https://serd.es/2025/04/17/Holding-the-Bag.html
The author does a lot of neat stuff with hardware imaging on their mastodon account, @azonenberg@ioc.exchange, which is very cool, and I’ve been following for a while. Just got around to reading this piece; it’s fun sci-fi, I enjoyed it a lot!
slight spoilers for why
It is, in large part, because the entire thing is a setup for the joke-ish reveal at the end. The contrivances abound (why Earth, specifically? and how come the protagonist has no agency?), but there are so many other silly details that make me smile & think "ah, someone who loves computers/science wrote this", that it's all good. Also the author's specialty, computational imaging, makes a star play and I think that's great :3
