Ladies and Gentlemen: the invention for which you are giving me this award is a fraud. It has an unforgivable bug. Ladies and Gentlemen, I accept this honor. Ladies and Gentlemen. This isn’t what I had in mind. I have been told it is customary to speak about the roots of one’s inspiration....

Anuett wiped dust out of her eyes and grabbed the trowel from her kit. Despite her aching knees and sore back, she scraped away yet another time-compressed layer of dirt from off the fresco, like she’d done for the last few standard-hours....

One  So a guy goes into a bar and orders a drink.  He nods toward the bartender and raises a finger. The bartender returns a knowing smile and slides a tequila on the rocks down the counter. The bartender doesn’t know the guy; this is the first time this guy has been in this bar....

Setti knew the woman for a ghost the moment she appeared. It was the pink hair that gave her away, short and spiky. Real people didn’t have hair like that. Also, you couldn’t see the scratch-marks on Setti’s kitchen table through real people’s torsos....

Anna follows the ghost across the galaxy, curled up into a ball inside her pod. She spends an eternity like this—drifting past stars and planets and the deep, never-ending void in between. Drifting, just in general. She sleeps little, thinks even less....

03/01/1546 – Mission #VN-7316 It’s hard to write an ongoing report when I know you’re going to be the first person to read it. You wouldn’t believe how much time I wasted just trying to decide what tone to strive for....