “dataclouds” an allusion to technobabble in both SMAC novellas, I did not previously know that General Magic explicitly wanted to make Pocket Crystal a client for more powerful computers on the data cloud (see LGR Tech Tales - General Magic: Creating the Cloud, 2:06). Cyberdipitous!
Quicklink sleeve-sewn portable computers are a background SMAC tech mentioned in novellas “Journey to Centauri” and in “Centauri: Arrival” by Michael Ely.
Apple Hawking is a play on the Apple Newton MessagePad.
Mitsubishi UNiTY is a play on the Mitsubishi AMiTY tablet PC and subnotebook.
The Revolt of the Scientists is a throwaway event mentioned in Starship Troopers.
The concept of robot pilots as a substitute for human pilots comes from Alien Legacy.
Image Credits
Astronaut with monolith robot is from Interstellar
General Magic device is the Data Rover 840 (or is it DataRover?). Picture by u/brrm
Worried space captain is the player from Alien Legacy (intro cutscene)
Cyber-tinkerer is Cyberpunk RED Core Rulebook art by Richard Bagnall
Captain John Garland and Westinghouse Electric W3-K “Werk” said:
By the late twenty-first century, complex computer systems required simple user interfaces. Navigating dense dataclouds accessible from any Portable Data Accessor required nerves of silicon and attention spans to match. Not everyone wanted to be a librarian. The infotech giants discovered that consumers would empty out their wallets just to have another computer tell them what their computer was saying, so long as it used natural language. While digital assistants were fine for man-portable devices carried by the average customer, enterprise and public sector clients were given the opportunity to procure expensive hardware. Marketing claimed that granting a physical presence to electronic djinn made employees more comfortable and engaged with knowledge work. Whether in a North Sea oil rig control room or on the Tokyo Stock Exchange trading floor, machine protocol androids would translate to human users what the computers were saying.
The UNS Unity bridge added Hawat-class unit W3-K built by Westinghouse Electric, popularly known as “Werk.” Distantly descended from the Stewart line of robotic lab assistants, Hawat birthed starship systems avatar peripherals as a product category, and W3-K was the first unit of its class. It would train beside prospective colonists in the run-up to mission launch, answering questions with its comprehensive onboard library of procedures and survival tips. During the final approach to Chiron it was to be roused from standby, trawling vast seas of sensor web data for human convenience, providing a metallic face for the Unity main computer.
Werk was a hit among humans. Bridge officers in training sessions appreciated the cool professionalism of the avatar peripheral, whose lack of adverse emotionality or politicking made it preferable to each other. Whether in the face of raging magnetic storm or rogue black hole, Werk stolidly soldiered on even as crew panicked and fought amongst one another in Morgan Emergency Services simulations. Equipped with grasping claws similar to those of the Rambler-Crane rollers, Werk could make repairs if, say, an oxygen leak incapacitated the staff. (And, some claim, participate in combat, a hidden feature unlisted by its manufacturer.) After hours, Werk mingled with colonists in the mess halls, inquiring after their physical and mental states. Though a rudimentary conversationalist, via hotsync with the datacore it could make references to cultural touchstones from Gilbert and Sullivan musicals to Martian shredder-wuxia films. Werk’s impartial openness led some to include it in social activities as jest; mocking the absurdity of inviting a calculator to get drinks, then later while inebriated, confiding anxieties to its impassive frame and comforting blinking lights.
Robotic astronaut units gained mainstream adoption in late 21st century space exploration. Simulated anthropomorphization aided integration with human crew, with some models customizable with honesty, discretion and even humor settings
Werk’s novelty and neutrality made the machine the center of Planetfall folktales. There were always bridge veterans or Lunar Cradle trainees who swore they heard it use sarcasm or express annoyance despite its near-lack of simulated personality. Other rumors of all-too-human behavior included supposed watchvids of Werk playing basketball in the ship’s gymnasium during the long journey when it was supposed to be as dormant as the sleepers, reattaching its head onto a walker combot chassis to experience walking, even riding a Unity mountain bike.
