Void Star

by Zachary Mason

She remembers the Metatemetatem, an AI that makes other AIs,

a forty-year-old editorial in Harper’s inveighed against ReTelomer for making long life available only to the rich, and she takes a moment to pity the writer as she would a child first encountering the hardness of the world.

For years, even after his circumstances were less dire, he’d been utterly certain that owning more than one pair of shoes was a sign of unseriousness, and that one of the many virtues of books was that, in sufficient quantity, they were furniture.

We were to be Bloomsbury, in our way, but with more math and fewer middling talents. Historians of science were to marvel that we’d known each other at all, much less been friends, or shared the squat.