Some books are just fun. Of Monsters and Mainframes is what would happen if you snatched up all the B-movie horror monsters from the 70's and 80's and tossed them into space on a ship driven by an AI. Demeter, the AI, has one job: get the ship from point A to point B while keeping the humans alive. She's not responsible for humans going crazy or their missteps, but when all 350 of them die without her having any record of how it happened, it raises some questions.
When it happens a second time? and a third? well it's no wonder if the AI starts getting a little eccentric. Poor Demeter.
The public outcry is enough to deal with, but the other ship's AIs make fun of her and call her ghost ship. The company says they'll scrap her, but she's too valuable to scrap. Instead they keep rechristening her with new serial numbers and sending her back out with new passengers who invariably end up dead.
Demeter tries everything she can think of to break this bloody streak of bad luck. She even consults Steward, the medical AI, and puts up with her somewhat judgy assessments of Demeter's competency.
In the end there's not a whole lot Demeter can do. If you can't beat the monsters... join them.
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