Destination: Void

After six previous attempts to build true artificial intelligence have ended in catastrophe, humanity launches a seventh: a ship of cloned colonists, told they're bound for Tau Ceti, actually running as a closely watched experiment out of a lunar base. Their vessel is governed by an Organic Mental Core, a human brain kept alive and wired into the ship's systems, and when it fails exactly as its predecessors did, the crew is left with no choice but to build a working artificial consciousness themselves, under pressure, with no one coming to help. The opening novel of Frank Herbert's Pandora sequence.