I've finished too.

Since no one announced that they started reading, I'll start the spoilery discussion.

"The universe began as an enormous breath being held." delighted me. The story is about entropy, or, if you will, about the ultimate end, but it still manages to put some hope and poetry into that situation, rather than sliding into pointlessness and looking for external validation (although it kind of does the latter by invoking aliens).

There was much less focus on that, but the observation "where is my body?" is quite salient. People tend to think that there's a border between "me" and "not me", whether it's the border of meat/nonmeat, or soul/body. But this seems all arbitrary, and I think it's fluid. If a prosthetic can be "me", then why not a wheelchair, and if a wheelchair, why not my glasses, or my bed, or family?

Sometimes I think we individualized ourselves too much and forgot that alone, we're worth very little. How often do you hear "I've earned all of this alone"? We're ants, and an anthill is a superorganism.