Human Error

The first space station, called the Wheel, crashes. A spaceship collides with it. The official verdict: pilot error. But as a government investigation unfolds, Captain Frank West begins to question whether the real error was ever the pilot at all. In the wake of the tragedy, Project Superman is born: an ambitious program to engineer a new kind of human, one capable of flawless performance, free from the dangerous variables of emotion and mistake. The logic seems unassailable. Space is unforgiving. Humans are fallible. The math is simple. But as researchers dig deeper, they discover something unsettling. Error isn't just a bug in the system. It may be the feature that makes learning possible. Emotions aren't weaknesses to be engineered away. They are the very mechanism by which humans adapt, grow, and survive. The perfect, errorless man Project Superman envisions might not just be impossible. He might be something far worse: a machine that has forgotten how to be human. Written in 1951, this is vintage SF that asks a question we're still wrestling with today: in our rush to eliminate human weakness, what exactly are we trying to eliminate?