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What happens when an AI assistant is always whispering in your ear? Does hacking into the structure of reality help you get a prom date? When your world is dying, how far are you willing to go to save its people? What is the nature of identity, and who are you, anyway? Flashes in Time explores these questions and more in sixteen imaginative short stories set atop a fourfold table of science fiction and fantasy, contemporary and far off. A diverse cast of characters explores the limits of what it means to be human, and what our choices make of us. From darkness to light and lingering in between, the scenarios and thought experiments take the reader on a journey with surprising yet inevitable twists.

After a nebulous Enemy destroys Earth, the remnants of humanity settle on Mars. Not only does this civilization survive, but they thrive, creating advancements for the rest of the solar system. The Enemy is an advanced nanotechnological AI programmed to produce paperclips out of anything it touches &hellp; and it's not done with humanity yet. Taru, a cadet in the Martian Special Forces, has been tasked with implementing a mutually assured destruction deterrent: if the Enemy attacks Mars, the Martians will destroy not only themselves, but the Universe at large. As events around Taru hurtle toward ultimate destruction, all is not what it seems ...

The Big Apple fell far from the tree. Now adrift in an alternate dimension, New Yorkers cling to sanity in an Escherian maze. Welcome to the Infinite Metropolis; you may never leave. Based on the science fiction audio drama of the same name, Infinite Metropolis features twelve original short stories by Finnish authors Edmund Schluessel and Mikko Rauhala.