A 21st-century family reunites every year for a battle against the Crawfather, a crawdad monster the size of an 18-wheeler that has killed and eaten many family members.

The Eavesdropper, a human-alien hybrid woman, moves through a sentient spaceship full of comatose humans whose memories she absorbs and processes through mind reading.

A man adopts a cage full of insects that engage in ritual war against each other and soon comes to be their god. When he begins to act cruelly against them as a corrupt exploration of his own power, the insects escape and begin a killing spree.

A retired covert operative speaks to a class, detailing the ways he “protected” his country and how protection came at the cost of danger.

When a posthuman 'hardshell' robot finds an injured biological human who has committed war crimes against hardshells, the hardshell's programming will not allow it to let the human come to harm, so it must use all the resources it has to find a way to bring this war criminal to justice.