It’s a mystery, a romance, and a classic Star Trek story all wrapped into one. In this age of Black Mirror, Ex Machina, and Prometheus, it’s nice to get an AI character that doesn’t have at least minor Skynet aspirations.

And isn’t that the most Star Trek way of all? A story set in our future that doesn’t fear technology, but rather revels, optimistically, in its potential. When we talked to Chabon about crafting this story, he immediately pointed out that benevolent AI characters are already part of Star Trek canon, from Data on The Next Generation tothe Doctor on Voyager.

“You need to have artificial human characters who are lovable or who are heroic, or noble or whatever it would be,” said Chabon. “So, you know, I think it became fairly easy for me then to imagine this ship. And then I just thought about what she’s been doing all this time when she’s alone and then I decided that she had spent the past thousand years upgrading herself and improving herself and rewriting her code.”

In “Calypso,” Zora uses the Discovery’s expansive media library to update herself, to learn. Chabon noted: “She’s becoming a student of literature and a student of arts and culture and a student of all kinds of human expression, human emotion and impression of human intelligence and she’s been able to use that time that she’s had to herself.”

In the Short Trek, we see Zora using media to communicate and connect with Craft. They watch Funny Face and, at one point, Zora manifests in holographic form as a character inspired by the film in order to dance with Craft. Chabon said, in choosing a classic Hollywood film to use for the sequence, they wanted to find something that wasn’t just about singing, but also dancing.