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Results for Questions Of Agency

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Listing 9 stories.

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

In Michigan, a recently divorced professor reflects on what it means to exist, first alone in his empty apartment and then alongside his student in a mission to find a missing girl.

A middle-aged man faces a difficult decision; he can choose to use genetic alteration to have a say over the life of his unborn child, or leave the future up to chance. As he struggles to choose a path, he reconsiders his own past and the struggles he has faced.

In a futuristic America, over the course of 200 years, a unique robot becomes an artist, a historian, and an inventor. He starts to wear clothes and invents human-like organs for his body, but what he wants more than anything is to be legally recognized as a man. After an operation that makes him mortal, the world congress rules in his favor and the world president grants him the honor of humanity.

In the near future, the United States has set aside designated areas for each group of ethnic minorities. After growing up in one of the cultural conservation units, three dancers consider leading a life outside their home.

In a futuristic world where hardly a trace of natural life exists untouched by human interference, a Citizen makes an unprecedented choice that brings a slew of notoriety and ethical questions.

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.”

In the far future, a woman is selected to undergo a Great Becoming. As she is forced to choose what she will become, she realizes that someone people do not have to choose at all.

A man working at the Met is given an interesting—and daring—proposition regarding one of the museum’s artifacts.