Void Star

by Zachary Mason

he looks like he learned how to knot his necktie on the web.

in the absence of sympathy it’s hard to communicate subtle things,

she feels old because instead of implying some extraordinarily specific cultural fealty his hair just reads as an elaborate waste of time.

gin and tonic, which Philip has always called the blood of dead empire.

On the wall before his eyes is an ethernet port, like a little ziggurat of negative space.

To be honest, I can’t tell one wine from another but it’s a kind of way of consuming history.”

He’d once read the memoir of Tesshu, a great swordsman of Japan, who said that when he was a boy an hour had passed like a year, but when he was an old man a year had passed like an hour, so the journey here was like youth, and if he ever goes back to California he’ll have to pay the price, so the only solution is to keep on heading west.

“Yes, to some nonzero, extremely small degree.”

So I know this is your car and all, and I’m already imposing, but if you don’t mind my asking, just who the hell are you?”

He lies there, craving more sleep, knowing it’s unattainable, hoping it will help a little just being still.

“Clothes are the soul,” Hiro says. “They’ll change how you think about yourself,

all of them except for the protagonist look like a nickel’s worth of gangster in ten dollars’ worth of suit.

Wherever two or more of you dumb punks are gathered together in my name …

the bartender, who’s your basic sun-ravaged vegan in a coral necklace,

(The climactic boss fight was on a satellite called the Void Star, which, according to the comments in the source code, was a cryptic joke, an oddly hopeful reference to an archaic programming language in which void star was a reference to a thing of mutable kind, which spoke to the coders of the chance for metamorphosis.)