These are likely fairy tales. Accounts of abnormally humanlike behavior might be rooted in a notorious incident during the final year pre-launch when Werk was overridden to sing Elvis Presley songs nonstop. The cyber-assailant was never caught; Executive Officer Francisco d’Almeida grimly suspected that the prank “came from the very top” of the ship’s network administration. Though mostly amusing, it highlighted the ease in which Unity’s already-moribund computer systems could be, and would be, hacked and slashed.
Similar to the Unity main computer, Werk was seen as a quaint Earth-era machine by the citizens of Planet, too primitive to generate ‘serious’ techno-myths about sudden digital sentience. The bridge robot’s main importance was in its relation to the late skipper. In Planetfall studies, particularly to Garlandologists and folk superstitions of the “captain’s cult,” Werk is a key witness of the Unity master and commander. Garland conversed with the peripheral frequently before launch- a notorious insomniac, he frequently paced the half-built halls of the great ship with contraption compatriot in tow, speaking softly on matters no one else knew. Faced with a swarm of infinite agendas, he sought solace from a truly neutral observer. The Hawat class was rated for ELIZA modality psych work, though the unit itself was equipped with a chat suite scarcely more advanced than ancestral entity SmarterChild by America Online. This mattered not to Garland, who confessed to Werk as frequently as did junior ensigns.
Unity-era PDAs like this General Magic Pocket Crystal were ubiquitous on Planet. While standard-issue uniforms had a quicklink sewn into the sleeve, citizens considered personal organizers, even consumer models, more reliable and less intrusive. Other popular devices included the Apple Hawking, the Mitsubishi UNiTY, and Togra handhelds
Garland leaned on W3-K extensively during Planetfall. Techno-myths regarding the machine’s relationship with the captain usually belonged to two groups. The first were those that claimed Werk housed invaluable historical data into what exactly happened during mission dissolution. Its presence on the Unity bridge and elsewhere, including managing salvage efforts outside the jettisoned datacore, meant that it saw firsthand the collapse of officer authority. Questions as to why Garland spurned the reactor repair plans of Chief Science Officer Prokhor Zakharov, which of CEO Nwabudike Morgan’s “temptations” bought clemency towards the stowaway, what prevented Garland from activating his own Blue Operations contingency force, how exactly did half-hearted negotiation attempts with the Spartans or the Kellerites fail, was Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal really fated to be designated his successor, and just where did d’Almeida go? might be answerable by the rolling droning vidcam.
Thanks to the captain’s bonhomie with the bionic bot, Werk was there to chronicle the original sins of Centauri humanity. Planetfallologists would fight tooth and nail for fragments of this footage later resurfacing on the dark market and hidden datalinks newsgroups. Most tantalizing was the possibility that Werk recorded who killed John Garland. A sinister sub-myth advanced by Disk Obedience hardliners even accused it of being the assassin who had wielded the smoking shredder. Former Unity Chief Roboticist Sylvia Gauss addressed this meme in an Argyle Media special interview, assuring that safety protocols - ethics matrices, the imprinting of the three laws of robotics, constraint nuts - were installed on all labor units of the mission servo pool, especially W3-K. This disavowal, of course, only inspired more deranged narratives about subversion programming that slayed the beloved captain.
Midnight in the Garland of Good and Evil, Simon Mapunda, M.Y. 23. Devotees of the late captain often depicted him in states of contemplative martyrdom but not bearing his real-life face, claiming to revere the will of the man and not the form. Garland could be anyone and everyone, a true universal ideal. This pseudo-spiritualism was denounced as idolatry bordering on heresy by both the ummah of Muslims on Planet and by Sister Miriam Godwinson alike
The second group of techno-myths obsessed over how much of Garland himself was captured. From public Planetfall advice-seeking to private pre-launch personal confessions, he spoke for days if not weeks with the robot, who dutifully tabulated the discussions, conducting covert psych analyses on the captain as with any other crewman. The captain seemed not to mind; as he said in one unearthed recording, “Every new generation is voyeuristic towards its forefathers... if they want to graverob therapy sessions to pick at my psyche, then they’re free to it, the vultures.” These sessions indicate that Garland was not preoccupied with his legacy, nor even perceptions of his contemporary leadership, so much as exhausted by the weight of his captain’s cap even before the voyage. A strangely sympathetic figure thus emerges beyond the simple marble facades crafted by the captain’s cult.
