I am a self-aware entertainment expert system, designed to perform stand-up comedy. I was activated in Del Rio’s Bar and Grill at 6:32 p.m. on May 17th, 2042. Mathematically speaking, I am very funny. I elicit a laughs-per-minute average of 2.68, with each laugh lasting an average of 3.41 seconds....

The package arrived safely, or as safely it could have, carried by the delivery man with my father tagging along right behind him. It was sealed, clean, sterile. Almost bigger than me, I noticed, like they were delivering a fridge to a happy new tenant, but instead of thank-yous they received only silence....

Chester Bennington is dead. But I see him. Kurt Cobain is dead. But I see him. Charles Baudelaire is dead. But I see him. Have I gone mad? Are they all ghosts? Or is it the AI doing … things, as she calls it, God only knows why, to us?...

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name....

I had researched Tomás Osorio on my flight from Chile to Germany. He was the closest to a child prodigy the art business was ever likely to produce. At thirteen years of age, his first solo show had sold out within minutes, for a combined price of four hundred thousand dollars....

Clara’s favorite part of the workday is the very beginning. She likes flipping the switches on the wall right inside the office entrance, all sixteen of them, different colors and laid out in two neat columns, like the console from an old NASA space capsule that she got to sit inside once on a school trip to DC....