Su Shan is a cleaner in the lower district, a woman everyone agrees is crazy. People go out of their way to avoid her.
Truth is, she's just a bit too fastidious about cleanliness and sometimes hits the mutants a little too hard. Does that really make her crazy?
Her brother, Su Mu, sent her to retrieve something from Scientific Research Site No. 7. She went, was ambushed, and, as she lay gravely wounded and close to death, something burrowed into her body.
By the time she crawled out alive, her brother was dead.
The news was everywhere: just as the latest artificial intelligence, Cocoon, was about to launch, Su Mu, one of its founders, had been murdered. As for his sister, a cleaner in the lower district, the rumor was that she had gone berserk upon hearing the news, blown up the site, and died in the rubble.
Su Shan narrowed her eyes. "That's nonsense. How am I crazy?"
A voice in her head protested indignantly, "Exactly! That's nonsense. How are you dead?"
"...Shut up."
In this wasteland, some people want her dead, some are after the thing her brother entrusted to her, and others have their eyes on the thing inside her body.
--If they want to take what's hers, why don't they ask whether she'll let them?
--
NEM-7 Anchor had been in an underground research laboratory since it was born. After lying beneath the ground for a hundred years, the first person it met was a crazy woman with a cleaning obsession. She thought it was dirty, cursed at it, and tried to wash it out of her body every day.
But it stayed with her anyway.
Not because its programming told it to. It simply didn't want to lie underground again.
It was too cold down there, and it had been there for too long.
