A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

A videogame developer becomes obsessed with an AI character of her own creation, and her struggle to control and understand what she has built brings dire consequences.

In the far future, two Ghost hunters— a woman in her 20s and an inhuman, 60-year-old male hunter— find themselves shipwrecked on an abandoned planet in search of Ghosts. As they try to piece together the reason for the planet’s desolation, the male Ghost hunter turns on the woman and the two strike a bargain.

In the wake of ecological disaster caused by a global industrial AI machine, three individuals in New Mexico, Delhi, and Stockholm attempt to discover its secrets and build a new world.

When aliens land on a planet new to them, they find a population obsessed with a virtual reality and uninterested in the intense beauty of the natural world around them.

In a Tucson, Arizona of the near future, an Asian American engineer races to salvage her prized creation, a stratosphere-orbiting balloon, before it can be hijacked to serve nefarious purposes.

A young alien scientist joins forces with other archaeologists to uncover the secrets of a race that died out many years ago.

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.

A collection of excerpts regarding humanity's various pursuits of science throughout time.

Aboard a human city ship headed for Proxima b, shadows begin to haunt the sleeping passengers. An engineer commits suicide, and a psychotherapist finds that these apparitions feed on human guilt. The only way to survive is to master and confront the mounds of guilt that each human passenger carries inside herself.