In the wake of a life-altering event, Anna has returned to work and written a standard, dry academic graf on self-driving cars—which, in 2042, have become the standard mode of transportation. Her paper's footnotes, however, reveal a tragic story.

A southern Nigerian woman lives through the colonial invasion of white Europeans, losing her son to assimilation and indoctrination that leads him to view her and her culture as savages. Decades later, her granddaughter, a historian, seeks to reclaim her past.