So for his pandemic book, Paul Cornell wrote a corporate dystopia in space, and it's so weird I'm not sure what to make of it. The main characters are all computer intelligences enslaved by a corporation (which appears to be the only thing that's survived the Earth), who are so mindfucked that they literally cannot think of it as enslavement. They're out on a mining-survey ship in Saturn's orbit, and run into a mysterious object that appears to be messing with them.

As they investigate the object, we find out more about how they got stuck in a computer (one's a video game character that basically evolved sentience, one used to be human and was uploaded, etc), and more about the incredibly bleak history of the solar system. There's a lot of anti-trans violence. There's some genocide. Almost everything is dead or dying. The story never quite gels for me because so many of the trappings are deliberately silly (one character manifests as a balloon, for a reason that's eventually explained, but that just felt distractingly odd for most of the book), and it's more of a guided tour of misery than a plot.

It's a thought experiment, not a novelette, and my main question is, "Are you okay, Paul?"