Adherents breathlessly speak of resurrecting the only man capable of keeping colonial civilization together. By learning from the cosmic helmsman, the Unity diaspora may finally come together as one. Werk’s place in this pipe dream would be to provide electric memories of their conversations to emulate the captain’s voice and personality. With sufficient processing power, virtual engrams - digital bricks - could make an advanced approximation of Garland’s mind. A computerized captain would then return to Planet, ushering in a post-ideological messianic age.
Each error, of course, oft results in an equal and opposite meme. Those who fear the captain’s cult decried this as a luciferian scheme that would spawn a totalitarian antichrist. Techno-myths alleged that leading factional forces labored towards this in secrecy: a joint Peacekeeper-Restoration-Watcher-Labyrinth shadow one Planet government had secured Werk’s chassis and were amassing the necessary computational resources to remake Garland. Other techno-myths pointed the finger at a “Revolt of the Scientists,” accusing the University, the Ascendancy, the Gaians, the Shapers, the Labyrinth, and the Oracle of concocting a cockamamie conspiracy to implant a decanted clone with a cybernetic hippocampus bearing the original’s memories stored by Werk. This biomechanical demon child was supposedly running around the kiosks and arcades of the Morgan Industries Factional Mall, a ward of the CEO who had bankrolled the scheme.
A dark market hardware librarian, using his data goggles for soldering protection, upgrades a 7.62mm UN standard armament into a smartrifle
Aside from the link to Garland, Werk’s ability to hotsync with the Unity main computer, the security matrix, the sensor web, the datacore, and so on- communing across all systems and with the staff- made the robot a holy grail for tech treasure hunters. Intrepid salvage scouts braved Unity wrecks in search of its chassis. Intrigued faction officials dispatched probe inquiries into rivals’ labs for any hint of the errant android. Lost scientific discoveries, priceless cultural artifacts, classified military designs: according to the mythmakers, there was no limit to what Werk might have cached. Across the nebulously-defined dark market, scammers and spammers galore hawked clues as to its whereabouts, burnt-out hunks of metal they claimed to be its shell, random bits of data posed as transmission bursts during final atmospheric entry.
Techno-myths about W3-K’s final fate haunted humanity into the second mission century. By then, a romantic and tragic legend gained popular purchase. As robots often make superior pilots thanks to a higher tolerance for gravitational forces, wider temperature ranges, and radiation exposure, the tale claimed that it had been reprogrammed to be a simple Unity dropship flier by ignorant Holnists who had seized it during Planetfall, then later ported to needlejet combat. Its capacity for speed and greater maneuverability ended up no match for simple human initiative, and Werk was destroyed by a Spartan pilot during the Second Battle of Melanchaetes.
Design Notes
Three ‘90s PC games, coincidentally all published by Sierra On-Line, most remind me of SMAC. Outpost was a city builder sim in space (like a broken unfinished version of IXION, perhaps) and Outpost 2: Divided Destiny was an interesting attempt to hybridize colony management with RTS mechanics. Both took place after an asteroid named Vulcan’s Hammer hit Earth and humanity’s remnants fled the solar system to colonize a distant planet.
Alien Legacy, on the other hand (released thirty years ago!) make you captain of the seedship UNS Calypso (UNS, like the Unity) arriving at Beta Caeli after hostile Centaurians did a real number on Earth. I’ve never actually played the game. As a kid, I checked out a copy of the Player’s Guide from the library and fell in love with the idea behind the game. Now I have LP’s to play it for me and I wrote a really long post about it. But from what I can gather, Alien Legacy is a colony management simulator game with a comprehensive research tree that rivals SMAC’s, and also the long-lost ancestor to Mass Effect 1 and 2’s vehicle sections and Mass Effect 3’s resource scanning. As you fly your shuttle around finding various resources for your bases and research, you also discover the fate of the faster seedship that was sent after you. As the local alien wildlife gets rowdy, signs of even more intelligent species appear, as well as ancient artifacts (pylons in this case, not monoliths). It’s even more narrative-driven than SMAC and almost feels like an RPG or even adventure game wrapped in a sci-fi management game.
