Mki wakes up in a hospital, terribly weak, wearing pajamas, hooked up to a catheter, dazzled by sunlight. There are bars on the windows, and two other beds in the room. He smells a familiar perfume - he recognizes it as Pauline's perfume. There are two attendants in the room, both medical interns called Pauline and Rolf. Mki tries to get up and Rolf helps him up, to the toilet and then to the common eating room, where he joins four other patients who are having breakfast.
Henry is there, paunchy and dishelved, with a block of wood in the shape of a PDA next to him. So is Egg, helped by an Arab orderly called Hamed. There is an unfamiliar man called John and an unfamiliar girl called Angie.
John is a fit man in his thirties, tanned and bald. He is weary of the fruit and vegetables and attempting to exercise his immense psionic powers, to little effect.
Angie is a very pale twentyish girl with dark hair and eyes. Unlike the others, she is wearing a black gym suit, drinks only water, and demands that the orderlies call her parents.
Confused, they plot their escape, avoid eating anything that might contain drugs (i.e, everything except for eggs and fruit), they try to work out and keep a low profile.
A Dr. Richards visits.
They are given a new, blue pill. Only Angie takes it. They wake up and ambush the orderlies, knocking them out.
They force the door and confront a SWAT-style team coming up. They kill or knock out the squad and taking their clothes, they enter their vehicle and drive off. Pursued by some other vehicles, John manages to cause those cars to crash.
They stop at a gas station / roadside dinner, and Angie hops out to buy some burgers.
Angie disappears
Henry go looking for her
Egg picks a fight with a biker gang
They are accosted by 3 fake feds in landrovers. Mki handles them and takes one guy's (fake) FBI ID, which identifies him as George DeVito. Before he drops George, he tells him that his boss is Chtris Gabel.
Holmes sends the landrover and the SWAT van into the desert, and they escape on the bikers' motorbikes
They dodge a search helicopter and drive off the road, where they spend a night in a desert.
The next day, they ditch the bikes, steal a car, find an internet cafe. Holmes hacks a bank, they get fake IDs, they go to Western Union and pull out 20,000$, they rent a red convertible, and book into a Las Vegas hotel.
They go to a lab in University and pay to have Dr. Katie Turnbow (Pharmacology department) analyze the pill.
Egg psyches John by "teaching him to fly".
John buys lots of knives.
They get catscans.
Paul, Dr. Turnbow's assistant, discovers odd viral(?) crystals in the pill.
The catscans show a web of "threads" in their brains and bones. Mki also has a metal implant in his skull.
They go to the hotel and Egg operates on Mki, taking out the implant.
They spend a week around University, paying for research. Mki wins money in the Casino.
A Phd. Student called Michael identifies the crystals as a form of viral nanomachine.
The capsule in Mki's head was a radio receiver and drug-dispensing vial, probably releasing nanomachines in his head.
Something (threads) is growing in Mki's brain.
They silence requests for grant applications with money.
They are ambushed in the elevator of their hotel.
They break out of the elevator, there's a shoot-out, Holmes crashes a big hole and they jump into the swimming pool.
Egg suggests they dive into the laundry chute and they make off in the laundry van.
They drive around town, heading for the highway.
They spot a suspicious helicopter, but don't do much to it.
They get into a hotel parking area, bluff the valet, and hotwire a red convertible, which they drive out of town. They drive all night, and eventually Holmes blacks out at the wheel, and they wake up in a warehouse.
They're strapped to metal tables, and Angie is there too.
Angie had vanished at the diner - she went to the toilet, where she was ambushed by two thugs - she quickly took them out and pounded on their larynxes - but then she found herself in a strange world, where scavenging feral machines flew around the great junk yards around the vast "Reno Metrocomplex". She wandered into the city there, got into a punk rock club, zoned out and found herself strapped to this table.
They are set free (on probation) by the "NSA" and sent back home, to New York.
They visit ground zero, check out the diner (but it's closed), go to Butch and Sundance
They find a wormhole
Throw it out of orbit at Antarctica and drag it to south Africa.
Henry tries to help Egg fly and throws him out the window.
Egg doesn't - he grabs a flagpole (telephone wire) with his sash.
Then he goes and has a reflective scene with Jasmine-scented soap and a big pipe of dope.
McKee finds himself a Zebra-tail fly swatter (a "Chile"), and goes looking for someone who can identify it for him.
