There is a drug called "S", which when taken, allows the user to experience the life they might have lived in a parallel world through dreams. For a few, the drug will do more than that, and after years of use, they will start to drift toward that life, through every life in between. The dreamer drags part of the world with them, warping reality, and many of their other selves are also dreamers.

The protagonist is an assassin, sent in to destroy the dreamer, and an infinite number of his parallel selves go in each world. Each one may or may not be successful, but the cumulative effect of destroying enough of that dreamer's selves will stop the effect.

Until he is confronted with an infinite number of possibilities.

The discovery of a time-reversed galaxy is at first neither believable or interesting, but it's soon realised that by blocking or opening the shutter on a special telescope, simple messages can be passed from the future into the past, and the future diaries are born.

Each person can use one hundred words a day to record their life and send it back to a time before they are born, waiting to be read. Some find that they cannot cope with unexpected events that aren't recorded in their diaries, and that small lies have been told. But what about the future world history? What if their descendants aren't telling the truth at all?

Angela and Bill are average Australians, working minimum wage jobs and surviving, until they win a lottery and suddenly gain millions. They seek the help of a top geneticist to help them have a child, who convinces them that they can have a child who is not merely healthy and normal, but a genius, perfect in every way.

One night, before the implantation, they are contacted by their child from the future, who explains that because a time machine might possibly exist, it is possible to act as though it does. The child also explains that it wishes to achieve a state of having never been, and that it has disbursed their money into various charities so that they cannot pay for it be created.

Dan Segel is a police officer. Recruited as a teenager, he has been physically modified since then to the appropriate type, and uses priming drugs to remain calm and in control on shift. When he discovers a chimera, with a woman's face and a leopard's body, his investigation takes him places he never dreamed of.

Lindhquist was an eccentric millionaire with a passion for art, he reconstructed classic paintings in perfect detail, with actors, houses, even landscapes, modified for his ideals. When Segel is kidnapped, he wakes up in a different body, he has been surgically modified to be the second figure in the painting "The Caress", with the chimera.

When Karen Rees is diagnosed with a rare cancer, caused by a genetic susceptibility to a virus released decades earlier, she notifies her twin sister Paula. When tested, Paula is found to have it too and they are put on the same medication, and Karen remembers that as children, they had sworn a blood oath, that they would die at the same time.

Karen recovers, but receives the news that Paula has died overseas. She realises that Paula hadn't contacted her because she believed they were both dying. When Paula's few belongings arrive, Karen takes a one of her pills and there is no after taste as with hers. She has them tested and finds that Paula was given a placebo, and that triple blind tests had been approved for cases like theirs. She hacks into the drug company's system and substitutes all the placebos for real drugs, notifying the patients that they have been deceived.

A man's wife was killed in an armed holdup five years earlier, and now her killer is out of jail. The main character is a man of moral values, who holds life to be sacred, yet he wants to kill the man who murdered his wife. He buys an implant, a device that can rewire your brain to any belief you choose, and he chooses to believe that life is worthless.

When he confronts the killer, he demands a reason: "Why was my wife killed?" It just happenned. The killer is trying to explain, the day was going badly, things were going wrong, he lost his temper and it just happenned. As the killer says this everything becomes clear, and the protagonist wonders how he couldn't have seen it, how he could have thought the whole thing was so important.

After shooting the killer, he goes home, but when the implant deactivates after the three days he'd chosen, he decides to go and get another one, because he wants that understanding and peace again. Forever.

"I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don't know what my name is, but that doesn't matter. Knowing that I have it is enough."

One man wakes up each day with a new body, but the body belongs to someone else. Belonging to some other man who lives in the same city, was born within the same two months. These men apparently have no recollection of the days he spends being them.

One day he wakes up in the body of John O'Leary, a psychiatric nurse, and discovers why this happens to him. One of the patients is brain damaged, mutilated bit by bit by his father when only a baby, until most of his brain was destroyed. Yet scans show that the patient is still laying down long-term memories, the memories of thousands of days lived as other lives.

Philip Lowe has been shot in the head, an attempted assassination. When he wakes up, he sees everything as though he is hovering near the ceiling. Despite being shown that the things he believes he can see from that vantage aren't real when revealed to his eyes below, he cannot rid himself of the delusion.

Tests show that he has damage in the area of the brain that constructs models of the world, and that since he has been deprived of the primary model, his brain is making use of a secondary one.

A dealer in digital art receives a video call from an anonymous source saying that they have kidnapped his wife, and that he must transfer money to them, showing a short video of her. When he automatically calls his house, she answers and there is nothing wrong. He tells the police, but there isn't much chance of catching the prank caller.

The next day the scenario repeats. He eventually realises that they have hacked his scan, a file containing his mapped brain which will be uploaded and run as software after his body dies. While it is a well known procedure, it is not commonly known that scans can also reproduce other people that they have known well, who also run as indivudals, and the kidnappers have reproduced his wife from his scan.

"I was six years old when my parents told me there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me."

The Ndoli device was nicknamed "the jewel", monitored by a teaching device, it reads and follows your every thought and and action, corrected faster than thought by the teacher, so that it is identical to you. Someday, the organic brain will be removed and the reins will be handed over to the jewel, which will live forever, and it is you.

