In future America, the downloaded people in the Ten Sigma Program fight endless battles. The struggles span all possibilities: face-offs with knives and clubs, skirmishes as Roman legionaries, pitched WW1 trench warfare, duels with ultra-modern hypersonic weapons, and everything in between. The combatants who live are rewarded with another battle until they reach the unreachable score of ten sigmas. Those who die are expunged from the system, gone forever. The methods, so harsh they go beyond anything possible in the real world, are necessary for the end goal: violent evolution to produce the greatest warriors in all of human history

Betrayed by Victoria—the acting President of the United States—Brin is a renegade from her own country. She hides in the badlands of Southern California, struggling to make this tiny part of the world a better place. But an old acquaintance comes to her hiding place and offers a plan that needs her to restore the country. Although risky, Brin has no alternative but to return and face her enemies. Meanwhile, Brin’s husband Vic is in turmoil from his existence. He followed her through the impossible odds of the Ten Sigma Program, but now, he’s lost his memories and is under Victoria’s control. He thirsts to obey her orders—which are to kill Victoria’s arch enemy, Brin, who unbeknown to him is his wife. As Brin heads on her mission with the side hope of freeing her husband from Victoria’s clutches, he begs to be sent to kill her, so he can become the perfect ten sigma. When he finally receives permission, it sets the two on a collision course with life and death.

In the flickering light of the makeshift hospital room, Nick stares at his wife Mary, who is losing a long, expensive battle against a mysterious illness. Besides the frailty of her form, he knows something is wrong but can’t put his finger on what it is. Instead of confronting her, he heads home to plan their next trip for a cure.

She awakens in a windowless room full of lab equipment and spends a minute getting used to the pumping heart, tingly skin, and air filling the lungs of her new healthy body. Her name is Mary, and she has returned from the Ten Sigma Program, a virtual universe designed to produce the greatest fighters the Earth has ever seen through the harshest training methods ever devised. Now stuffed with every type of lethal knowledge and a victor in countless life-and-death struggles, she has one goal: to reunite with her family. But in the program, her memories were erased and now she only has an inkling of her former life.