Twenty years after her Alzheimer diagnosis, the person who had been the third-richest on Earth still ran her company with ever-sharper attention to detail, her focus on business absolute, her ruthlessness indistinguishable from her younger days.

Neither these robots nor these corporations are people.

“I can’t sleep,” I complained to my therapist. The inhumanly empathetic rendering nodded.

It wasn’t terrorism to install robots with machine guns in every schoolyard and street corner.

“miracle” is an object of wonder, while a “monster” is a strange creature portending evil. Those are not mutually exclusive.

“Virality is bullshit”, he said that last night, waving his gun as if underlining the point.

Why AIs will never fully replace humans.

I would have betrayed anybody and anything for a hallucination.

Like seasons or car accidents, vampires must be known but considered an unavoidable part of the natural world. They must be spoken of as ecologically and socially beneficial, mostly by themselves and by people entirely ignorant about both topics or naively attempting to be eaten last.

Hovering over the frozen ruins of dead social networks I set loose statistical ghouls to sift through their words and learn their blind rhythms, until the nonsense from the bots mirrors the high-dimensional topologies of the original authors. Prosody, not psychology. Vocabularies, not minds. But for such as they were perhaps complexity enough.