The Noise Floor by Kevin Escoda: nineteen stories of the near future, including the five singles Lanterns, Churn, Saltwater, Four Questions and Serenity.
An AI rationed to twenty watts asks the one question its rationers never specified. And that is only the first story. Nineteen stories from the thin edge of tomorrow, where the signal of our lives meets the noise of our machines.
The last cable repair ship dredges up something patient on a route that officially carries nothing. A dying language survives inside a model, waiting for mouths. A city is built three milliseconds closer to the money. Two hundred stars begin a countdown older than our species.
Five transmissions: Lanterns, Churn, Saltwater, Four Questions, Serenity™. Fourteen signals: Complete stories at the length of a coffee, sitting between the longer pieces. Carried over from the nonfiction on the infrastructure of power: the future is not weightless. It runs on cables, contracts and human hearts, and every one of them can be cut.