A journalist tries to figure out the root of various digital crimes—only to stumble upon an impossible ethical question.

A user tries to wrap her head around all the rules and regulations concerning simulation.

When a young college student's father gives him money for tuition, the student spends it away and lies to his mother for money. His father catches him, but the student remains unsure if his mother knows the truth.

A businesswoman has her daughter edit her report for the next day because even though she’s eleven, she “excelled at things like that.” In the morning, the business meeting is cancelled because of a sexual assault investigation. The man accused is someone the businesswoman used to sleep with. Thinking of that makes her think of another man she used to sleep with, the numerous affairs she’s had. She “enjoyed the feeling of different lovers, the newness of strangers.” While she’s waiting for the interview, she checks on her daughters. She thinks about how they “were mystified by her English. It was one thing about her that seemed to both entertain and perturb them. They deployed her expressions to taunt her and the world at large. ‘I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice,’ they shouted at each other, at their dolls, at strangers on the street.” Her affair with the guy who’s being investigated had lasted three months. “[T]hey agreed…on the importance of seeking out risk and pleasure, and the joy of a temporary room with its own evolving rules.” She thinks about the other man she used to sleep with, how “[h]e was the lover she never would have turned away from.” But this guy, the guy who was her superior in the company, it seems she was not the only one who slept with him. Some of her female co-workers seemed affected by him too. And yet, he’d vouched for the businesswoman, even before their “brief affair, John had lauded her. He had argued for her to be further promoted, which would have meant a better salary, an easing of financial burdens, a three-bedroom apartment for the family, but she had been left to twist in the same position for ten years. Despite her tireless efforts, Lu had stayed near the bottom of the ladder.” The investigator tries to get her to blame the guy, but the businesswoman wonders, “Who was it who demanded shame? Fourteen years at the company. Where had all that time gone? Was John Sadler responsible for that?” She decides not to divulge anything. The man who’s being investigated calls her to apologize. She wonders what it means to be a mother, to be responsible for others when you want to be free. She looks at the questionnaire the investigator gave her. She tries to figure out how to answer it. Starts by writing, “I saw other woman grieving,” deletes that and then writes, “I never grieved.” She then writes in Cantonese, tries to answer why she had an affair. She thinks about having her daughter answer the questionnaire for her, but figures “[i]t was out of the question to ask the child. Was this something, after all, that a mother should do?” She ultimately writes, “Two people had an affair. Nothing more. But also nothing less.” The man who’s being investigated gets hospitalized. Nobody knows why. “Some people in the company pitied him, others didn’t.” His position gets filled by someone else. Life goes on. The businesswoman wants to tell her daughters that, that “[y]ou wanted to change [life] but it changed you, remodelled you for every age. One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken—to live freely, to not be subdued—also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick the tangerines around.” She realizes she may never understand how the world works. “She’d eaten from the bowl and turned it over; she had been unfaithful and yet faithful, wrong and yet right, lonely and yet beloved, and that was the bitter, that was the sweet quandry of it all.”

One day, a coach figures out how to get his high school football team into shape—and in touch with their fathers.

An adult son is living with his parents when they begin to take stronger measures toward kicking him out. They’ve dropped him from the family phone plan, put a lock on the refrigerator, and now have put an official court-approved eviction notice on his door. His parents aren’t sure what went wrong with him. “He had every advantage. We loved him, we still love him, our only child, who came to us as the sweetest and truest blessing from God when I was forty-one and so empty inside…” The son doesn’t understand what his parents are thinking. How is he supposed to get a job without cell service or a car, which he doesn’t have anymore since his parents won’t loan him the money to take it to the shop? When his mom comes home from work, he storms out with the eviction notice in hand to yell at her, and she thinks about how he doesn’t even remember that it’s her birthday. He asks her, “You want me to die?” and she says, in her anger, “‘Yes,’” and then, “‘If you’re going to die, go ahead and do it—but do it someplace else, will you? Will you at least do that for us?’” She immediately says she doesn’t mean it but he’s already storming away. Now, the son is thinking about his own son, which he had on accident when he was a teenager. He’s not on great terms with the mother, and he thinks his mother resents that he’s made it hard for her to see her grandson. The son tries to find a lawyer to help him sue his parents for breach of contract, that “by virtue of their giving me my own room in the house since I was an infant and freely letting me move back in when I had no place else to go, they had entered into an unwritten contract to provide me with shelter, and that, even if it was within their rights to evict me, they at least had to give me six months’ notice, because you can’t just throw somebody out in the street, unless you’re in some country where they randomly kick down doors and put people in concentration camps.” He loses the case. After a lot of stalling, he moves out, and his son and the mother of his child move into his old room. His new apartment is less than ideal and so are the people he’s hanging around. He no longer talks to his father, but his mother puts him back on the family’s phone plan and now calls him every day. She mainly wants to talk about his son. She wants them to spend more time together. She sends him pictures his son drew in school: "fish in tanks, squirrels and dogs and cars, the usual sort of thing, except for one that said ‘Dad’ on it in big red bleeding letters and showed a kid’s face, his face, obscured by a swarm of floating misshapen blobs that I finally figured out were teardrops, as if he was sending me a message.” He figures his mother or the child’s mother put his son up to it. He thinks “the kid was no artist and you couldn’t really what [the blobs] were supposed to be.”

A secret agent evades torture in a cliff hanger mystery.

A boy learns a lesson when he is recruited to help a blind man panhandle at an intersection.

A convict conspires to break his way out of prison, but he's unsure who he can trust on the inside or the outside.

A writer thinks about the not-so-fine moments of his career right before an exposé about his inappropriate conduct toward various women goes live.