An audio book. Near-future SF.
- The Year of Nostalgia - the mother of the 1st person narrator (a mother) has died. She pays to have her recreated as a hologram built from recorded images. The result on the Nostalgia app is inadequate so they pay more to have her box of journals, etc scanned in too. The result pleases the widower and surprises the narrator - the dead mother's hologram smokes and relates tales about Italian/Mexican lovers. But some romance novels had been scanned
- Beijing - the air's so bad that people go around with oxygen tanks. There are cheap services (like tattooists) that can remove unhappy memories by "patching". The protagonists lover is dead. His parents want to patch him away.
- Comfort - comforting via the web - e.g. images where people welcome the PoV narrator with "great to see you". Pause Rewind Play Pause Rewind Play.
- Purple Hearts - a divorced father doesn't want his son to select the combat version of an online game because real people die. But he's a lonely child, and game-play is how he makes friends. The father starts playing and finds friends. He (accidentally?) enables combat mode and kills some third-world kids.
- We Only Wanted Their Happiness - how much web freedom should kids have? Should they have implants?
- True Love Testimonials - various people recount online relationship experiences. Suppose your avatar has a heterosexual experience with another avatar, but you find out that the person behind the other avatar is the same sex as you? Straight guys like pretending to be lesbians. Should there be gender verification? People overlay the faces of those they're with. Ex's meet in new bodies and like each other again.
- Childhood - parents have robot children because it's cheaper. A girl and boy robot (14 and 10) move in. They try to work out which memories were real and which implanted. The girl starts smoking shavings of her emotion card. The parents start turning her off at night. She absconds, The boy finds her amongst baddies starting to harvest her body-parts. He escapes with her help, but how many of her and his emotions were genuine?
- Sanctuary - intelligent beings invade virtual worlds. An elaborate Easter Egg? Invasion or are they seeking sanctuary? People who'd never gone online before do so to help the alien life, sheltering them in the cellars of their virtual houses.
- Infinite Realities - Someone discovers how to move things between parallel timelines. He meets an alternative version of his partner, who in his normal timeline has rejected him. Is he exploring new aspects of his partner, or being unfaithful to her? There's leakage between timelines. He wonders whether he could arrange a threesome. When he learns about his alternative self he realises he could be a better person. His partner begins to like him again. But when the 2 versions of his partner meet they decide he's caused them to betray each other and put space-time at risk, and tell him to go.
- Mountain Song - The narrator sells advice. China lost. The USA won. Generations differ greatly in their attitude to how to interface online. Towers and satellites.
- Islanders - The protagonist's a young teenage boy. When water levels rose, his mother left. Maybe she's dead. He and his dad salvage what they can now that New York's underwater. When his father meets a woman the narrator decides to set sail alone.
Reviews suggest Black Mirror similarities. I like several of the ideas (The year of Nostalgia, Sanctuary, etc) and the stories usually tick over nicely.
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