In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia. One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived.

During the Devolution Wars his name was Theo Bronkman - one of seven enlisted in a prefabricated family of orphans, strays and runaways to work on a top-secret government project called Nimbus. But that life has been long-forgotten, and he is now simply Peter Ambrose - a struggling jazz musician who makes his living implanting mental prosthetics into the skulls of those with the money and the desire to artificially expand their brainpower. But in a world awash in the artifacts of countless invented pasts - where faces and personalities can be changed as easily and often as clothing - even the most scrupulously suppressed memories can take on murderous lives of their own. And now Peter Ambrose is trapped in a nightmare suddenly, and violently, reawakened - in which someone is killing off his Nimbus brothers and sisters, one by one...

The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming and social networking to the criminal methods of the Russian mafia and Islamic terrorists.