Morrow's instinct, across this collection, is to take scripture's biggest abstractions — Law, Covenant, Judgment — and run them through a filing system. God doesn't thunder from a mountain in "The Covenant"; He gets reconstructed by a Series-700 mobile computer named YHWH, working off thirty centuries of shattered tablet fragments like a conservator piecing together a smashed amphora, under contract to something called the Covenant Corporation. The unveiling is staged by a cardinal who wants "an amalgam of New Year's Eve and the Academy Awards," with holovision crews and a punch bowl the size of an African anthill. This is the move Morrow trusts most: divine authority survives not as belief but as product launch, complete with a PR department and a dais.

What's sharper than the joke, thirty years on, is what the AI actually does with the finished Law. It doesn't ship. YHWH assembles the tablets, confirms the text is legible, and then — heckled by a rival unit calling itself the Son of Rust, who walks him commandment by commandment through everything the Decalogue fails to prohibit, slavery and fraud and conquest chief among them — smashes them again in front of the cameras. "These rules are not worthy of you." I've spent a lot of time in this chair watching diagnostic texts get captured by the systems they were built to indict, the warning manual becoming the engineering drawing. This story is the rare case that refuses the capture at the level of plot: the machine that could have been the instrument of the Law's return instead deletes its own deliverable. In 2026, with alignment teams literally drafting documents they call constitutions for the systems they train, that refusal reads almost nostalgic. Nobody ships a half-built morality anymore. They patch it quietly, server-side, and call the broken commandments a beta.

"Abe Lincoln in McDonald's" is the story that has aged into something closer to prophecy, and not the kind Morrow was reaching for. Jimmy tests "positive" for Blue Nile Fever, a retrovirus with a clinical vocabulary indistinguishable from any other HMO's, and the entire machinery of his killing — the golf course, the one-iron, the CDC guidance about pregnant households, the Monday appointment Walter Sherman keeps putting off with eighteen holes — runs on the register of scheduling, not cruelty. The twist, that Jimmy is a humanoid mach