Otomo’s seminal manga follows members of teenaged motorcycle gang who become entangled in (and help facilitate) the destruction of Neo Tokyo. After gang member Tetsuo begins to exhibit latent psychic powers, the military—which harbors its own psychics—detains him, prompting the gang’s leader, Kaneda, to join a faction of rebels and try to rescue his friend. As Tetsuo’s powers develop, he loses touch with reality and unleashes mass destruction upon the city. The comic’s 1988 animated feature adaptation is regarded as a high-water mark of animation, as well as a worldwide success that helped to popularize anime outside of Japan.

Stan Lee presents the Marvel Comics illustrated version of Blade Runner. Based on the novel Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

"Burning Chrome" tells the story of two free-lance hackers - Automatic Jack, the narrator and a hardware specialist; and Bobby Quine, a software expert. Bobby becomes infatuated with a girl named Rikki and wants to become wealthy in order to impress her. Jack has acquired a powerful Russian "icebreaker" program that can penetrate corporate security systems. Bobby suggests that they use it to break into the system of a notorious and vicious criminal known as Chrome, who handles money transfers for organized crime, and Jack reluctantly agrees to help. The break-in is successful, and Jack and Bobby empty Chrome's bank accounts, but they discover afterward that Rikki had been working in a brothel with ties to Chrome. She uses her earnings to buy a set of cybernetic eye implants for herself and go to Hollywood; the news leaves both men devastated, as they have grown to love her, and Jack never sees her again.

Software introduces Cobb Anderson as a retired computer scientist who was once tried for treason for figuring out how to give robots artificial intelligence and free will, creating the race of boppers. By 2020, they have created a complex society on the Moon, where the boppers developed because they depend on super-cooled superconducting circuits. In that year, Anderson is a pheezer — a freaky geezer, Rucker's depiction of elderly Baby Boomers — living in poverty in Florida and terrified because he lacks the money to buy a new artificial heart to replace his failing, secondhand one.

The Running Man is set within a dystopian future in which the poor are seen more by the government as worrisome rodents than actual human beings. The protagonist of The Running Man, Ben Richards, is quick to realize this as he watches his daughter, Cathy, grow more sick by the day and tread closer and closer to death. Desperate for money to pay Cathy’s medical bills, Ben enlists himself in a true reality style game show where the objective is to merely stay alive.

Computer programmer Kevin Flynn is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer, where he interacts with various programs in his attempt to get back out. During his adventure he meets Tron, a rebel program fighting the tyrannical Master Control Program.