Item One: Glaciator. This is one of my least favorite inventions, and that’s only because the device is so fickle. At first I thought it was pretty cool, being able to design the coolant, ignition and explosion mechanisms as interlinked chambers contained within a fist-sized steel sphere....

Wake. Little input, bad bandwidth. Low-res image, blue planet, white clouds. Insufficient resources to boot full OS. Eight to the minus sixty-fourth speed. Incoming transmission attempted download. No space. Watchdog process, wake when okay. Power down. Wake up. Better than first time, not enough yet....

The New Year was coming, and my calendar was full of social engagements. A good number of friends, more than usual, had invited me out to dinner that year, many of them the county’s most celebrated fiction writers, essayists, and poets....

Red was the color of the land, but it was not the red they were used to, vibrant and iridescent, unraveling every shade of the spectrum: scarlet and crimson, carmine and vermilion, garnet, coral, maroon. It was magma, the blood of mammals, the fruits and the flowers, the crystals that formed in caves....

One: A Maze of Associations How do you measure creativity? The founder of the associative theory of creativity believed that creativity is the ability to connect disparate elements which are distantly related. “The greater the distance of association between the newly connected elements, the more creative the thought that joins them or the solution to the problem.”...

As I lifted my eyes from the tracking app, I saw my next customer. She was just outside, near a group of rowdy people with colorful umbrellas, and still holding a briefcase that must have been important at that final moment....