The Ones Who Look {novelette}

by Katharine Duckett

Description

Ethical Empire built the gate to heaven, and their employees hold the keys. By offering custom-built afterlives through full-brain uploads, they answered the needs of a society pushed to the brink by climate change and cascading antibiotic failure. But for Zoe, who works daily to assess the sins of users and decide who's worthy of salvation, heaven is not so simple. Despite the urging of the angels on her shoulder, she is determined to uncover heaven's secrets, no matter the cost. At the show more Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. show less

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ca.bookwyrm 1,398 reviews

This short story is a bit odd: it deals with Heaven & Hell and judgment, but it also is 100% human. The sci-fi aspect of it (which I am not going into because of spoilers — you can read the story for yourself here and see for yourself: https://www.tor.com/2020/07/01/the-ones-who-look-katharine-duckett/) is something I could see humanity actually doing, right or wrong, once we have the capability for it.

I thought this was a well-crafted story, but too open-ended for my personal tastes. I didn't get any hint of what happened at the end of the story, and even when something is left open to personal interpretation, I like there to be a hint. Now, it's possible that there is a hint there for people who are either more religious than I am show more (maybe there are hints in the Heaven & Hell aspect that I missed) or people who know more about the actual mechanics of what the programmers did. But if there were hints about what the ending meant, I missed them completely. show less

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