Stu Cole is struggling to keep his nightclub, Club Anesthesia, afloat in the face of mob harassment when he's visited by a manifestation of the city of San Francisco, crystallized into a single enigmatic being. This amoral superhero leads him on a terrifying journey through the rock and roll demimonde as they struggle to save the city.

In a future where minds are enslaved by computer chips, one man seeks revenge. Michael Berlyn is an American computer game designer and writer. He is known as an Implementor at Infocom, part of the text adventure game design team. Berlyn joined Marc Blank in founding the game company Eidetic, which later became Sony Bend. He is also a composer and continues to create games for the Apple App Store.

The story follows the progress of a group of computer hackers (called "warlocks" in the story) who are early adopters of a new full-immersion virtual reality technology, called the "Other Plane". Warlocks penetrate computers around the world for personal profit or curiosity. Forming a cabal, they must keep their true identities—their "True Names"—secret even to each other and to the "Great Adversary", the United States government, as those who know a warlock's True Name can force him to work on their behalf, or even cause a "True Death" by killing the warlock in real life.