A Cosmic Tech Mystery Results in Literal Lost Souls in This Sci-Fi Short Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Twenty-One Second God” by Peter Watts. Enjoy! The Twenty-One Second God by Peter Watts “Individual: a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component.” —Fields and Levin, 2018 We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it can: this number of petaflops, that many milliseconds, ten thousand network nodes stuttering under the weight of increased traffic. Chemicals spiking and crashing in brains the world over: GABA and serotonin and a dozen others that would make perfect sense to you, if you w ... Read full article.