An elderly Chinese engineer reflects the time he spends working on obsolete space craft in relative isolation.

Through three tales of impossible machines with abilities to manipulate the physical world, travel through time and space, and bestow telepathy onto an entire community, candidates of an engineering exam in the far future are asked to ponder fantastical implications of technology.

Days after announcing an invention that will change the fabric of his futuristic world, an inventor goes missing and two detectives must find out where he is and what his supposedly groundbreaking invention was.

On a train ride to a metallurgical conference in Chicago, a consultant tries to avoid the debate between pure and applied sciences, but he cannot avoid it when he gets cornered in the washroom by two professors and an undecided bright new recruit.

In the near future, an energy crisis compels humanity to take advantage of the one source left untouched by industrialization: the past.