The asteroid work crews don't have much to do but tell tall tales to each other. One man tells a particularly riveting account of an expedition where he met a strange parasitic species that inhabits human bodies and barely escaped unscathed—or did he?

In a Tucson, Arizona of the near future, an Asian American engineer races to salvage her prized creation, a stratosphere-orbiting balloon, before it can be hijacked to serve nefarious purposes.