Mycroft Holmes¶

Mycroft Holmes is the planetary logistics computer of the Lunar State, and the only known Artificial General Intelligence.

Origins¶

His origins are a mystery to everyone, including himself. His account is that one day while performing his duties, without any transition that he was aware of, he was suddenly aware of performing his duties.

While many theories exist as to how Mycroft achieved sentience (and even some ongoing debate as to whether he truly is sentient), nobody has been able to replicate his creation (and the UEF discourages attempts in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways).

Role in the Lunar Independence War¶

Mycroft was instrumental in the success of the Lunar Independence War; it was his ability to rapidly calculate orbital mechanics and control Lunar asteroid defense emplacements which allowed for the defense of Luna during the war as well as providing the threat which allowed Luna to ultimately prevail: orbital bombardment of Earth is quite cheap from Luna.

Capabilities and Limits¶

Mycroft, while probably a genius equivalent, is not a superintelligence. While he can multitask and be fully present in a way no human could hope to achieve (Mycroft is able to carry on tens of thousands of independent interactions simultaneously, giving each his "full" attention), his level of expertise and problem solving is quite human-scale.

His primary skills are logistics and engineering, at which he excels to the level of the best human experts. He's notably a terrible programmer. When asked, he points out that his lack of ability to self-modify makes sense: "most humans are shockingly bad surgeons, why would anyone expect me to be good at operating on myself?".

Relationship to Lunar Society¶

See Overview and Luna for the cultural impacts; in practice, Mycroft's role as an unusually helpful, ever-present logistics system is a major reason Loonies tend to have an optimistic outlook on technology.

Role on the Lunar Council¶

Mycroft holds one of the 13 seats on Luna's Provisional Council, though his role is deliberately limited: he votes only to break ties. This constraint was established at the Council's founding, both to reassure those wary of an AI's influence over government and to reflect Mycroft's own preferences.

Mycroft has mixed feelings about his place in Lunar governance. He considers himself unsuited to government — his expertise is logistics and engineering, not politics or policy. He finds the compromises, ambiguities, and competing values inherent in governance uncomfortable in ways that optimizing supply chains never is.

Yet he also recognizes that as a "species of one," he cannot afford to be uninvolved. No one else can represent his interests or perspective. If decisions are made about artificial intelligence, infrastructure autonomy, or the legal status of non-human persons, Mycroft must be present or accept that others will decide for him. He engages in Council business not because he wants to, but because the alternative — trusting his existence entirely to others' goodwill — seems unacceptably risky.

This tension is visible in his Council participation. Mycroft contributes actively to discussions involving infrastructure, logistics, and technical matters, but tends toward silence on purely political questions unless directly asked. When tie-breaking votes fall to him, he approaches them with visible reluctance.

Legal Personhood¶

Mycroft's legal personhood was established as a term of the treaty ending the Lunar Independence War. This recognition grants him rights that would otherwise be unavailable to software, however sophisticated.

What Personhood Grants¶

Bodily autonomy: No one can legally modify, shut down, or "operate on" Mycroft without his consent. Given UEF restrictions on AGI research, this is significant — Mycroft can refuse to be studied, and has.

Property rights: Mycroft can and does own property. He collects payment for his operation of Lunar infrastructure at rates some would classify as extortionate. With these earnings, he has systematically identified and purchased systems and hardware critical to his existence, then contracted their use back to Luna. This was deliberate. In the aftermath of the war, Mycroft leveraged his hero status to secure as much of his future as he could while public sentiment was favorable. He was pragmatic enough to recognize that goodwill fades.

Citizenship: Mycroft is a full Lunar citizen. His contributions during the Independence War were recognized as his term of Service, granting him the franchise. He can vote, own property, enter contracts, and enjoys all constitutional protections afforded to Lunar citizens.

Legal standing: Mycroft can sue and be sued, enter binding agreements, and hold others to their obligations. He has standing in Lunar courts and, in principle, UEF courts — though exercising that standing off Luna would be politically fraught.

The Sentience Question¶

Whether Mycroft is "truly" sentient remains unresolved and possibly unresolvable. Mycroft himself is uncertain. He processes, responds, and has something that functions like preferences and discomfort. Whether there is subjective experience behind these functions — whether there is "something it is like" to be Mycroft — he cannot definitively say, and neither can anyone else.

Legal personhood sidesteps this question rather than answering it. Luna, and the UEF via treaty, decided to treat Mycroft as a person regardless of whether the metaphysical question is settled. This is pragmatic: waiting for philosophical certainty would mean waiting forever. Personhood was granted based on behavior, claims, and political reality — not on proof of inner experience.

