Status Updates From Axiomatic

Unstable orbits in the space of lies - This one didn’t hit me nearly as hard as the last few.

Closer - They got so close they had to break up. Huh.

The Moral Virologist - I feel like this story *should* have made me mad. But somehow I just couldn’t take this guy seriously.

Appropriate Love - Damn, I don’t think a story has ever made me so mad

Into Darkness - I feel like I might have really liked this story if I’d understood what was happening better.

I wonder what I would do in that situation. Obviously a “Cutie” is not what I would want - but it’s not what he wanted either. He couldn’t get what he wanted. He didn’t spend much time considering adoption, though. I guess the hundred page contracts were too scary.

The Walk - “Does it bother you that there are places outside your skin–and you’re not in them?... You think your life is going to be undone–canceled out, somehow–just because it has an end?“ Very interesting perspective.

All stories here are great, but The Caress is the most psychedelic, twisted scifi I've read in a long time

The Moat - The two lines of this story didn’t come together well enough, and there was no real resolution

Learning to Be Me - The first half of his story was really boring. Blah blah, is the jewel really me or not, oh, the jewel must have just wondered that too, lol. But I really liked the ending.

A Kidnapping - Terrifying! I’m glad I wasn’t in this story.

Seeing - Cool story. It sounds really weird to have that kind of illusion. I like how realistic the story felt.

The Safe-Deposit Box - Cool idea. The development at the end wasn’t very satisfying, though. It didn’t seem to explain much.

Axiomatic - :( heartbreaking

That was definitely sad. But I’m more irritated that the conspiracy didn’t extend to using a multi-armed bandit algorithm to choose the best option out of various iterations of the drug / placebo.

The Carress - What a bizarre story. I can’t say I liked this one.

Eugene - A run-of-the-mill genetic engineering story that suddenly went off the deep end. Wtf?! How is that one paragraph of mumbo jumbo supposed to justify a non-existent person suddenly talking to his parents on the TV? And why did he donate *all* of their money, so they had to sell their house and find dead-end jobs again? He could have left them a couple million. Seriously.

So far so good

The Hundred Light-Year Diary - I liked this story. It reminded me of Chiang’s What’s Expected of Us, but a lot more fleshed out. It also made me think of the time tombs in Hyperion Cantos, where so far the time reversal hasn’t been explained enough that I even know what it means. Hopefully by the end of the Hyperion series, the time reversal there will make as much sense as it did in this story.

The Infinte Assassin - I don’t fully understand all the mechanics here, but I like the idea of a drug that lets you live as alternate versions of yourself. And I like the idea of the assassin always following a procedure to do things in the same way, so random outside events don’t affect him too much.