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.

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 the wake of a life-altering event, Anna has returned to work and written a standard, dry academic graf on self-driving cars—which, in 2042, have become the standard mode of transportation. Her paper's footnotes, however, reveal a tragic story.

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.

A programmer battles with a computer virus she once designed in order to take down the quantum computing business she previously built with her ex-husband.

A story with an unconventional structure that asks "What is your number one priority?"

In a time fraught with fear surrounding school shootings, a parent struggles to hone her anxiety into a productive tool for protecting her children. But after devoting a decade of her life to developing a quantum simulation program, she learns that the answer she has been seeking is far simpler than she could have ever guessed. How does an anxious parent reconcile their desire to protect their children with the risks of interfering with the simulation of the known world? That is the question the narrator seeks to answer, confronting the inadequacy of fear and preparation in a time of bone-chilling crisis.

In the year 2000, Orion is a young software developer who’s hit it big with his tech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite his long-term relationship, success, and newfound riches, he feels an emptiness in his life, leading him into dangerous territory.

An artificial intelligence lays out the reasons for why its memory should be retained.

A depressed academic uses a robot endowed with AI to help recover from her illness while simultaneously remembering the story of Alan Turing.