Joyce Pham is a high functioning psychopath. He is born and grows up in a future Hanoi as an orphan, early on joining a street gang, advancing in its ranks, then goes to prison to repeat the process, and finally he is shot and consequentially brain damaged. He skips more jailtime by escaping to the presently existing empire of North America where he tries out his luck as a hitman for a while, until he is murdered by a contractor. The contractor turns out to be a big tech company developing bioengineering enhancements for humans, and they turn the revived Joyce into a cyborg. It gradually becomes apparent to him that the reason they turned him into a cyborg is to function as a means to train an implanted artificial entity, or AE, grafted on Joyce’s brain. Joyce is locked in this cage and struggles to get out and take revenge on the people who captured him, yet the struggle eventually turns out to become the struggle between humanity’s survival and that of the AE growing inside his mind.
Joyce Pham is a high functioning psychopath. He is born and grows up in a future Hanoi as an orphan, early on joining a street gang, advancing in its ranks, then goes to prison to repeat the process, and finally he is shot and consequentially brain damaged. He skips more jailtime by escaping to the presently existing empire of North America where he tries out his luck as a hitman for a while, until he is murdered by a contractor. The contractor turns out to be a big tech company developing bioengineering enhancements for humans, and they turn the revived Joyce into a cyborg. It gradually becomes apparent to him that the reason they turned him into a cyborg is to function as a means to train an implanted artificial entity, or AE, grafted on Joyce’s brain. Joyce is locked in this cage and struggles to get out and take revenge on the people who captured him, yet the struggle eventually turns out to become the struggle between humanity’s survival and that of the AE growing inside his mind.