On the Soul’s Strength
Running a cult isn’t fun if nobody wants to leave. He told us that. He told everybody in the cult. He always called it “the cult” not because it wasn’t one but because he didn’t care to hide it. We all...
View ArticleBreakfast Time
There are four silent children sitting around the dinner table. You remember having three. Your thoughts grind with an inarticulately terrified urgency to know which ones – no – to know which one is...
View ArticleThe Train
Souls keep quiet as they board the dusk train that takes them from the barracks where heath harvests them daily to the empty unfinished city that will belong to the living. No employee of the embryonic...
View ArticleQ&A
The first time he asked the question he felt the answer break something in two. The second time he had asked the question he tasted blood that wasn’t there. The third time he asked the question he...
View Article“Transference”
“Sometimes I think having all these computational enhancements makes trauma worse,” he said. “Files are more detailed than memories and you never run out of space.” It wasn’t a new insight – not even...
View ArticleThe Metaphysics of the Fly
Who you work for is no longer a meaningful question. The web of bribes and blackmail is so dense and computationally complex that there’s hardly an action you could take that it’s not something you...
View ArticleFrontier Work
We have to celebrate them as heroes, explorers, said the man at the head of the virtual table. If we don’t position them as the heirs of the crewed deep space program public opinion will turn on us the...
View ArticleOn those who listen to silence
To have a nose for magic is a rare thing. Few people can perceive the crossing of that threshold between what seems impossible and what should be. On one side there’s a brilliant idea, an addition to...
View ArticleAI Alignment
Sometimes your spreadsheet lies to you. It explains and it predicts and sometimes — not as often or as obviously as it used to and therefore more insidiously — it’s wrong in way it’s not correctness...
View ArticleTargeted
It wasn’t a real war until somebody you loved died. This unfairness you understand without feeling. You realized the person you loved was dead when you learned they had been killed before you first...
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