- Tower of Babylon
- A story about people tunneling through the vault of heaven. But unbeknownst to them, their world is shaped in a way that they were tunneling through the Earth's crust back up to the surface.
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- Understand
- A person who suffered brain death is given an experimental drug that has a side effect of making neural connections more efficient. So efficient that his mind gets stuck in a death loop.
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- Division by Zero
- A mathematician proves that algebra is flawed and becomes suicidal. Her husband shares empathy from his own suicidal past, but it's empathy of separation over unification.
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- Story of Your Life
Arrival (2016)
- A linguist helps communicate with heptapod aliens. Through learning their language, she develops the ability to simultaneously experience the birth, life, and death of her daughter, before living through those events.
- "Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it."
- "Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose."
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- Seventy-Two Letters
- A nomenclator does research into seventy-two letter names that can animate sculpted automata. His research helps refine the nomenclature used to add dexterity to the automata, where his research is picked up by a lord who was investigating humanities sterility come after a set amount of generations (about five). Order is born from nomenclature, and life is born from order. More complex beings see a lesser cross-generational expectancy, as well as more complex nomenclature that guides them. As speculated, by imprinting the nomenclature for humanity on the ovum of a women, new life is able to made without a father. However, that solution allows lords to rule over the peasants by controlling their reproductive freedoms, since each new generation would have to be artificially induced. The nomenclator discovers the solution to impress the ovum with an antonym that induces a foetus that bores its own name, allowing the artificially induced generation to bore their own children by providing them with the nomenclature for humanity.
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- The Evolution of Human Science
- Scientific research by humans falls to the wayside of research done by meta-humans. Meta-humans are born of gene therapy to allow them to communicate more effectively, however they grow up to be incomprehensible to the parents. Because of this, parents tend not to opt for the gene therapy adjustments, leading to a renewed interest in human-led research.
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- Hell is the Absence of God
- Too religious for me.
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- Liking What You See: A Documentary
- This story consists of various peoples' points of views about a student-led initiative to require college attendees to get a procedure that makes it impossible to feel feelings associated with beautiful or ugly faces.
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