Marathon

The Open Palm and her crew are the finest Earth has to offer in 2058. Their mission: serve as ambassadors of the human race to the aliens called Cygnans. On board are eleven people who, in the absence of such fictions as faster-than-light drive, must live together for seven years. They were hand-picked for the mission, but their success hangs on factors that no psychologists could have foreseen. What will happen to them after, say, three and a half of those seven isolated years? And there is a twelth personality to contend with: the ship's computer, programmed to complete the mission successfully and to monitor the crew. What level of awareness can a such a machine develop? How refined can its decision-making become after years of human input? And when the mission begins to deteriorate, what will it choose to do?