Trap Nano probes in Petri dishes, fight bums with golden wristwatches.
McKee burns the out-of-control nano-tumbleweeds in Bruce and Georgie's lab, but not before it crawls up his leg and slimes his jeans. He considers eating it and becoming wool-man...
Henry and McKee look for Mujahedettes.
John meets a woman called Glenda (or was it Brenda), who knows him from elsewhere.
Egg gives a lecture / party. He calls Henry and McKee and has them come over after Jo-Anne, a qusit Asian IT chick shows up.
John notices someone suspicious in the party wearing a gold wristwatch.
McKee approaches the suspicious guy, and snatches his wristwatch, putting it on his wrist.
Egg is talking to someone when he gets poked in the back and then shot. In the chaos, McKee knocks out John and begins pounding on Henry.
Egg calls Avis, and then borrows a gun and shoots the watch off McKee's wrist.
Egg is rushed to the hospital.
Henry investigates the shattered watch and discovers it has a bizzare communications component which works telepathically. John investigates it and as he examines it, feels a call from "Home".
The doctors tell Egg he will never walk again, and it's a miracle he's alive. McKee talks him into eating a bit of his mineralized African nanotech crystal, but it passes whole without effect.
One night John is leaving the University (while Henry stays to talk to Bruce & Georgie there) when he picks up a telepathic broadcast targeting the communications device in the wristwatch. It's coming from the Hospital.
John alerts McKee at the hospital. McKee goes into the foyer and fights off an assailant that comes up from the elevator, dismantles a bomb that came taped to a hospital dolly there, and uses ball bearings from the bomb to ambush mind-controlled zombies coming up the stairs.
Meanwhile, in Egg's room, there's a strange glow and a hand rests on his shoulder. He looks up and sees Pauline, wearing sunglasses.
"It's time you checked out," she says.
Henry and John arrive at the hospital, where McKee disables a final assailant, dressed up in black, with a gas mask, and wearing a strange heat-beam wrist-blaster. Beneath the mask is another mind-controlled zombie.
Pauline,unhooks Egg from the monitors, lifts him from the bed, and steps into a wormhole in the wall. When the others arrive to check on him, they find him gone, and the smell of Ozone.
Egg sleeps, and finds himself in a fancy Oriental-style parlour. He pumps Pauline for info ("milk! milk!"). Pauline tells him that the good news is that he can fly (they step outside to expirience this).The bad news is that none of this is real... She brings him "out" of that "reality", and he finds himself on his back in a big cave.
Meanwhile, the others have been busy. They have taken their own wormhole (which they stashed in McKee's apartment behind a closet - forgot to mention this last recap...), the telepathic component, and with a lot of luck, wizardry and powers, they create another portal. Stepping through, they find themselves floating hundreds of meters above a mountain gorge.
Henry grabs them, and they fly around, homing in on the cave where Pauline and Egg are located.
Pauline explains to them all that their "real world" was an elaborate virtual reality. They were placed there in order to protect them. They are actually infected with hyper-advanced quantum-level femtotech, of alien origin, just like the NSA told them.
She tells them that the galaxy is networked with wormhole portals. The wormholes spread across the galaxy at sub-light speeds, carried by nanotech or particle-sized probes. Travel through the wormholes is instantenous. On Earth, there is a "loop-back" wormhole path that leads to the future, to the year 2050, where Earth has been devestated by the reckless use of all this advanced alien technology.
They don't buy the "virtual reality" story, so she says she can send them there. She touches McKee's forhead and he freezes - and finds himself in New York. Egg and Henry follow, and then John - who leaves "15% of his mind" behind to monitor his body.
They walk around the subway and go up to a taco stand.
They go to hell to find Elliot Richards.
Hell has become some sort of cross between Disneyland and a prison camp - a mix of smiling attendants, armed guards, neon signs and free sweets.
They trudge up to the white house on the hill, where they find a party going on, are greeted by Bridget (Elliot's "sister"). She gets them drinks and takes them to Elliot's study.
Elliot claims to know nothing about all this "virtual reality" business. Egg tries to prove it by popping back to his body in the cave, where Pauline is keeping watch.
Egg conjures an image of the cave on a mirror.
Bridget flirts with John and Henry, asking them about this "non-virtual reality".
Henry "uploads" her to his PDA, and sees her face on the screen.
