Gizmo Origin: A Colony Mars Short Story (Colony Mars Series)

When you’re stranded on an alien planet, all alone with no hope of being found, it’s good to be a highly skilled engineer with the ability to fashion your very own robotic friend.

Take a standard maintenance droid, hook it up the primary colony AI, imbue it with a self-learning neural-network, and feed it the complete works of Oscar Wilde as the basis for its grammatical lexicon. And voila, you have yourself a friend to stop you going insane — just so long as it doesn’t drive you crazy first.

More scrapyard than hi-tech, more steampunk than space-age, Gizmo is ready to help in anyway it can. Generally by letting you know just how smart it is and the probability of you dying within the next 24 hours