i used to be an avid reader and scifi short stories were my addiction. i’ve forgotten most of the titles, but can remember fascinating aspects that have haunted me over the decades.

one is in the future and human beings have micro-robots in their bodies ensuring whatever life span that they wanted for themselves. the protaganist in the story wants to go home and rest but she can’t because she’s lived in everyone single house in her neighborhood at point or another in her last few hundred years of existence and she can’t remember which one she’s currently live in. she revisits her most cherished memories of living in the neighborhood to help her jog her memory and ends up remembering which one is the right home.

another is set in a near-ish future where the non-rich retire in virtual-reality-like micro-realities because they cannot afford to reired real life due to the american government’s severe austerity policies and a generations-long severe economic depression. the people in these realities end up having children within these realities and the reactionary christo-fascist american government labels the is new life as abominations to be controlled. the communities of these virtual realities seek to emancipate themselves via migration to canada; but doing so is illegal and the american government has created an ice/gestapo-like police force to stop them. the people natively born in the virtual realities have existences that span weeks in the human world and the culture & time-scale it engenders makes them incapable of “passing” as humans in the android bodies that they have commissioned built for them in the black market for the journey to canada; so they rely on the retirees who had lived in the human world to control the android bodies with their virtual realities stored inside them. the protagonist volunteers and almost fails until an alien intervenes.

a third is also set in the future that has time travel and a corporation has levied it to kidnap people from the past to force them to work for the corporation as slave labor out of thier ignorance of the future. the protagonist is not one such person, but he is forced to work with a younger version of himself who he knows despises him for “selling out” to the corporation and he remembers the virulent hatred he felt for his older self when he was younger. they both work in hr and the older one’s job is to fire the employees of the company right before they encounter life altering sicknesses/injuries/death to avoid insurance payouts to the employee’s families. he has a change of heart after he’s tasked with firing an employee moments before he is killed by a dinosaur at dinosaur-tourism theme park that the corporation’s subsidiary has created and he himself is fired and then killed almost right afterwards by same dinosaur.