El Nido de Ladrones, the Nest of Thieves, is a fifty thousand square kilometre area of bioengineered jungle in the amazon. Out of it comes designer drugs which interact in the user's system with common addictives in food. Guillermo Largo has defected to them with the results of his research and one man is sent in to get him.

But Guillermo hasn't concoted a new drug to get high with, he has concoted a drug that allows you to restructre your own mind.

When the main character is dragged by his new girlfriend to the office of The Children of Eve to be mitotyped, he doesn't take it seriously. Mitochondrial DNA is passed unchanged from the mother only, and the Children of Eve believe they have found a way to track every person on earth back to one female ancestor.

They believe they can unite everyone with the knowledge that they are all related, but it all becomes much more serious when other groups begin tracing Y-chromosome DNA to find recent male ancestors.

What begins as a joke between two student ends up being one of the most important questions in the world. Can simple mathematics be proved to be inconsistent in a finite number of steps? Using dead time on the computers of a thousand interested people, they finally realise it can.

What does this mean for our reality, and who will want access to it?

What is freedom, how can you see your own reactions and decisions clearly, and their motivations? When one man finds a device that allows real-time monitoring of thoughts using patterns, he believes that he has found the way to truly understand himself.

Based on the idea that homosexuality is a result of high levels of cortisol in the blood during pregnancy. One company is developing a cocoon for unborn shildren that will allow only the necessary substances through to the child. But if it protects against toxins, it also protects against homosexuality, and they are willing to do anything to promote this aspect of their product

If the brain is scanned, then surely the act of scanning will produce thoughts as the neurons are activated? One man is going to be scanned, and he is warned that he will have what are termed "transition dreams", but are they, or are they the random firings as his brain decays after death?

The new virus is Silver Fire, rare, incurable, horrifying. It produces collagen plates that literally shear the skin from the body, and the only treatment is to keep patients under anaesthetic. When a trail of Silver Fire infections is found to be moving across the country, it is assumed that there must be an asymptomatic carrier. But the truth is far worse.

A mutation in a type of brain tumor makes the main character, a young boy, incapable of feeling anything but completely happy and optimistic. It is producing high levels of Leu-enkephalin, a drug that makes people happy. When he is given a radical new treatment for the tumor, all the receptors for leu-enkephalin are burned away, leaving him incapable of feelings any positive emotion.

When a new treatment, twenty years later, returns his ability to enjoy life, he is also given a control, he can choose how much he enjoys any given thing, music, exercise, a person's company. But what does happiness mean then?

A detective is hired to find a missing piece of artwork, the courier who was delivering it is now dead and it seems to have been more valuable than expected. As he draws closer to the killer, the detective discovers that the artwork isn't an old piece after all, but a new one, made with paint mixed with radioactive material from Chernobyl

Humans have been encoded as software for centuries, able to clone themselves off for various tasks and continue on. When a group decides to enter a black hole, a father and daughter decide to come and watch. While the father seems determined to try and cling to an existence reliving the past of the flesh, the daughter is taking steps to find her own way, and take him with her.