After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley

by Rob Reid

his Soviet-era childhood convinced him that bad as imperfect Western democracies are when they run amok, there are greater evils out there.

poster of the Yalta Conference—Yalta!—in his bedroom, the words “NEVER FORGET” emblazoned beneath Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Polish, Latvian, Czech, Albanian, and all those other ex-commie tongues.

“the fine-tuned universe proposition,” or “the anthropic coincidences.” It’s an awkward subject for an atheist like her. Many fundamental physical constants turn out to be immaculately tuned to permit the emergence of a life-bearing universe. While these constants could have taken any value within fairly wide ranges, they all landed at bull’s-eye settings that just happen to make the universe (and with it, us) possible. The odds of this occurring through sheer chance have been shown to be infinitesimally small by top minds