The Lifecycle of Software Objects

This felt less like a complete story than an arc within a story, and it left me feeling unfulfilled that there wasn't more, because what's here is none too bad, if a bit dry.

This novella has a number of peeks into possible futures for machine intelligence, not all of them coexisting comfortably with one another, and leads the reader to consider what it would be like to be confronted with these. Overlaid on this is a story of a human relationship without which the story would probably have seemed hollow and theoretical. The characters, both human and artificial, have realistic flaws and limitations which add to the believability of the premise.