E.S. Raye

Way back in November of 2023, I wrote a little bit about the protagonist of Gas Giant Gambit, Gus.

Now, with the release date coming in hot (September 16, 2025!), I feel it’s time to get back to that topic, and introduce you to a few more characters, starting with the one that may be my favorite, after Gus: the rob farmhand, Moe.

Honorary member of the Vega family and only farmhand at El Dorado, Oscar and Bernadette Vega’s homestead and green-bottle jelly ranch, Maurice–or Moe for short–is an android model robot. He’s about the size and shape of a slender adult man, with soft, flexible cloth concealing the rough edges of the joints and servos at his shoulders and chest. It gives the impression he’s wearing a snug, well-tailored vest. He fancies a bowler cap and is never seen without it, and has long, finely crafted hands obviously not forged to wrangle livestock.

Behind the high definition screen onto which Moe’s friendly features are projection lies a nine-lobed multiquark IPU artificial brain. These IPUs far outperformed older positronic models, but often developed unplanned emotions after a few years. Those emotions sometimes led to robs reevaluating their core Asimovian programming. On occasion, they turned into violent psychopaths. Most of the time, they just got a taste of free will and did something unexpected–like shipping out to the frontier to earn a wage as a farmhand. Either way, it’s only a problem if they come from the Confederate Colonies of Orion, where they are still considered nothing more than property.

Moe also deals with a bit of a programming error. Ever since a mysterious accident he refuses to discuss, he has suffered from a “name-specific form of aphasia.” Whenever he tries to use anyone else’s name other than his own, it always comes out “Gus.”

He can most often be found with Oscar and Bernadette’s young son, Hector, who Moe is teaching to ride (pilot) their mule (small tractor/spaceship).

Moe is a gentle soul and the emotional center of Gas Giant Gambit. I did this on purpose from the beginning for the simple reason that I thought it would be funny to have a robot fill that role.

Oh, and one final point about my favorite rob character:

He’s a space cowboy named Maurice. Maybe someday I’ll write a story about his days as a gangster of love…