my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done. - Robin Sloan

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.

I'd sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I'd get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I'd add it to my reading list. Then I'd follow another link to a book review. I'd add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book — third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I'd retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.

There had to be a scale somewhere — the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings — upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.