A gang of unruly teenagers cut school and go joy-riding around "the Net" on their hopped-up portable computers, committing casual acts of vandalism and just generally being a$holes. Our hero is a good kid who's fallen in with a bad crowd; his parents eventually realize something is wrong and try to suppress the relationship. This results in the kid finally using his technical skills for deliberate purpose, to rebel against his parents -- and to win, because the paradigm shift is completely in his favor.

Headcrash is the story of Jack Burroughs, a computer nerd in his mid twenties, who lives with his overbearing mother, and works a dead-end job at a software firm. Jack lives a far more interesting virtual life in the metaverse, where he is an elite hacker who goes by the handle MAX_KOOL. Along with his friend Gunnar, Jack is hired to hack into a corporate system to retrieve files proving that the company was stolen from the rightful heir of its founder.