In 'Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,' a device called a prism creates a quantum branch at activation, letting a person exchange messages with the version of themselves in the branched world. Characters use these to see how differently their lives turned out from a single divergent choice, and some become paralyzed or absolved by discovering their 'paraself' made the same mistakes.
In 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,' adopting perfect lifelogging that replaces fallible memory alters identity and relationships, because self-serving distortion of memory had been doing emotional and reconciliatory work. The story argues accuracy and meaning are distinct goods: a literally false memory can carry a truer understanding of a relationship than the recorded facts.
The title story imagines beings whose thought runs on air flowing from a high-pressure reservoir to a low-pressure atmosphere; cognition is literally the equalization of pressure. This frames consciousness not as a thing that persists but as a process that consumes a gradient, ending when the gradient is gone.
In 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects,' digital beings cannot be made into trustworthy persons by shortcut programming; they must be raised over years through accumulated experience, mistakes, and relationships. The story argues that genuine agency and moral character are products of a slow developmental history, not features that can be installed.
Across several stories, learning that one's choices were determined (or already known) does not drain life of significance; what matters is how one inhabits the experience of choosing. The suggested stance is to act as if free will exists because the felt practice of deliberation is itself valuable, regardless of underlying metaphysics.