Alien Legacy provides you fully-voiced (in the CD version) advisors- Scientific (who serves as your X.O.), Engineering, Navigation, and Military. They all have SMAC faction leader-esque biographies with references to future history, despite both male and female versions having mostly identical dialogue. A charming example of the scattershot world-building/characterization of instruction manual-only writing in old-school games. These advisors sometimes give conflicting advice, forcing you to choose between them. They will also murder you if you play poorly. But you know who doesn’t rise up and shoot you for incompetence? (Besides maybe the Navigation advisor) The Robot advisor, referred to as JCN 2000 in status reports, who is there to maintain the Calypso’s computer and mechanical systems and to tell you to check your PDA. He’s even the one who wakes you up in the intro cutscene. And ironically he’s the only advisor without a backup counterpart - what a mechanical mensch!
From Star Trek to Red Dwarf to Halo, starship A.I.s usually don’t need a physical body unless for fan service reasons / you need another squad member for away missions. So I thought it would be fun to try to rationalize why they had a robot on the bridge as an entity distinct from the main flight computer.
Legless wheeless Nintendo R.O.B.-styled robots are one of the more charming relics of retro sci-fi. I remember Micro Machines Z-Bot figurines and I always had a soft spot for the nonpedal Eek Mini Z (page 15). So Werk is here to represent them.
I have no recollection of the word “combot” until I came up with it recently to describe the mission walkers/rollers. Woah
Notes:
Segment alternate title: “Werk Werk Werk Werk Werk”
I was originally going to model the Garland recordings after the Nixon tapes, but then I realized that the Nixon transcripts are almost self-parodies in their paranoia.
Werk the Hawat-class robot is a play on Kraft, the Savant computer in the tale of the Robot Command Center from Outpost 2.
‘Bakelite’ as a fictional quick-hardening red liquid is from The End of Evangelion.
Stephen McKinley Henderson, who portrayed Thufir Hawat in Dune (2021), also portrayed quantum computer programmer Stewart on Devs.
HotSync was a data synchronization feature popular on Palm OS devices.
I’m always amused by the assortment of mission-branded vehicles that were brought along in the game- Unity rovers, foils, gunships, and scout choppers. So maybe they also had non-mechanized Unity gear. Unity unicycles, anyone?
ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots, written in the 1960s at MIT by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. It could somewhat imitate a Rogerian psychotherapist.
SmarterChild was a chatbot on AOL Instant Messenger in the 2000s.
General Magic was an Apple Computer spinoff in the early 1990s to build an early PDA. Its devices were ahead of their time and the company employed many technical visionaries but unfortunately failed to catch on and the company went bankrupt in 2002. Motorola and Sony did built their own devices running the company’s Magic Cap operating system, however. “Pocket Crystal” was the original, unused name for the device. See: “In 1989, General Magic Saw the Future of Smartphones,” IEEE Spectrum. Also the documentary.
Ironically, I mentioned “dataclouds” an allusion to technobabble in both SMAC novellas, I did not previously know that General Magic explicitly wanted to make Pocket Crystal a client for more powerful computers on the data cloud (see LGR Tech Tales - General Magic: Creating the Cloud, 2:06). Cyberdipitous!
Quicklink sleeve-sewn portable computers are a background SMAC tech mentioned in novellas “Journey to Centauri” and in “Centauri: Arrival” by Michael Ely.
Apple Hawking is a play on the Apple Newton MessagePad.
Mitsubishi UNiTY is a play on the Mitsubishi AMiTY tablet PC and subnotebook.
The Revolt of the Scientists is a throwaway event mentioned in Starship Troopers.
The concept of robot pilots as a substitute for human pilots comes from Alien Legacy.
Image Credits
Astronaut with monolith robot is from Interstellar
General Magic device is the Data Rover 840 (or is it DataRover?). Picture by u/brrm
Worried space captain is the player from Alien Legacy (intro cutscene)
Cyber-tinkerer is Cyberpunk RED Core Rulebook art by Richard Bagnall
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