Tower of Babylon: Hillalum, miner from Elam traveled to Babylon to help with the Tower of Babel, which after centuries of construction had reached the vault of heaven. It took the miners months climb up the tower, in stages of a week each, after which their guides went back down to the level on which they lived. Passing the levels of the moon, sun, and stars, they reached the granite vault. The miners tunneled upwards, and one day they encountered a storage vault for water. They close it off quickly to prevent it flooding out, but Hillalum was trapped inside. He frantically swam and climbed upward in the darkness, eventually coming out as if it were the ground. Which it seemed to be—a passing caravan was going to Babylon. Then he realized that Yahweh had not interfered with the tower because Yahweh’s dwelling was still inviolate; the world was constructed such that the bottom of it was connected to the top, like the beginning end of the carving on a cylinder seal is connected to the end of the carving.

Understand: Leon Greco, a holovid editor, who had an accident that left him nearly brain-dead was given an experimental injection to restore his neurological connections. It worked well, raising him from 70th percentile to 99th percentile intelligence, and he was offered another injection as an experiment, since it only worked on dead neurons, of which he had many more than the usual. The second injection made him superhuman, and he began intuiting people’s behaviors based on subtle muscular cues. He understood that the CIA wanted him and would pursue him. He stole a third dose used his superhuman ability to vanish. He gave himself the third dose, which enabled him to be conscious of everything in his body, and to be able to reprogram his mind. However, he had to eat a lot to fuel his brain, and shave his head to allow heat to escape, and he realized that he needed to build external brainpower in order to come to the singularity of understanding. One day he found a subtle message in the stock investments he set up to finance his research, and he realized that there was another super-intelligence out there, which knew his name. After some search, he located him, named Reynolds. Reynolds wanted to benefit humanity and Greco wanted to retreat from humanity, and since he could not be part of Reynolds’ solution, he was part of Reynolds’ problem, and thus they could only be enemies. They met and had a silent conversation confirming this. Greco set up a runaway loop in Reynolds’ mind, and could see his intelligence diminishing, but Reynolds was able to analyze it as it was working and undo it, even with reduced intelligence. Reynolds had set up some memories in Greco, and triggered them; the memories together gave him the understanding of the Word which would destroy his consciousness, and he dissolved.

Division by Zero: A mathematician discovered that division by zero was not actually an illegal mathematical operation, which meant that any number was equivalent to any other. This destroyed any meaning that mathematics could have, and she became depressed. While she was doing this, her husband was coming to the conclusion that he did not know her any more; he actually understood how she was feeling, but was afraid to tell her why.

Story of Your Life: Told somewhat in reverse, a female linguist meets a male physicist as they are part of a team trying to learn to communicate with some aliens that have arrived. She slowly understands their written language, which has the interesting feature that the words affect each other. As she understands the language, she begins to start remembering the future. She and the physicist will have a daughter; they will divorce; her daughter will die in a mountain climbing accident at 25. Although she knows the future, when the choice arrives in the present, it impels her to make it the way it will happen. Just like light going from air to water figures out the quickest path before it travels, she is doing the same, but the question is, is she minimizing and maximizing her pain?

Seventy-Two Letters: In the Victorian Era, Namers learned to use 72 letter Hebrew names to create useful golems [with a steampunk-like ethos, minus the steam]. One particular (British) namer discovered descriptors that animate fingers, allowing the golem to produce fine designs. His craftsmen were afraid that the golem would take their jobs and threatened to strike. An English lord invited him into a project to help humanity: the lord had discovered that humanity would die out within five generations. He had discovered how to magnify the proto-humans in male sperm (which were ghostly until the sperm reached an egg, and fought each other for the chance), and having put one in an egg and examined the results over several generations, discovered that there were no humunculi by the fifth generation. Another member of the team found out that the lord planned to restrict who could breed. The namer resolved the problem by discovering the piece of a name that was self-replicating.

The Evolution of Human Science: Research paper describing the situation around metahumans. Sugitomo therapy, if done early in embryo development, before neurogenesis, allows the child to be connect to a digital network with their brain. Unfortunately, this results in the child becoming incomprehensible to their parents, so very few parents now do Sugitomo therapy. This means that human culture is likely to survive in parallel with metahumans, as metahuman language/culture are incomprehensibly advanced to normal humans. Only a little has been translated by metahumans into human language.

Hell Is the Absence of God: Although the ground sometimes turned transparent and revealed the souls in Hell, and that the souls of the saved could be seen ascending to Heaven, Neil Fisk had largely ignored God as irrelevant until his wife died and was seen ascending to Heaven after being killed by the blast of an angelic visitation (which were often accompanied by earthquakes, fire, floods and sometimes killed people). He wanted to be with her again more than anything, but that required loving God, and he was angry at him for taking her away. He tried everything, went to support groups for people (or family of) who experienced angelic visitations. Nothing worked, and eventually he decided to see if he could get caught in the backwash of an angel arriving or leaving, as those people who experienced Heaven’s light loved God completely. There was another woman who was crippled while in the womb, when her mother was in the vicinity of an angelic encounter. She spent her life speaking about living contentedly with her disability, and encouraged many. She was healed during a visitation, which left her struggling how to help people. They both ended up at a region known for frequent visitations, and Neil bought an offroad truck to drive to the angel when one was sighted. After one was sighted, he managed to drive nearby, but wrecked his car and fatally injured himself. The woman happened to be near, and she knew him from the support group. She tried to help his wound, but could only slow the arrival of death. While he was dying, the angle left and he was saw Heaven’s light, and loved God with his entire being. He was not taken to Heaven when he died, and in Hell he knew the absence of God and what his presence would be like. But he still loved God anyway.

Liking What You See: A Documentary: Students at a university debate over a bill by the student senate to require students to enable “calli”, an easy, non-invasive, reversible procedure that disables specifically the part of the brain that recognizes beauty in people and treats beautiful people better. Typical Progressive moralizing debate ensues (but written in 2002).