After the near total collapse of the human race it falls upon one injured machine and one young boy to survive long enough to pass on stories about human lives and history.

After the collapse of civilization, a group of men meets weekly to read classic novels and listen to records on a portable phonograph, bringing them great joy but unbearable distress at remembering how the world used to be.

When electricity-eating beings invade and overtake the earth in 1977, all humans are stripped of anything electrical-powered and forced to adapt.

As a programmer builds a videogame world, the stars above Earth go out and reality begins to disappear one landscape at a time until nothing is left but a memory of a woman, Sarah.

In a dystopian future dominated by technology, a man is ejected from his orgynism—a mass of sedated human bodies connected for their own sexual pleasure. Without that blissful oblivion, the man is left to wander what is left of his city.

When a serial writer decides that he can’t take more of his monotonous life, he destroys his copywriter and leaves his domestic prison to protest the rise of the machines.

In a world where death is a foreign past to the privileged people who live on their technologically-advanced home in space, the Satellite, a television representative travels to Earth to make a deal with a village chief who is dying from cancer. In exchange for broadcasting the immersive experience of the chief's death, the television representative will provide the chief with technology to help his village better survive in the ruined wasteland that the Earth has become.

In the far future, a Welsh woman temporarily moves to a space colony on a distant planet with her husband, Owen. The woman regals her space-born daughter with tales of the wonders of Earth, and her daughter develops a great longing for Earth that eventually puts her life at risk.

Is it better to have a human civilization devoid of art and culture than to have none at all? Three Earth ambassadors must whether to annihilate a space colony that has traded away human consciousness for a hive mind that feels nothing but the need for survival. In the distant future, three humans in possession of nuclear warheads must decide whether to allow a remarkable human variant species without consciousness to dominate the galaxy or destroy them forever.

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.