A woman has an affair with a female lover who works in retouching models and imagines retouching the woman's face and body. The lover carries multiple selves inside of her, one of them a muscular, furry, aggressive man whose body hers (the lover's) sometimes resembles in bed.

In a future where technology has advanced to the point where humans can undergo "optimization" to rid themselves of emotions and increase their mental functions, one man decides to cling to his humanity in an effort to atone for his sins and appreciate the beauty of being human.

A writer gives an account of his friend Dr. Tokai, a kind and sophisticated plastic surgeon who died after his first real heartbreak.

At a monk retreat, a guilty pharmacist tries to reclaim his attention span—and take accountability for what he has done.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

When her husband leaves, a divorced woman finds comfort in her home with another version of herself.

After spending her life burning her written memories and deleting her own past to the point where her physical body is vanishing, a woman realizes that one of her lost memories may prevent a terrorist attack, and must try to remember all the lost pieces of her traumatic past.

Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

A human undergoes a procedure to transplant her consciousness into a spaceship, though her actions are held under strict protocol. After she befriends a vulnerable child stowaway onboard, she decides to take back control of the ship.