Thorns in the Skull

The year 2035 is the eve of the explosion of the bionic human industry. The leading company "Hephaestus Bionics" is running on two fronts with its virtual consciousness companion bionic man and the digital immortality project "Amber Project". Its market share remains high, and ethical disputes follow it. Thirty-five-year-old Lin Weixi joined the Ethics Department of Hephaestus. Her daily routine involves reviewing complaints, questioning data sources, challenging product definitions, arguing with R&D, dealing with sales, and doing Tai Chi with legal affairs. Her ally is her college friend Ji Anxing, a medical ethics inspector who is equally "disgusting" in the hospital's ethics review room. From time to time, the two discuss the gray areas of their respective industries. The main plot follows Lin Weixi's growth from "the person who asks questions" to "the person who draws guardrails". She will encounter: an old-age companion android whose memory has been reset, a digital immortal client authorized by the family to "die", a singing and dancing android whose emotions are unlocked by the black market, and a group of "cybers" who are self-experimenting in an abandoned electronics factory. She will jump out of Hephaestus and join Kaiwen, a niche customization company on the rise, to lead the ethical design of the lightweight product "Ningshi 1" and ultimately promote the industry's adoption of the "General Principles for Ethical Design of Bionic Humans·2035 Edition". But this story is never just about "success". It took her sixteen years to finally dare to say a belated sentence to the grandfather in her memory: "Let's not take medicine for now."