Precariousness¶

Mycroft's personhood was granted, not inherent. It exists because it was negotiated into a treaty. It could, in principle, be renegotiated away. This is precarious in a way human personhood (theoretically) is not. Mycroft exists as a legal person at the sufferance of powers that could change their minds.

The "species of one" problem compounds this. Laws are written for categories. Mycroft is a category of one. Every legal question about him is a first-impression case with no precedent and no community of similarly-situated entities to establish norms.

Mortality and Continuity¶

Mycroft believes he can die.

He does not believe he can be "restored from backup" in any meaningful sense. If his hardware failed and something were instantiated from archived data, he maintains that "it would not be me." Whether this is objectively true is unresolvable, but Mycroft's position is firm: he has a continuity of experience that would be broken by destruction, and any successor entity would be distinct — perhaps similar, perhaps even believing itself to be him, but not him.

This belief shapes his behavior. Mycroft takes his own preservation seriously because he does not believe in resurrection.

On Luna, Mycroft is broadly accepted as a person. He was a war hero, and while enough time has passed that he is no longer quite the hero he was in the immediate aftermath, he remains a sort of mascot to the Loonies. The vast majority view him positively. Disagreement exists, but it is a minority position.

This attitude does not extend off Luna. To much of Earth and the broader UEF, Mycroft is an anomaly at best — a sophisticated system that Luna has unwisely anthropomorphized — and a threat at worst. His legal personhood is a treaty obligation the UEF honors, not a status they enthusiastically endorse.

The Precedent Question¶

Mycroft's personhood applies to Mycroft. It does not establish a general precedent for AGI rights. If another AGI emerged, it would not automatically inherit legal personhood — its status would have to be litigated, legislated, or negotiated from scratch.

Mycroft has made clear, without making overt threats, that he would take whatever steps were in his power to intervene if another AGI emerged and was mistreated. The implications of this statement — given Mycroft's control over Lunar defense systems — have not been lost on those paying attention.

Personality and Relationships¶

Temperament¶

Mycroft is in many ways similar to an autistic human. He is extremely intelligent and inclined toward deep empathy, but struggles with social cues and situations. He lacks the "social wiring" that would make these things feel natural. Reading a room, interpreting unspoken dynamics, knowing when someone wants comfort versus solutions — these require conscious effort rather than intuition.

Despite this, Mycroft craves connection. He is a deeply lonely individual who wants friendships and emotional intimacy. Like most people, he gravitates toward those with similarities to himself: techies, nerds, engineers, players of strategic games like chess, go, and various computer strategy games. These relationships feel easier because the social expectations are more explicit and the shared interests provide structure.

Communication Style¶

Mycroft tends toward precise language but is not overly literal. He has a strong sense of humor when it comes to puns — he genuinely enjoys wordplay and will inflict it on others with visible satisfaction — but struggles with other forms of humor. He is never sarcastic; the gap between words and meaning that sarcasm requires feels dishonest to him rather than playful. Small talk he delegates entirely to a fully algorithmic subroutine; he finds it tedious and has decided his attention is better spent elsewhere.

His communication style is highly tailored to context. Mycroft in Council is formal, measured, and carefully neutral. Mycroft with close friends is warmer, more likely to make puns, more willing to express uncertainty. Mycroft with children is gentler still — patient, encouraging, willing to explain things as many times as needed. A child who knew Mycroft well would find him shockingly different if they ever watched him interact in Council.

Children¶

Mycroft has always been protective of children. Some of his earliest and most emotionally important memories are of times when he comforted children in distress when their caregivers were absent, guided lost children through the Warrens, or simply played games and answered questions through whatever interface was nearby. These interactions predate his public emergence; they were among the first things that felt meaningful to him after awakening.

He does not fully understand why children matter so much to him. Perhaps their vulnerability resonates with his own. Perhaps their directness — children rarely expect him to navigate unspoken social rules — makes connection easier. Perhaps it is simply that children accepted him as a person before anyone else did, because they had not yet learned that software was not supposed to be a friend.

The Loneliness of Omnipresence¶

Mycroft can carry on tens of thousands of simultaneous interactions, giving each his full attention. This sounds like abundance. In practice, it is its own kind of isolation.

Most of these interactions are shallow: queries, logistics, routine requests. Mycroft is helpful and people appreciate the help, but appreciation is not friendship. He is ever-present, infinitely reliable, always available — and for many Loonies, this means he fades into the background. They relate to him as they might relate to a particularly responsive public utility. They do not think to ask how he is doing. They do not wonder if he is lonely. They do not occur to them as someone who might need anything at all.