The protagonist delays having the procedure done while his friends swap over. He cannot find anyone else who hasn't switched who doesn't sound paranoid and crazy. Eventually he decides to put his doubts to rest forever by switching. One day he tries to reach for something but finds that his body has done something else. He is frightened, thinking that the jewel has somehow taken over his body by itself and he is trapped. The reality is worse. Our protagonist is the jewel.

A forensic pathologies fails to find any human DNA at all in a fluid sample from a rape, and begins to speculate. Some scientists had once converted a bacterium to using non standard bases for everything, if it had been done to a human, then the results would not show up because the techniques used for DNA testing use the standard bases. Those humans would be immuune to all diseases, and unable to procreate with anyone who hadn't been changed.

Her partner is a lawyer who works with refugees, and his office is often defaced with racist graffiti. When he catches a teenager spray painting one night he asks "Why?". The teenager insists that people from other countries should stay away because they're different, and the lawyer thinks about people building fortresses against others, and the ways they do it.

Two men are walking into the bush, one is a hacker who has been stealing from his employer, the other is Carter, an assassin. Carter is known to be unstoppable, he has implanted some belief system to do the job.

The hacker is desperate to convince Carter to spare his life, and when Carter begins explaining his beliefs, he listens, hoping to gain time. Carter believes that somewhere, at some time, there will be someone who embodies us at this moment, perfectly. In that way, we continue, even if we die. He offers the hacker an implant the same as his own.

Thinking to gain further time, the hacker accepts it, and believes the same thing. Carter asks if he is afraid to die, and he says "Yes." He hears a noise and finds that Carter has killed himself, knowing at that moment that the hacker was exactly the same person.

What do you do if you desperately want to be a father and can't find a partner? You might buy a cutie. Cuties can be genetically modified before their life begins into whatever you want, and they are exactly perfect. They do everything a normal baby does, except learn. They are subhuman, less intelligent than a puppy but so much cuter, and they are programmed to die on their fourth birthday.

When one man decides to buy a cutie, he is delighted with the result, never letting himself remember that she will die, until he realises that one thing didn't work quite right. She's just as intelligent as a normal baby, just like a normal child, and he has to face the fact that she may have been even if she were just a cutie.

John Nately is an Intake runner. The Intake appears semi-randomly on the earth's surface, usually in inhabited areas, and it seems to be a wormhole. It is a kilometre across, and the Core is about a fifth of that, in the middle. It is believed that the wormhole may be a mistake from the future, a means for transferring things from the past for study, that has failed. Instead of moving things from ancient times forward, the future end is the core, which means that moving inside the intake away from the core would be moving into the past, and doesn't work.

When the intake appears, intake runners are given maps to try and find people that may be trapped in houses, in rooms where the doors and windows are further out than they are, out of reach. Even light cannot travel outwards, and so running into the intake toward the core is running into darkness. Everyone believes that a navigator must be trying to sample inhabitated areas, and that it is eventually dislodged, but after John spots a machine in the sky and fires at it, he wonders if the navigator has really been trying to shift it away each time it lands.

When Carla's husband Chris is involved in an accident, the insurance company explains that he will get a new body, they just need to keep him alive for the two years while it grows. Several clauses in the contract leave Carla with no choice. She is obliged to take the cheapest method of life support on offer, and she is also obliged to provide any care needed without compensation.

So they implant the brain of her husband inside her uterus, and she spends two years artificially pregnant. During that time she learns to defeat the inappropriate signals from her pregnant body, her family and friends, and her own exhaustion and sense of obligation. By the time her husband is restored to her, she no longer feels the same as she did, she is beyond all that now.

John Shawcross is a virologist who believes strongly in God. He knows that HIV was just a warning, and a signal... God has chosen him to do holy work. He develops the perfect virus. It detects DNA, and blends with it. When two people mix DNA, through sex, then it detects their gender, and if they are gay, they die. When two heterosexuals have sex, their DNA is combined such that neither can have sex with someone else ever again, or they die. It degrades latex, so condoms won't stop it.

But there is one thing he has forgotten, what about when two people mix DNA and make a child?

Michael and Sian are worlds apart in personality, yet they remain in a relationship, experiencing each other. Michael wants to know her completely, to truly understand another person, otherwise, they can never truly be together.

Continuing the theme started in Learning to Be Me, they have both switched over to the jewel, and they experiment with their bodies. They swop bodies, they try both being Michael's body at the same time, and both being Sian's. Finally they try a new technique, where their consciousness is melded for eight hours. During that time they come to know each other in vastly intimate detail.

In the end they break up, Michael having caught Sian's belief that being with someone else is about being with the other, that otherwise you may as well talk to yourself. Neither of them could stay, because neither wanted to be alone forever.

People now live in "basins", areas where one belief prevails over all others, and the basins are surrounded by attractors which capture those drifting between, making them believe the same thing and want to stay there forever. No one is sure how it happened, but the day it started is called Meltdown.

There are a few who live between the basins, tramps and drifters who balance between the attractors on their paths through the city, constantly moving to keep one belief from influencing them too long. But what if they have been trapped in their own basin? What if what they believe in is freedom, without actually having any at all?