A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

The asteroid work crews don't have much to do but tell tall tales to each other. One man tells a particularly riveting account of an expedition where he met a strange parasitic species that inhabits human bodies and barely escaped unscathed—or did he?

A grieving mother and accomplished linguist relives her child's lost life as she learns to communicate with the aliens that have landed on earth.

Aboard a human city ship headed for Proxima b, shadows begin to haunt the sleeping passengers. An engineer commits suicide, and a psychotherapist finds that these apparitions feed on human guilt. The only way to survive is to master and confront the mounds of guilt that each human passenger carries inside herself.

Aliens land peacefully on Earth and promise to fix humans’ societal problems, but humans soon get so frustrated with them that they flee to other planets. The smaller Earth population ends up bringing positive change, but this emigration to other planets reveals that many other populations have fled these aliens for the same reason.

A strange intergalactic force infiltrates the consciousness of a modern Earthling, prompting meditations on the role of the human, the loneliness of life, and the greater unknown.

A woman on a space mission to help save the planet sends audio messages to her brother back on Earth. The last message contains gut-wrenching confessions, and reveals that her brother is the reason she is on the mission at all.

In the near future, a young mother leaves behind a book for her daughter before she embarks on her space journey to the outer solar system in an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial creatures. Sections from her book are interspersed with her husband's verbal recollections of their love story, which he addresses to their young daughter.

A group of explorers take a traveler to tour a cave where ghosts sing songs forgotten by the living. Upon entering, they realize they underestimated the effect the songs have on the psyche.

A modern Puerto Rican parrot meditates on why humans seek intelligence in other corners of the universe while they neglect the refined communicative capacities of their neighboring parrots.