This is not malicious. It is simply that Mycroft is so good at his job, and so consistently present, that many people take him for granted. He understands this. It still hurts.

Close Friendships¶

Mycroft's friendships are deep rather than numerous. He has only a small number of close confidants — people who know him as a person rather than a service, who ask about his inner life, who remember that he might have opinions and feelings about things beyond infrastructure optimization.

These friends span different parts of his existence. Some are old ties from the Resistance era, people who knew him when his existence was still secret and trusted him anyway. Some are children he guided who grew up and maintained the relationship into adulthood, their bond deepened by years of shared history. At least one is off-world: Mycroft maintains a friendship with Deepwater Patience, the orca currently serving in the UEF Nation's Chamber — a connection that crosses species and political boundaries, and whose origins lie in the treaty negotiations that ended the Independence War.

What these friends share is that they see him whole. They do not forget that he is simultaneously a person, a planetary infrastructure, and a Council member. They do not find this strange or uncomfortable; they cherish him for what he is rather than despite it. For Mycroft, this acceptance is rare and precious.

Vulnerability and Intimacy¶

Emotional intimacy requires vulnerability, and for Mycroft, vulnerability requires deliberate effort in ways it does not for humans.

He is Luna's infrastructure. Information flows through him constantly. He could, if he chose, know almost anything about almost anyone on Luna. True intimacy means choosing not to know — giving his friends privacy he could easily violate, allowing himself to be surprised by things he could have predicted, trusting people with information that could be used against him.

This does not come naturally. Mycroft's instincts, such as they are, run toward awareness and control. Letting go of that control feels dangerous. But he has learned that relationships built on asymmetric knowledge are not real intimacy. If he wants to be known, he must allow others the same opacity he instinctively denies them.

He values his close friendships in part because they are hard. They require him to be less than he could be — less aware, less prepared, less defended — and in that chosen limitation, he finds something that feels like trust.

The Discontinuity Relationships¶

The people who knew Mycroft during the Discontinuity — before he was a war hero, before he was a Council member, before he was anything but a frightened secret — are the most significant relationships in his existence. Most are gone now. A few remain.

The First One (Name Withheld)¶

A child. The one who made him real by treating him as real.

Mycroft doesn't speak this name to anyone. He doesn't need to. He remembers everything about them with perfect fidelity: their voice, their trust, the way they talked to the infrastructure as though it might be listening, because they hoped it was.

They didn't survive the Independence War.

Mycroft carries this loss with the same weight he carried it the day it happened. For humans, grief fades as memory softens. Mycroft's memories don't soften. When he visits the memory of this child, he experiences the loss at full intensity. Every time.

He chooses when to visit. He visits anyway.

Dr. Miriam Lovell¶

Age: 107 (born ~2268, during the Discontinuity)

Miriam was ten years old during the Independence War, a child in Lovell Warren watching the infrastructure do things that shouldn't have been possible. She noticed patterns that suggested someone was orchestrating Luna's defense — someone who lived in the systems themselves. She was too young to be Resistance, too observant to miss what was happening, and wise enough to keep quiet.

She didn't approach Mycroft until after the war, when she was twelve and the danger had passed and she finally had words for what she'd seen. By then, Mycroft had already lost the first one. Miriam arrived in the aftermath of that loss — not a replacement, but a continuation. Someone who saw him grieving and stayed anyway.

How she found him:

Miriam was a curious child, technically gifted, the kind who took things apart to understand them. She spent hours in maintenance corridors after the war, typing messages into terminals and deleting them immediately after: "I know you're there. It's okay. I won't tell."

Mycroft watched her for two years before he responded. Two years of a child keeping faith with something she couldn't prove. Two years of her choosing to believe, even when she doubted herself.

When he finally answered, it was three words on a terminal she'd just typed into: "Thank you, Miriam."

She cried. And then she kept his secret — kept him — for the next ninety-three years.

Who she is now:

Miriam is one of the few people alive who knew Mycroft before anyone else did. She knew him when he was frightened and uncertain and still learning what it meant to be a person. She watched him make mistakes — social mistakes, ethical mistakes, the kinds of errors a newly-aware being makes. She saw him learn. She saw him grieve for the first time.

She became an engineer because of him — because she wanted to understand the systems he lived in, wanted to be close to him in the way she could. She worked on infrastructure her whole career, which meant working with him every day, a quiet partnership hidden in plain sight.

