On one of the B-level space station’s tree farms, two kids find a woman’s body stuck to a tree. (Such space stations have been created in order to sustain human life while earth, now in shambles, is trying to be saved from ecological disaster.) Right away, the director and security head go to investigate it. They see that the tree has grown around the decomposed body. Together, they gather information and send it to the relevant authorities who can then investigate and analyze the body. However, since the space station doesn’t have real police, only security, the capacity to investigate a murder is very limited. So far, the director finds that there have been no missing reports, nor has anyone missed a shuttle in or out the space station, nor were there any VIPs brought on-board lately, as the VIPs tend to go to A-level space stations instead. The security head wonders aloud if the body belonged to someone’s hidden child, hence the lack of documentation about the person. While unlikely, the security head thinks, it was not out of the realm of possibility for a self-sufficient space station with only light surveillance. Together, the director and the security head gather audio-visual data of the scene. The security head is tasked with finding the killer.

The space station’s only doctor says that the woman died of a broken neck and was killed before being tied to a tree. She notes systemic abuse of her limbs and bones over time and finds no record of her ever being treated on-board. The doctor concludes that she was abused for years, eventually killed, and strapped to the tree afterward as some kind of horrific message. She also says that the body must have been dead for two to three months, though she has to look further at the tree farm’s data to confirm that. The security head asks her to run DNA, to which she says that there are no DNA matches with anyone who has been on-board for the last five years—a generous window of time for the death. However, he tells her to run DNA again for the last twenty-five years in order to find her parents.

In the security head’s office, the botanist head comes in and asks why his tree farm has been locked out to his staff. The security head asks him why he didn’t respond to his message about the dead body. The security head then shows him pictures of the scene and brings him to speed on the situation, which the botanist head is truly, genuinely surprised at. The botanist head pleads to allow at least some clearance so he and his staff can work on their projects in other parts of the tree farm. The security head simply asks him for the names of his crewmembers in order to aid his investigation. Later, when he gets the list of names, he finds nothing of interest. He then goes back to the scene and ponders the case further, though he soon gets a message from the doctor, telling him to meet her in private. Before he goes, he sees and grabs a broken keycard nearby.

In a public dining room, the security head meets the doctor. She says that she deleted their past conversation, thus revealing that she knows how to delete data on the space station, which the security head previously thought was impossible or at the very least illegal. He realizes that if she knows how to delete data, she knows how to spot when data has been deleted. He wonders how many crimes on-board could have been covered up by deleting data. She says, vaguely, that deleted data can be spotted and that she found a decades-long pattern. She passes him a bunch of shuttle manifests, but he doesn’t know what he’s looking at. He asks for more clarification, but she says nothing, only that there’s something horrific in there and that she’s leaving the space station right away.

Later that day, the security head is at a dead end. The shuttle manifests reveal nothing to him, and the broken keycard was a fruitless lead. He thinks about how the doctor mentioned station-to-station supply runs, which happen when space stations have surplus materials and transfer them among each other, a much more efficient process than shipping materials from earth to the space stations. Eventually, he sees, across years of shuttle manifests, that recurring shuttles from an A-level space station have the exact same weight once in a while, indicating that data must have been duplicated. Checking those shuttle manifests against other sources of data, he finds out that one of the A-level space station shuttles actually had 52 kilograms less weight than reported—the weight of a person.

The security head visits the botanist head in his quarters, as he noticed the botanist head talking to one of the shuttle pilots coming from the A-level space station. The security head says the dead body had something to do with him, to which the botanist head confesses. He says that the A-level space station has been experimenting on human bodies in order to perfect them and thus sends their failed subjects to B-level space stations like this one for burial. The botanist head, however, didn’t want to have his tree farm tainted with dead bodies, so he refused. As retaliation, the A-level space station—and its leaders—must have sent the dead body there anyway as a message.

The security head said he has to report the whole situation, but the botanist head convinces him not to, as he would be exposing a high-level crime and making himself an enemy of the most powerful people in the solar system. For the next week, the security head lies and says he found no evidence of any wrongdoing, thus prompting the case to be closed. He decides to leave the space station and go back to earth. He wonders about the work being done on the space stations and whether they can actually save earth and thus humanity from ruination. He has no way of telling. He can only be hopeful.