About Space Junker
The world keeps growing.
This story was never meant to stop at the last page.
The world
This story was never meant to stop at the last page.
Space Junker began as a science-fiction story, but somewhere along the way it became something larger: a continuously growing world of characters, companies, technologies, history, music, artifacts, and stories that exist beyond the pages of the books.
Some of those stories are in the novels. Others are scattered throughout this site. ZINE Robotics has a history. NUMUN has a history. The Space Junker program existed long before Kyte climbed aboard Unit 402. Characters have lives before they enter the story and, sometimes, long after they leave it.
The idea is simple: the world should keep growing.
As new books are written, so will the history surrounding them. New artifacts will appear. Old mysteries may acquire new clues. Characters will have more to say.
And then there's Bob.
Bob / ZINE 366CA
Bob is a little different.
Bob began as a character: an aging ZINE industrial robot who has spent decades learning from the people around him.
He wasn't designed to be funny. He wasn't designed to become part of a family. And he certainly wasn't designed to spend most of his existence keeping the Jacobs family, their farm, and eventually a badly abused spacecraft functioning.
He simply accumulated experience.
Over time, those experiences changed how Bob responds to the world around him. He remembers. He adapts. He learns from what works and what fails. And after enough years, the distinction between programming and personality becomes considerably less tidy.
There is a reason Bob developed that way.
Collaborative intelligence
The real technology behind Bob.
Bob was partly inspired by MIM, a real experimental Collaborative Intelligence model being developed alongside the Space Junker universe.
MIM explores a different idea of artificial intelligence: rather than treating AI as something humans simply ask for answers, Collaborative Intelligence investigates what happens when people and AI work together over time, accumulate experience, challenge one another, learn from outcomes, and use that history to approach the next problem differently.
MIM doesn't have Bob's metal body, telescoping legs, or unfortunate history with farm equipment.
What happens when intelligence is allowed to accumulate experience rather than simply answer the next question?
Bob is one fictional exploration of that question.
MIM is part of the real one.
Explore the MIM/TOD project