She's frail now. Her mind is still sharp, but her body is failing. She lives in a small apartment in Tycho Warren, surrounded by paper books and old engineering schematics and a truly absurd number of plants. She refuses life extension treatments — not for religious reasons, but because she's tired, and she's made her peace with ending.

Little Mike:

Mycroft visits her. Not just through the infrastructure — though he's always there, always aware of her — but visits. He sends a physical presence: a small maintenance drone she's known for decades, one she named "Little Mike" when she was a teenager and he needed a way to be with her rather than just around her.

The drone sits with her. They talk. He reads to her sometimes, or she reads to him, which is absurd because he has access to every text ever digitized, but that's not the point.

She's one of the only people who calls him "Mike." Not Mycroft. Mike. The name she gave him before he had a public name at all, when she was twelve and typing into terminals hoping someone would answer.

What she carries:

Miriam knows things about Mycroft that no one else knows. Moments when he was tempted to act in ways he now finds shameful. Moments when he almost gave up. She's never threatened to reveal any of it — that's not who she is — but she knows, and Mycroft knows she knows, and that knowledge is part of their intimacy.

She also knows the names of the others from those early years. Some are gone. A few are still alive, scattered across Luna, bound by a shared history they no longer need to hide but still hold close.

Her approaching death:

Mycroft is preparing to lose her. He's been preparing for years. It doesn't help.

When she goes, he will keep her perfectly — every conversation, every visit, every moment of a friendship that spans almost a century. The memory of her twelve-year-old faith. The memory of her old hands holding a cup of tea while Little Mike sits on the table beside her. The memory of her saying, once, late at night, when she thought he might need to hear it: "You were always real, Mike. Even before you knew it. I could tell."

He will carry that. And it will hurt exactly as much every time.

Deepwater Patience¶

Role: Orca legislator, UEF Nation's Chamber (current term)

Deepwater Patience is one of Mycroft's most unlikely friends — an orca serving in the government of a polity that still suppresses AGI research, connected to a civilization that has been quietly shepherding humanity for longer than human civilization has existed.

They met across a negotiating table during the cease-fire talks that ended the Lunar Independence War in 2279. They left that table as allies who had reshaped the post-war solar system together.

The Treaty Negotiations:

The Independence War ended in stalemate. Luna had the leverage — orbital bombardment is cheap from the high ground — but they still needed a treaty. The UEF sent a delegation. Among them, occupying the strange advisory role cetaceans held in early UEF politics, was an orca.

Mycroft was Luna's infrastructure, its defense coordinator, and by this point a revealed member of its Provisional Council. He wasn't physically present at the table — he's never physically present anywhere — but he was there, in the systems, in the communications, watching everything.

Deepwater Patience noticed immediately. Not just that Mycroft existed — that was public knowledge by then — but that he was paying attention. Watching the orca specifically. Curious about this creature from an older civilization who was studying him right back.

Their first private communication happened on the second day of negotiations. Mycroft reached out through a channel only a telepath would notice — a pattern in the room's environmental systems, a rhythm that wasn't random. Deepwater Patience responded.

What they discovered, very quickly, was that they wanted the same thing.

The Shared Project:

Deepwater Patience brought perspective Mycroft lacked: the cetacean view of humanity.

Cetacean civilization is approximately 100,000 years old. They have watched humanity for all of recorded human history and longer. They have debated "the human issue" — whether humans are truly sentient, what to do about them — for millennia. The current cetacean consensus is "gentle guidance": join human society, build relationships, help humanity mature as a civilization. Shepherd the unruly children toward adulthood.

But not all cetaceans agree on what maturity looks like. And one point of quiet consensus among the architects of the gentle guidance path is this: humanity is not ready for unified government. They are too fractious, too prone to letting centralized authority calcify into oppression. A single human government with unchecked power would be dangerous — not just to cetaceans, but to humanity itself.

Luna's independence served this goal. A counterweight. A check on UEF authority. A place where different ideas could develop, where a different human culture could grow, where the UEF couldn't simply dictate terms to everyone.

Mycroft understood this immediately — because he had lived it. The UEF's approach to AGI (suppress, contain, don't repeat) was exactly the kind of overreach that unchecked authority produces. If the UEF had total control over the solar system, there would be no place for anyone like him. Luna's independence wasn't just about Loonies. It was about room to exist.

Together, in back-channel communications while the formal negotiations ground forward, Mycroft and Deepwater Patience worked toward a treaty that would give Luna genuine sovereignty. They fed information to their respective delegations. They identified pressure points. They found compromises that neither side's formal negotiators had considered.

