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When we moved Dad to the care facility, his only complaint was the Wi-Fi. “Laggy,” he called it when he was having a good day. “Fucking piece of shit,” he called it the rest of the time.
At first I was relieved. I’d been worried that he’d bristle at the cramped room, like a zoo animal pacing its enclosure in a sad documentary. But he never said a word about the bedsit quarters or the unfamiliar, ever-churning staff.
The only sound Zero heard in their helmet was their own hyperventilating and the gentle pings from their pegasus.
> waiting . . .
> waiting . . .
> communication received
> confirmation of countdown initiation: 30 seconds
Jay found himself sitting across from a bearded old man in voluminous maroon robes. “Why are you here?” the robed man asked. “I was sentenced to VSIM rehabilitation by my judge-counselor.” “Yes,” replied the robed man. “You would choose the literal interpretation of the question, wouldn’t you?”
This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had taken a plea deal, promising to name names, promising to name the name.
Espie Droger dreams of war. What else can he dream of? There is nothing left. He has dreamed of world travel and expensive Scotch and lithe young women and sudden uncontrollable laughter. But his vitality has seeped from him like fluid from a dying tree. Espie is old. And Espie is tired.
The earliest videos went something like this: disembodied female voices singing strange intonations of the words “girl dinner” in a voice-over effect as the visuals of the video featured dozens of increasingly strange combinations of food. A handful of Cheez-It crackers, grapes, and a stick of string cheese with a line of sriracha along the top? Girl dinner.
The AI surgical bots that reconstruct Warren after the accident have no clearer a concept of human anatomy than AI has ever had. He emerges from anesthesia to discover, in stages, two extra fingers on his right hand, a tentacle emerging from the left side of his ribcage, and a third eye, gummed shut by mucus, in the back of his head. Also, one of his feet is backwards.
Today, the hydrocarbon clouds of Titan had rolled back over Kraken Mare, rendering the waves of the methane sea impossibly blue as they lapped at the shore, gradually eroding sharp spires of ice into rounded pebbles. Beatriu Cardona shivered despite the warmth of the rover’s interior as the vehicle plowed along the frigid shore, tanklike treads crushing the ice sand into chevron-shaped tracks.
The settlement was barely two weeks old, and so her own habitation husk had to serve as an ER room for the man who was carried in from the planet’s surface, screaming and blue-lipped with trauma shock. “What happened?” The doctor listened as the man’s coworker explained how he had been guiding a transportation eelcraft when something huge and obscure rose from the river, crushed him against the bank, and made off.
On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the customs of each person’s native community. This was the most sacred of tasks. Carelessness or disrespect was not tolerated; just one mistake meant immediate dismissal.
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