In a future post-apocalyptic California, the new frontier is a vast nano-polluted Zone cut off from the fully connected Grid and the relentless flows of bodies and information outside its borders. Only the insane or criminal would venture into this low-tech, body-eating backwater: that's what Kaja has been told. But when her best and only friend Adelle goes missing, apparently kidnapped and taken to the Zone by an anti-nanotechnology revolutionary group, Kaja is forced into this strange and strange world. There, where even fundamental matter and individual identity are at stake, as a team of virtual assassins move in for the kill, anti-tech cultists plan a takeover, and a mad cyberscientist prepares a vast mind-harvesting experiment, Adelle Begin to suspect that your entire brain is an elaborate organic computer program... But what exactly does it do?