A collection of 5 original science fiction short stories.

-Sammy Slow Knife is a cartel kingpin who enforces obedience throughout his lucrative galactic empire with duct tape and a slow knife. He rules his world. Until he winds up stranded on a desolate planet with an unlikely friend and protector. Priest is a Hwarthian mystic determined to keep Sammy alive. Despite Sammy's plans to kill him.

-George Bullard is a famous political dissident of a near future Earth, committed to equal rights for AI and jailed for life on the surface of the moon because of it. Bullard is given only a computer to keep him company. He finds that cybernetics can make for strange bedfellows.

-Manly Savage lives in the posthumous shadow of his older brother, a war hero killed in combat. So Manly joins the Army too. He serves as a mess cook and his world stays pretty mundane. Until a kitchen accident disfigures his body and agents of his government step in to help.

-Five year old Donnie Franklin has a story the humans of earth would like to hear. And non-human friends to keep him from telling it.

-Thomas Castoldi is an entomologist who prefers the company of insects over his fellow humans. But Castoldi and the population of Earth have a shared problem: a slowly progressing but always fatal disease for which there is no cure. He and his expedition travel halfway across the galaxy in search of a cure and they find it. But it comes at a very strange cost.