Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories

A collection of short fiction from qntm, who writes science fiction the way an engineer writes a bug report: state the premise precisely, then follow it all the way down regardless of where it goes.

The stories work through uploaded consciousness, universes with different rules, and systems that behave exactly as specified and are therefore appalling. The best of them, "Lena" among them, take a single technical idea and expose the human consequence buried inside it in a few pages.

Short, cold, and considerably more upsetting than the page count suggests. If you came from There Is No Antimemetics Division, this is the same mind working at shorter range.