COMPUTER BRAIN

Competing for a $30 million prize, a team is developing an unmanned lunar rover. Reporter Midge McConnell becomes suspicious of the rover’s human-like performance. Her investigations will take her to the halls of academia, to the Air Force’s Satellite Headquarters, onto a lethally guarded Texas research site, inside an exotic lakeside Chinese Sanatorium, and to a Chinese rocket site. What she discovers will put her squarely on the horns of a moral dilemma. International relations here on earth, and perhaps the survival of the human species in future space colonies will depend on her choice. English physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed that the future survival of the human species depends on space travel. A former NASA official said that until we can engineer a tiny person, long space trips carrying human intelligence is not practical. Could an autonomous intelligent computer bridge this gap? Would it act morally? The dilemma is solved by a terminally ill quadriplegic’s immoral human decision.