Mike Brotherton: Since the whole book is a hunt, in a sense, I hit on the idea of using Hemingway thematically. Initially that was just going to be in small ways: ship decoration, allusions or metaphors. Then I decided that any spacecraft a few centuries or more into the future would be controlled by an artificial intelligence, and that such an intelligence would have to have a personality, so Hemingway came naturally. But it couldn't be completely free. I mean, imagine your home controlled by a computer. You want it to be there, to make everything run better, but you don't want to hear it say a word about how messy you are, how you drink too much, or anything at all about your masturbatory fantasies. Therefore, it must have restrictions. The original story about an all-seeing artificial intelligence driven crazy by conflicting orders was Arthur C. Clarke's HAL, and I figured any run of the mill home computer or spaceship AI would be constantly teetering on the edge of conflict without being given directly conflicting orders. Hemingway himself was such a larger than life character that any way you might try to box him in would produce interesting conflict. This would be interesting, but this wasn't the half of it.

Papa is not human. He's not even completely organic. He's part computer, part organic brain. We're going to be able to make shit like this, someday. I guarantee it. What happens if you make a human mind, but don't put it in a human body? More conflict. Our minds and our bodies are linked, at least until we get smarter about what both those things are. It really is intrinsically interesting, not only abstractly, but personally. Imagine a heaven, or a hell, in which you are you, but not in your own body. In something else, very, very different than a human body. How can that not be interesting? It could be awful, or wonderful, depending on perspective, but it would definitely be interesting.

Moreover, there would be programming, trying to keep forcing you to be a particular person (i.e., Hemingway) even when every input screams you are something else. I don't see any way to get this right, not right away, even though such a creation would be invaluable running something like a spaceship. The future is going to be an interesting place, and from an ethical perspective, it'll probably be in the sense of that old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."