It would, of course, take a trio of Ivory Tower scientists to conceive of tracking down that statistical entity, the Common Man, and testing out an idea on him. And only the Ivory Tower type would predict that egregiously wrongly!
The operation was a very serious one and Bart Neely was willing to put himself into Dr. Morton's hands. But if things turned out badly, Bart was going to teach them a lesson. He was going to refuse to die.
In the distant future, the interstellar starship Calypso and its human crew encounter a gigantic megastructure inhabited by ancient robots known as the Custodians. As the humans, led by Lieutenant Brenda Ivanova, attempt to restore ancient data to uncover the robots’ origins, they face ethical dilemmas about the nature of self-awareness and the evolution of these machines. Amidst philosophical debates and crucial decisions, leading the humans to rethink how to aid these robots in their evolution
Millions of years in the distant future, a posthuman scientist is attempting to build a time machine and tests it by sending two boxes with a hastily gathered batch of educational toys into the past. When the boxes fails to return, he believes the entire experiment to be a failure, he discontinues his efforts. One box arrives in the middle of the 20th century and the second in the latter part of the 19th century. Both have had their time-travel circuitry irreparably damaged by the journey.
Earth has transformed overnight: The Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece and Rome have returned to Earth with all their awesome powers intact. War on any scale was outlawed, along with boom-and-bust economic cycles, and prudery but no change was more startling than the face of New York, where the Empire State Building has become the Tower of Zeus...