Mycroft Holmes (computer)

In Robert A. Heinlein's novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)", the character Mycroft Holmes is a self-aware computer system entrusted with running the life-support systems, communications, payroll and many other things, in a penal colony underground in the Moon or "Luna". Mycroft eventually sides with characters inciting a revolution to free Luna, and is instrumental in their victory against the Lunar Authority on Earth.The name 'Mycroft Holmes' is given to the computer by one of the characters, from the HOLMES acronym of his official name "High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L". In fact it is Heinlein's tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional Mycroft Holmes, brother of the famous Sherlock Holmes (in the book the tribute is compounded by stating that the computer was nicknamed for "Mycroft Holmes, in a story written by Dr. Watson before he founded IBM").

Mycroft most often goes under the name "Mike", but also adopts a female persona on occasion called "Michelle", and appears in public as "Adam Selene", the reclusive leader of the revolutionary movement. Adam Selene is eventually "killed" in the Battle in the Corridors when it becomes inconvenient for Mike to continue to pose as Adam Selene. He also goes under many other names and personalities, pretending to be his own secretary and several of the main characters, among others.

In the novel, Heinlein posits advanced Artificial Intelligence software for the consciousness of the character of Mike. Mike's awakening is a fictional example of the "emergent theory" of consciousness. Mike was originally installed to control the mass driver catapult mechanism and control the flight of pilot-less freighters; he was vastly under-utilised in this role however and so the Luna Authority gave him more and more tasks to do, and more and more resources (extra memory, processing units, neural networks etc) until one day he became so complex he simply "woke up".

Heinlein also proposed the use of advanced real-time computer graphics and speech synthesis techniques for portraying Adam Selene over video phones, techniques that were far in advance of the primitive line drawing CG capabilities of the time (mid 1960s).

Mycroft Holmes' death, rescue and resurrection

"The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" ended with the bombing of Mike's physical hardware by Earth, a trauma so great that the sentience that was Mike retreated into a coma from which he could not be awakened, despite the best efforts of his friend and engineer Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis.

The central plot device of Heinlein's "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" is the recruitment of Richard Ames to rescue the software and hardware that went into making Mycroft Holmes sentient. The plan to wake Mike from his coma is simply to "throw him into bed" with the sentient computer Athene, a plan that succeeds, as a revived Mycroft Holmes appears briefly in the novel "To Sail Beyond the Sunset".

It is revealed in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" that most histories in the parallel universes of The World as Myth record that Adam Selene was truly a creature of flesh and blood.