The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a highly dysfunctional family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004. The first three stories follow the character of "venture altruist" Manfred Macx starting in the early 21st Century, the second three...

"The planet Kerenza is attacked, and Kady and Ezra find themselves on a space fleet fleeing the enemy, while their ship's artificial intelligence system and a deadly plague may be the end of them all"--

"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. There, it will embark on a journey of exploration. As the probe is being tested at Goddard, things go awry, and an explosion kills seven scientists. The AI program in the probe, a powerful, self-modifying AI called "Dorothy," flees into the Internet. Series character Wyman Ford is tapped by the president's science...

"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous...

Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus continue to lead the revolt against the Machine Army. In their quest to save the human race from extinction, they gain greater insight into the construction of The Matrix and Neo's pivotal role in the fate of mankind.

Return to a world of two realities: one, everyday life; the other, what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more.

"Kady, Ezra, Hanna, and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza--but who knows what they'll find seven months after the invasion?" --

"Oliver and Nathan, determined to get to the bottom of their new homeroom teacher's fishy behavior, discover Mr. Aidact is actually an AI robot from a secret experimental program."--

"How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology--and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income...

"We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind,...