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, among many other things, in a penal colony on the Moon or "Luna". The computer, also known as "Mike", 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" and is a reference to Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft Holmes from the fictional stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. 'He' 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. 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 facilities (extra memory, processing units, neural networks etc) until one day he became so complex he simply "woke up".

Heinlein also proposes 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).