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A collection of short stories by Greg Egan.

• The Infinite Assassin: the identity crisis of an assassin that exists in an uncountable number of parallel universes.
• The Hundred-Light-Year Diary: people know what is going to happen because they can read the diaries they will write in the future, until history is too horrible to write about truthfully.
• Eugene: future parents design their child to be a genius, but their child's message from the future convinces them not to do it.
• The Caress: a cop discovers a woman-panther chimera, and is then abducted and surgically altered by a billionaire to play for a few seconds in the living re-creation of a famous painting containing the chimera and a man.
• Blood Sisters: twin sisters get the same disease and one dies because she's given a placebo: pharmaceutical research is more efficient when done on the whole population.
• Axiomatic: neural implants allow you to chose what you want to believe; the narrator stops believing that murder is never justified to kill his wife's murderer.
• The Safe-Deposit Box: the narrator regularly moves from one person's body to another; he discovers that his original body is now devoid of mind after an abusive medical experiment.
• Seeing: after having been attacked, the narrator's subjective point of view (as produced by his brain)is to see his body from the outside.
• A Kidnapping: the narrator gets a ransom demand for his wife who has not actually been kidnapped; the victim is a simulated, conscious version of his wife.
• Learning to Be Me: everybody has a computer in their brain learning to be them, before replacing the brain's function; the narrator is the computer who got accidentally out of sync with its brain and now has a separate consciousness.
• The Moat: while a scientist works on replacing the DNA bases with artificial ones to isolate humans from pathogens, isolationists want to shelter Australia from climate refugees.
• The Walk: the executioner for a criminal organization walks his victim to his isolated place of execution, but spares him and commits suicide after having convinced him to use a neural implant to share his belief in a form of reincarnation (based on the necessary repetition of the quantum states of the finite number of particles in an infinite universe).
• The Cutie: the narrator gets Cutie, a process to get a baby that will barely develop for four years after birth and then die; but he got a cheap knock-off who actually learns to talk and walk but will still die at age four.
• Into Darkness: the narrator is a volunteer who enters the wormhole that randomly reappears in the city, to fetch people who get stuck, as moving backwards is impossible.
• Appropriate Love: when her husband needs a new body after a terrible accident, his wife accepts (constrained by the insurance policy) to carry his brain in her womb for two years until the new body is grown.
• The Moral Virologist: a devout christian creates a sexually transmitted virus that defeats condoms and quickly kills people having homosexual relationships or sex with a second partner; when he discovers that it would be fatal to babies being breast-fed longer than 4 weeks, that becomes a sin as well.
• Closer: a couple tries all forms of body-mind swapping, as the man wants to “really know” his partner; after performing a temporary merge of their minds they separate because for knowing each other too well.
• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies: a phenomenon made people of a city permeable to the beliefs of those in close proximity, creating isolated groups sharing a given belief; some people try to navigate between them, trying not to get caught and find a way out of the city, but someone points out that they too share a common belief.