Joy Janeway was born broken.

A malformed segment of the brain left her incapable of reaching much beyond an eight-year-old's conception of the world. Mental retardation. When she was young, her well-achieved mother and masculine father looked at her as an extension of their success: a beautiful little daughter who would make great things of herself, they were certain. When her mental flaw was uncovered, that pride turned to fear.

She was given her first cybernetic implant, designed to counteract her inborn flaw.

It was small one, buried deep into her brain tissue, but the results were miraculous. Her intelligence sky-rocketed, she was taken from the "special" classes to the normal ones, social skills finally showed signs of life. But while no one could see the electric device adjusting her mind's every signal, she could feel it. It hurt. Very, very badly. Only after months of that little girl begging to "go back the way I was" did a shocked doctor realize the implant was destroying her. It was irremovable, but also unsustainable. She was on the path to death.

So to counteract the malfunctioning, she received five implants.

A few years passed peacefully. "Jay Jay," she was calling herself, was predominately a high-level pupil of all her teachers. Then the decay began once more: her movements were jerking, her steps were off. Her mother noticed bruises over the preteen's arms and legs, a new mark left whenever she rammed herself into furniture. Worse, she was talking to herself frequently- nobody could ignore the paranoia, either, or her sudden rage at even the smallest transgression. "Your brain is still fighting the original implant. By rejecting our machinery," the doctor sagely intoned, "your immune system is killing you!"

They could only hope that, by adding yet more devices, they would be able to force the girl's decaying brain into accepting her original implantations.

It worked. After years spent under surgery, modification and adaptation... Joy was finally safe. With, however, a cruel irony: her parents did this all to give her a normal childhood, but now it was too late for that.

She was a teenager. A teenager with a chrome-colored wave of metal encasing the back of her neck, a prosthetic limb replacing her left hand, and a computer articulating thoughts on her behalf. She was intelligent, and she was (mostly) sane, but she was not a child any longer. Even with the best efforts of the best professionals her family could afford, the original implant was always faulty. She still requires a doctor's care every six months, or her brain will begin to decay again.

As the years passed, joining the I.O.S.E. became an easy choice for Joy. At first, it was difficult to get in: the administration was nervous about allowing in a woman who, technically speaking, was still brain-damaged. She only slid in through her intelligence and determination.

With the growing, growing, growing threat of "permanent implant malfunction" at her back, she feels a drive to do something valuable with her life before it's too late, and a responsibility not to waste the second opportunity this technology has granted her.