Void Star

by Zachary Mason

There was a psychological shift, with drone cars, that made people act less like they were in semipublic and more like they were in their bedrooms. She often saw people getting dressed, men bucking in the confined space to get their legs into pants, women putting on makeup or stockings, anonymity substituting for privacy.

Now most of the world’s software, and, lately, its industrial design, comes from machines that are essentially ineffable, though only a handful of specialists seem to realize this, or care, the world in general blithely unaware that the programs and devices that mediate their lives have emerged from mystery.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

From the ceiling hung a banner with CONGRATULATIONS! next to a logo like a stylized centaur. The old man was there, clapping steadily, but he seemed calm, and wore a suit like all the rest. The old owner, the man from the pictures he’d found so long ago, was there, too, looking decades younger.

“This world was created for you, but now it is ending.” He explained that they were engineers who had designed a laptop to save children in the far reaches of the world. It was meant to be their school, to teach them everything, to draw them in and hold them while they grew. It would make poverty unimaginable, the relic of a barbarous past.

she is acutely aware of leaving a strand of old selves behind, like brilliant pebbles on the timeline, of falling, headlong, into the future. This, she knows, is how other people always experience time, and she wonders if they notice.

A gap between buildings frames a rectangle of the dull lunar gold of the dry mountains and the wildfires’ swathes of black ash and he remembers their flight into Los Angeles, how the plane had banked over the golden mountains and then the shock of his first sight of the city, the dull glare of the vast plain of concrete and glass, which seemed to have no limit, its far boundary lost in the enveloping smog, and he’d remembered that someone had said God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference doesn’t exist.

“You sound like a samurai.” “The job does require dedication, and a level of comfort with the nearness of death, but actually being a samurai? My god. With all the repression and the social rules and the obsession with caste it sounds even worse than being English.”

Of course, she thought, I should have known, this is what death is, this stillness in memory.

“Let no one call himself rich who can’t afford his own army.”

it occurs to him that, in the same way that heaven lacks a shape, the lives of the blessed dead lack any apparent purpose, not counting the singing of hymns, which would get old in about a minute, but then it’s obvious—what you do in heaven is keep on going up.

Coleridge said images in dreams represent the sensation we think they cause. We don’t feel horror because we see a sphinx, but dream of a sphinx to explain our horror.

He feels like Theseus searching for the Minotaur, but if Staging 373 is the labyrinth, and the cable is Ariadne’s spool of thread, then what’s the central monster?

In the last years of his life, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi had become a hermit and dedicated himself to learning how to die, which had always puzzled Kern, as it seems like something that would take care of itself, but now he thinks he gets it. Staring at the ruined city, the glare on the sea, he tries to imagine the world without him.

He has to be sure to erase things in the right order, lest he end up conscious but helpless—his technical acumen and goals have to be the last to go (and what will that be like, being nothing but a knot of skills and a need for self-destruction, and not knowing where any of it came from?).

He’s about to start deleting the memories of his family but stops, surprised at his own tenderness toward these delicate structures, and, there, on the screen, is his tenderness as a glyph, which is keeping him from acting, and always will, which implies he’s trapped forever. His despair is so strong it becomes a kind of clarity and he watches as though from a distance as his hand moves toward the tablet’s screen and the glyph is deleted. He’d expected a sense of profound violation but in fact it feels like nothing, and he should have done it long ago—it would be a shame not to use this unprecedented degree of self-control. As his sadness serves no purpose he deletes that too, along with his fear and his attachment to his old life, for change will come, has come, must be accepted. It occurs to him that, no longer being human, he need not die. He stares out over the sea, blank but alert, a neutral intelligence devoid of purpose, impatience and suffering.

(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.)