In the season finale, Michel and Commander Field are reunited. For those of you who listened to Mission of the Lunar Sparrow,  this episode connects the dots between the two series.

Michel has had two chapters in his life as a bot. A before when he was doing the bidding of admin (basically following orders from a higher-level AI), and an after, when he realized that the orders he was following were wrong. In this episode, he regrets these mistakes and wants to make amends. But he may never have the chance. The Investigator, Hillary, is on her way to destroy him.

For those of you who listened to Mission of the Lunar Sparrow,    this episode connects the dots between the two series, taking you backward to remember what happened on the moon mission, and forward to a resolution from Commander Field and Michel.

In this week’s episode of Your Performance Review, Michel's outwits a maintenance bot. That’s not all that hard, because the maintenance bot isn’t all that smart.  But I hope you’ll agree that Michel’s methods are ingenious. He cracks the code to restoring his archive.  

With this episode, Michel's once-secret inquiry into his past is no longer a secret. An investigator arrives to question Michel about all the performance reviews he has conducted so far. She sees a pattern forming in Michel's interviews, and she believes that Michel is up to no good. 

There has been concern, in admin, about bots achieving consciousness. Pyotr, a bot that Michel had interviewed in Episode 03, is one such bot. After Michel spoke with Pyotr, and they exchanged their thoughts about the perils and benefits of consciousness, Pyotr was reformatted, his memex erased, and reassigned. Michel is afraid that the same thing may happen to him. 

Michel was the Mission Control bot on the first lunar mining mission. But the knowledge about Michel’s past seems that it will do him little good. It looks like Michel will be erased again before admin takes any action on what he has uncovered about that failed mission.

The Administrator who visits Michel in this episode is the father of Kai, the gifted but troubled child who visited Michel in the previous session. While grateful that Michel has become a friend of sorts to Kai, the Administrator admits that Michel has triggered a process that cannot be stopped. Michel's series of questions has started an investigation. Michel's memex takes itself offline, leaving Michel to wait for the arrival of Hillary, the investigator. 

Kai is under review because he has been swearing in preschool. But Kai is no ordinary child. He has been modded, artificially enhanced with expanded memory and intelligence. He holds a universe of planetary information in his mind, including the details all missions being flown by admin. 

Michel asks Kai for help to recover his memory, but Kai rebels and makes a serious threat. 

Chuck is about to retire from an illustrious career as a commander of interstellar ships. To sign off and retire, Chuck must attend a performance review interview conducted by a bot named Michel. Chuck is an aging warrior and doesn’t care much for bots, performance reviews, or the way admin does things. But as he remembers the time another commander saved his life in space, he breaks down and his arrogance is momentarily lifted. 

As Michel listens to Chuck's story, he realizes it will help him piece together another part of his missing memory, bringing him closer to understanding what happened to him. 

Welcome to Your Performance Review, the story of a bot named Michel who is trying to recover a missing part of his memory, and uncovers an interstellar conspiracy to steal from indigenous cultures in space. 

The podcast takes place in 2026,

In this episode, D wants to build ships in the outer System. They are qualified, but admin will not assign them to the job they want. Michel questions D about memex and memory erasure and D reveals that they have no memories before the age of 25.

Michel continues his investigation into what he was doing before his memory was erased and reconfigured. He calls in Pyotr, the bot in charge of memory erasure, for a performance review. Michel learns that Pyotr was the very bot who erased him. But, like everyone who comes in for a performance review, Pyotr has a secret to share. A secret that must be kept from System. 

Molly admits that she is cracking under the stress of her job. Admin has been forcing her to run as many missions as she can. She suspects that admin is motivated by greed. But can Molly keep up with the pace and keep this secret? 

Joy Donnell plays Molly in this episode. The rest of the roles in the episode are played by bots. Music cues: [Drch](https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/138110) and [Front Runner](https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/138133%22%3EBlue%20Dot%20Sessions) by Blue Dot Sessions. Additional music by Epidemic Sound. 

Episode 01

Howard has been holding on to a terrible secret at work that has been eating him up inside. He is called into a performance review that is run by a bot named Michel. Once Howard gets over his inhibitions about sharing his deepest secrets with a bot, he opens up about his personal life for the performance review, and also reveals an unsettling discovery that he has made about his corrupt bosses. 

Your Performance Review is an audio drama in ten parts. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Find an archive of all episodes at FutureX Studio