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385 pages, Hardcover
First published April 11, 2017
… she turns on her implant’s wireless, is instantly aware of the constellations of the thousands of nearby machines. She scans through them and finds the elevator and sees that its software hasn’t been updated in years – infrastructure, she’s noticed, is often lost in the shuffle. She tells it lies like bad patterns whispered in its ear, and it’s soon persuaded that she’s a long overdue maintenance program sent by the manufacturer and by the time the elevator starts to slow it’s entirely hers and she’s never been happier about committing a felony.In Kern’s laptop game, the “Void Star” is the ultimate challenge, where the final battle with the Lord of Shadows awaits, which has its analog in the plot of this novel. The phrase “Void Star” is also a reference to void * in C and C++ software programming: it’s a pointer to an unspecified type of memory location, which is a a programming technique for more easily building a solution, but a risky one. As one programming website comments, “[t]he disadvantage of using void * is that you throw type safety out the window and into oncoming traffic.” This concept, too, is echoed in the plot of Void Star.
With each passing car there’s a deafening pulse and he’s wondering if he could time them, fling himself through one of the evanescent gaps, and he’s looking for his moment when behind him someone ostentatiously clears his throat.
He pads naked into the bathroom, which is tiled in smooth stone—easing the light on, he sees it’s granite, mottled with the cross-sections of tiny fossil shells.