Microsoft gets into sci-fi publishing with research-inspired short stories | PCWorld

The end result is a series of works that bear signs of Microsoftian influence. One story by Seanan McGuire, for instance, tells of a lifelike avatar that removes all conversational barriers for her deaf user, acting as a "highly advanced version of the old translation software that had been rolled out in the late 2010s." While the stories are decidedly PG, they aren't entirely unquestioning of technology. In Greg Bear's tale of quantum computing, a highly-advanced supercomputer appears to cause parallel universes to be inadvertently smashed together.