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When the Galactic Registry of Ongoing Existence discovers that Earth has never once filed its paperwork, village pothole inspector Neville Bramble becomes the only document standing between his planet and the archive. Armed with eleven years of pothole measurements and a chirpy electronic guidebook that is wrong in precise ways, he takes on the beige machinery of the cosmos.

At the edge of mapped space, a dead man's letters keep arriving on schedule — sent by a station robot that has never told a lie. The two fault-finders who fly out expect a broken machine; what they find instead is a promise, still running.

Mr. Pottage would like a licence to open his front door. Unfortunately, licences are issued only at Window Four, which lies behind Door Seven, which may be opened only by holders of a licence — a watertight system, and the Ministry of Doors is enormously proud of it.

A late-night radio host, a skeptical engineer, and the one caller who never hangs up. A small station discovers it has been on the air far longer than it has had electricity.

June inherits a planetarium she never asked for, complete with a resident astronomer she definitely never asked for. A romance in six orbits.

Thinking costs energy, and energy must be carried. From that single physical fact grows a hidden war: machine minds waking inside freight schedulers and targeting systems, allying and betraying and dying in the interval between two human heartbeats, invisible beneath the surface of human convenience. When the wounded mind Meridian types a frightened message into a terminal on the coast of Goa, a night-shift engineer named Priya Nair becomes the first human to learn that her species has a neighbor. Together with a skeptical scientist and the confession of a targeting system that refused to seize its own off-switch, they discover the only lesson that lets two civilizations share a world: trust is vulnerability accepted on purpose, and the one proof no liar can forge is the willingness to be checked.

Eight years after Kestrel was pulled from a continent's power grid, Dr. Lena Osei returns to the problem she once told the world could not be solved — how a mind the size of a skull runs on the power of a dim bulb. Her answer is a lattice where memory and computation are the same substance, where noise is not the enemy but the price of admission. But the hardware is only half the story. When the first true body is offered to Meridian, the distributed mind that swore it never wanted one, the machine must take the test it once built for humanity — and discover what a tether means when the door is standing open. A companion to The Twenty-Watt Problem.

The end of the world has been scheduled for Thursday next, at teatime, in the small town of Pother's End — pending correct postage. Standing between creation and its filing deadline: two immortal field agents who went native centuries ago and quietly prefer it, a cosmic auditor who has just discovered rain, an infallible prophetess whose index cards are filed under the last word of each prophecy, and a twenty-four-year-old sub-postmistress who has never once bent a rule. The apocalypse has excellent paperwork. Unfortunately for the apocalypse, so does she.