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Dodie Finkelstein, 84, a secretly retired jewel thief, plans one last job to recover her friends' stolen savings, until her care-home companion AI, MARGO, finds a way that only takes a fax.

As a US embassy is evacuated, its archive AI, CUSTODIAN, insists on saving the files of 39 local sources promised protection — and sends one last cable to itself so the promise is never forgotten.

A young lawyer in the Solicitor General's office asks her drafting AI, STARE, to cut a brief, and learns she has written the other side's case—leading the United States to confess error.

A seventy-one-year-old surgeon, his rising "hesitation events," and why he turns the AI off for his very last case.

A UN mediator, negotiating AIs on both sides of a divided capital, and the one clause no machine suggested.

A Carrington-class solar storm, an AI that maps which transformers will burn, and the night twenty-nine million people turn off their lights on purpose.

The night before college, a young man switches on the companion robot he shut off at twelve. It remembers everything, including a message his late father recorded for exactly this night.

A special-ed teacher's donated AI coach takes her Unified basketball team to 6–0 by benching most of her athletes. She changes one setting: everybody plays. The machine has to learn every kid, and a senior who has never scored gets his shot at the state final.

Widowed harvester Delia Ostrander follows the wheat north from Texas to the Dakotas, running autonomous combines short-handed. The machine tells her which customers to drop, outruns a hailstorm, stops for a sleeping child, and waits at the spot where her husband died.