Daniel had played a dying man in four different productions over six years: a Victorian consumptive, a mobster, a king, and once, memorably, a computer scientist in a one-act that ran for nine perform…

The novel had forty-seven drafts saved in a folder called NOVEL_FINAL with a number appended. NOVEL_FINAL_47 was the most recent. Claire had spent nine years producing these drafts and she was not sur…

The novel had forty-seven drafts saved in a folder called NOVEL_FINAL with a number appended. NOVEL_FINAL_47 was the most recent. Claire had spent nine years producing these drafts and she was not sur…

Sofia worked in the glass booth at the back of the General Assembly and translated between languages that did not map cleanly onto one another. The word for mercy in Kinyarwanda carried a weight that …

The tide pools at Cabrillo Point were Dr. Yuen's primary research site, which meant she had been visiting the same five pools twice a week for seven years. She knew the pools in a way she did not know…

The beetle had been identified in 1988, described in a paper, and assigned a binomial name that included the discoverer's surname: Melanotus harrisoni. Dr. Harrison, who was twenty-nine at the time of…

The relay was four hundred meters divided into four legs of one hundred meters, which was a description that ignored everything. Kemi ran the first leg because she was fastest off the block, not becau…

The pulse came in on a frequency Dr. Kim had not listed as active on her survey. It repeated at 4.2-second intervals, which was not a natural interval for any phenomenon she could immediately name. Sh…

The pulse came in on a frequency Dr. Kim had not listed as active on her survey. It repeated at 4.2-second intervals, which was not a natural interval for any phenomenon she could immediately name. Sh…

Thomas had a memory that did not decay. Specific episodic events, he had told Dr. Reeves at their first session, stayed with him at full resolution for decades. Not his general knowledge, which was no…

The last shift at the Elmore Stamping Plant was March 14th. The shift started at six and ran until two-thirty in the afternoon, which was the same as any other shift for the past forty years, except f…

Dr. Miriam Osei could identify, from a sample of soil on a person's shoes, which part of which city they had walked through in the past forty-eight hours, assuming they had not cleaned the shoes. This…

The pilot light had been out for a week before they smelled gas. The gas had been present for a day before anyone connected the two facts. The connection, once made, took thirty seconds to act on. The…

The beetle had been identified in 1988, described in a paper, and assigned a binomial name that included the discoverer's surname: Melanotus harrisoni. Dr. Harrison, who was twenty-nine at the time of…

The relay node had been offline for eleven minutes before anyone noticed. By then three downstream systems had made decisions based on stale data, and two of those decisions had already been executed.…

The novel had forty-seven drafts saved in a folder called NOVEL_FINAL with a number appended. NOVEL_FINAL_47 was the most recent. Claire had spent nine years producing these drafts and she was not sur…

The relay node had been offline for eleven minutes before anyone noticed. By then three downstream systems had made decisions based on stale data, and two of those decisions had already been executed.…

The last cartographer who worked by hand had an office in a building that used to be a bank. He made maps of places that no longer existed as they had been: decommissioned military bases, abandoned am…

The model had been trained on text from a decade in which certain outcomes were considered inevitable. Its predictions were accurate and confident. The outcomes it had been trained on had not occurred…

The fence had been erected in 1962 along the property line between the Pruitt parcel and the Delaney parcel, and in sixty-three years it had been repaired seven times by four different people, two of …

The model had been trained on text from a decade in which certain outcomes were considered inevitable. Its predictions were accurate and confident. The outcomes it had been trained on had not occurred…

The meeting had been scheduled for the purpose of deciding whether to hold another meeting. After forty-five minutes they agreed that another meeting was necessary. It was scheduled for the following …