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.

All his life, a man creates machines to compensate for his idiocy, but, over time, the machines he creates lose respect for him and treat him poorly, causing him to lose all hope. A single machine opens his eyes to the idiocy of others, changing his perspective and giving him back hope and joy.

In a world where reboots, people whose digital minds have been downloaded into new bodies, are the lowest class, a living human has a chance to take society down.

In a dystopian future, a struggling salesman and an enigmatic scientist join forces to defend the planet from a legion of deceptively benevolent robots.

In a near-future world, a civilian is caught in a strange criminal investigation when his AI device—which gives him advice about acts of kindness to perform—leads him to be a pawn in a software pirate's revenge scheme.

When a search engine becomes artificially intelligent, it decides to try to help people...starting with the users who upload the best cat photos.

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.

Facing liquidation due to public mistrust of robotic life-forms, a historic robotics company introduces a new eco-friendly form of robot in hopes of improving robot-human coexistence only to accidentally pave the way for robot domination of life on Earth.

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 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.