After a university student returns home from to Mali to find al-Qaeda has thrown his hometown into a state of chaos and destruction, he finds himself lost in the desert, with an unpredictable technology age genie emerging from his iPad to guide him to safety.

A Los Angeles speech pathologist is assigned to the case of a presumably mentally-ill woman who speaks in gibberish that turns out to be Old English. When the woman disappears, deciphering her mysterious writing leads the pathologist to wonder if she has stumbled across a time traveler.

A young woman from Dahomey is stolen during the Dutch colonization. She is separated from her brother and hopes to go on a mission to find him.

In a realistic sci-fi world, a mystery writer nurtures his robot servant's interest in becoming a writer as well, paying for a series of expensive upgrades such that the robot can understand spelling, grammar, plot, human behavior, and humor. However, when the robot's talent threatens to surpass his own, the egotistical writer demands the robot's mind be restored to its original state.

A young man leaves his traditional village behind to travel and work on distant planets. Throughout his interplanetary journeys, he must constantly reevaluate his understandings of truth, tradition, and love as he seeks a fulfilling life of his own, independent of what is expected from him.

A scientist who specializes in neurolinguistic computing built an ASL translation system to more easily video-call with her deaf sister, who is an avian conservationist. When one of her birds accidentally gets online with the scientist's children, the scientist discovers that her translation software can give a voice to animals too.

In a Chinese village during the Qing Dynasty, a crippled man acts as a lawyer for the poor with the help of the trickster Monkey King, but his peaceful life is turned upside down when he comes into possession of a book that details atrocities committed by the government.