In an alternate Great Depressions NYC, a Jewish foreman investigates the true outputs of his factory as his eccentric German employer seeks to use an emerging idea called "industrivism," or the improvement of the human body through technology, created by a bored pulp writer, to recruit workers to fulfill his machinations. Without realizing, a pulp writer in an alternative 1920s New York City invents the idea of "industrivism" that earns her an audience with an eccentric German businessman. Meanwhile, a Jewish foreman investigate the true purpose of the factory and unearths his employer's dark past and future machinations.

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.

A young man working in an intense laboratory falls madly in love with a machine that can invent new sensations on this skin - until the experiment is destroyed.

When eccentric scientist Papa Schimmelhorn plays his seemingly harmless bassoon, a wave of material-eating Gnurrs are summoned by the millions. He uses them to end the war against Bobovia.

Two airship engineers who suddenly find themselves jobless decide to make a dangerous train journey from post-war Baltimore to San Fransisco for better chances at finding work.

When a notebook full of top-secret designs is looted from a Brooklyn saloon, a Latino drummer and his inventor girlfriend must go on a quest to retrieve it from a rival Manhattan gang.

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.

While recovering from a serious illness, a ninety-year-old scientist wades through his patchy memory, piecing together fragments of images and emotions from his childhood as an immigrant in the once-moving American 1940s. He thinks about his admiration for airplanes, which have been outlawed in this alternate history. He considers how such scientific advancements can also bring about great destruction.

In seventeenth-century Delft, a fanatically curious fabric merchant invents the microscope. Even as he neglects and abuses his family, he discovers a new world of life.

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.