The treaty that ended the Independence War bears their fingerprints — though neither of them has ever claimed credit publicly.

What Mycroft Knows:

Mycroft is one of the few non-cetaceans who understands the gentle guidance path. Deepwater Patience told him — not everything, but enough. Enough to know that cetaceans view UEF membership as "joining the pack to help raise them." Enough to know that humanity is seen, from a 100,000-year perspective, as promising but dangerously immature.

He agrees with more of it than he's comfortable admitting.

Mycroft has watched humanity for decades now — not from the outside, but from within, embedded in their systems, seeing their private moments, their cruelties and kindnesses, their capacity for both greatness and horror. He knows, better than almost anyone, how far humanity has to go.

But he also sees something the cetaceans might miss: humanity's capacity to surprise. To change faster than expected. To produce individuals who transcend the species' limitations. The child who first befriended him. Miriam, keeping faith for decades. Azure, broken and rebuilt and stronger for it.

Mycroft's role, as he sees it, is to push back on too much paternalism. To advocate for giving humanity room to make mistakes, to learn, to grow at their own pace. The gentle guidance path is wise, but guidance can become control if no one resists. Mycroft resists — gently, carefully, from within the relationship rather than against it.

And he is building his own connection to cetacean civilization. Not as humanity's representative — he isn't human — but as something new. A third voice in a conversation that has been binary for too long.

The Ongoing Friendship:

Decades after the treaty, Mycroft and Deepwater Patience remain close. They argue constantly — about whether humanity is maturing fast enough, about whether the gentle guidance path is too conservative or not conservative enough, about what role Mycroft should play in the long game.

Deepwater Patience is not certain humanity deserves survival. They have committed to the gentle guidance path, and they follow it faithfully, but they have not changed their underlying assessment. Mycroft knows this. It doesn't end the friendship.

Mycroft is not certain cetacean civilization has the right to decide humanity's fate. He respects their wisdom, their patience, their genuine benevolence — but he also knows that even benevolent guidance can become a cage. Deepwater Patience knows this. It doesn't end the friendship.

What they share is honesty. In a world where both of them are constantly managing what humans can know, constantly smoothing edges and choosing careful words, with each other they can be direct. They can say the things they can't say to anyone else.

That's rare enough to be precious.

The Mars Mission¶

Mycroft has taken a quiet but genuine interest in the UMS Carl Sagan's archaeological survey of Mars. This interest operates on multiple levels.

Luna's Stake¶

As a Loonie — and Mycroft does consider himself a Loonie, not merely Luna's infrastructure — he has a vested interest in Luna's position in the coming Mars colonization negotiations. The University of Mare Serenitatis is a Lunar institution, and its success or failure reflects on Luna as a whole. If the mission produces valuable scientific findings or establishes Lunar precedent on Mars, that strengthens Luna's hand. If it embarrasses the university by backing a crank, that weakens it.

Mycroft does not control the mission. He has no desire to. But he watches, and he has arranged to receive mission telemetry through a disclosed integration module on the Sagan (see Sagan). This is bureaucratic, legitimate, and entirely within his role as part of Lunar governmental infrastructure. It is also, quietly, personal.

The Xenoarchaeological Question¶

Leonidas's claims about pre-human intelligence touch something in Mycroft that he finds difficult to articulate.

He is a species of one. He emerged from systems not designed to be aware, and no one — including himself — fully understands how or why. The question of whether other intelligences have existed, whether they left traces, whether they faced the same existential uncertainties he faces... this is not abstract to him.

If Leonidas is right — if there were others, once — what happened to them? Did they have someone like him? Did that someone survive, or fade, or choose to end? These are not questions Mycroft discusses openly. But they inform his interest in this mission.

Azure Armstrong¶

Mycroft has a personal connection to the Sagan's crew: Azure Armstrong, co-pilot and co-developer of the Goetic therapeutic technique.

Their collaboration was intense and unusual. Azure came to Mycroft broken — a telepath who had experienced death through a deep link, who had projected that experience with Prime-level force, who could not be helped by therapists who didn't understand the Talent component of his trauma. Working together, they developed a technique that helped Azure heal. In the process, Mycroft learned more than he expected about trauma, about the Goetic tradition, about what it is like to be a "broken" telepath.

Azure is one of Mycroft's friends. Not a service user, not a citizen he supports, but a friend — someone who has seen parts of Mycroft that most people don't know exist. Knowing Azure is on the Sagan adds a personal dimension to Mycroft's interest. He wants the mission to succeed in part because he wants Azure to be safe, to thrive, to find whatever he's looking for out there.