Jacob sits stunned in the woods next to his house. A schoolteacher turned guerrilla warfare recruiter explains to him that he just shot dead ten soldiers of an invading army. Jacob is now a hero, but he has also become something else, something he despises - a killer.

Mike Knapp would gaze at the top of the flag pole that stood outside his 4th floor office. It didn't look far. Maybe he could leap out the window and grab it. That was just a daydream until one morning when an accident in the parking garage set off a disastrous chain of events.

David is on break from his dead-end job at the Dollar Store. A scruffy old man approaches him claiming to be his uncle who hasn't eaten in two days. David gives the old man his last $2. Something comes back in return later.

Nelson stumbles into a tiny restaurant somewhere in Alabama. The place is a treasure trove of chats with interesting people. Nelson goes out of his way two months later to revisit the place, but things have changed.

Thomas and Karen were winter house sitters at 12,000 feet in the Montana mountains. Spring arrived, but not in the normal fashion. They found a stranger in the barn who was too sick to explain himself. Thomas heads down the mountain to find a deserted ranch and town except for one man dragging himself across a street.

Jerry broke into computer systems. He had been doing this since the third grade. This time was different. This time Jerry was going walk into a corporate building and walk out with data in his hands. Would it work?

While scrounging for food, I found something that changed my life: a typewriter with ribbons and paper. I would record the history of the world after the event for those in the future. The event, however, was blurry in my mind. I kept seeing different events and couldn't decide which one was true. What would I type for the future?

An elderly widower finds a dog on his walk in the woods. The two become companions as the man cares for the dog and the dog watches the man.

A fundamental task of ours is to test or experiment with our equipment...so began a report I wrote. We were struggling to build systems. Analysis showed that our basic problem was how we tested systems and reported the results. This booklet records time-honored fundamentals of testing and reporting on tests.

An engineer builds an interface between a computer and the human mind. Books and movies come alive in your brain. Then the engineer connects the entire Internet to his brain.

John wanders into Third Route, Mississippi and the Postmaster job. Something seems wrong to John. Then one day he sees something in the bed of a farmer's pickup that he wasn't supposed to see.

There are times in life when I am glad when someone taps me on the shoulder and returns me to sanity. Unfortunately, on this night when a stranger invited me into a mysterious building with no windows, no one tapped me on the shoulder.