McKee confers with Elliot (while Egg and Henry are popping back and forth between Hell and their bodies in the cave), and then McKee snatches Elliot's scissors from his desk, stabs them into Elliot, and gets sucked into Elliot.
John tries to warn the others but finds his call blocked - he finds himself in some black abyss.
Henry (currently in the cave) tries to get back to Hell but finds himself blocked.
He finds the spot which would be the "camera eye" showing the image in the mirror in Hell and punches it, to no effect.
In Hell, Egg gets Wu Dun on Elliot - snapping him with his sash. Elliot snips the sash to ribbons.
Bridget comes at Egg with a halberd, and he blocks and sweeps her off her feet, then snaps back into the cave.
They sleep, get up, Egg does his Kata, Pauline complains and tells them it's time to get back to New York for some coffee.
She summons a Manhole (personal transport wormhole) by invoking some invisible user interface, and gets them to a rooftop in New York. They go to a coffeeshop and talk some more, explaining about different levels of technology - the 2050's tech of the mind-control wristwatches vs. the cutting edge wormhole-controlling nanotech she's using vs. the even more powerful and unguessed-at femtotech behind their powers. The discussion bogs down with Egg's question of how time travel works and how it can prevent rampant technological advancement (technological development running along a loop).
They interrogate Pauline in the Coffeeshop.
Henry tries to re-enter the VR, except he goes into the "operating system" level. There he grips a sword in a stone. However, his attempts to gain access or hack the system are met by resistance, symbolized as a big black manta.
Pauline suggests they go back into the VR, and walk the pattern to gain insight into it.
They check into a hotel, and go into the VR.
They are blocked by a Manta, demanding a password. McKee guesses it by reading the label of his jacket: "Stephan Saeed, Girl". She does (step aside).
They go to New York, Empire State Building.
They go through the subway to the Castle on the hill.
They enter the Pattern room, and walk the pattern. They notice there are 5 paths in the Pattern, and the fifth one has been walked by another.
Egg, Henry, John and finally McKee enter the center of the pattern, and awake in the hotel room, where Pauline is waiting.
They discover they can access the VR now, and scry through it.
Egg senses he can fly, but the ability is atrophied.
Scanning via the Overworld (VR), they pick up several images of people with golden wristwatches - a well-dressed businessman, a street vendor.
John realizes that their enemy is probably jumping from one mind-control victim to the other.
They decide to use the Overworld (VR) to track their stalker (the entity sending mind-controlled Zombies wearing Golden Watches at them).
They see a sequence of about eight people, each wearing a golden watch, going about their business. They try to triangluate the signal to it's source.
Egg fills the bathroom sink and scries into the Overworld. John tracks him (projecting his vision on the wall). Holmes watches TV. McKee zombies. Pauline stacks minibar bottles on the counter.
Egg and John home in on a small world in the Overworld. It is a devestated city, or rather a section of one, 15 kilometers in diameter, which repeats on demand. John senses anger and despair coming from the whole city.Their enemy manifests as a black-clad man in a gas-mask. He doesn't speak, but shows them visions from before the devastation, a man and a young girl in an apartment in the city, the man watching on the news with growing concern how the world is being destroyed in a series of violent confrontations between the world's governments and hostile superbeings, who appear similar to Egg, Holmes, John, Angie, Butch, Pauline, Patrick...
The year in these visions is 2048.
Pauline snaps them out of it, saying that they are being scanned, and someone is locking into their location. They open the window, climb up to the roof via the fire escape, and wait for an attack.
They get shot at by a team of snipers using exotic guns which open micro wormholes and fire the projectiles through them. John, who was using big whirling fan blades as a shield, gets shot twice (arm and leg). Holmes flies across to the next building and disables the attackers. He brings back an agent and a gun for them to examine. Egg breaks into a room on the top floor and their interogate the hostage.
The hostage explains that they are a team of governement operatives, a special US Army emergency counter-terrorism squad, and tells them his superior officer received orders sending them to attack "people on the hotel roof". He demands back the gun, and they kick him out.
They take the elevator to the carpark, but there's an ambush waiting for them (McKee tosses some gravel out of the elevator and it gets shot at). So they go back up to the third floor and jump down to the street with the help of a tree.
They catch a cab to the New Jersey Turnpike, find a secluded spot and Pauline opens them a manhole to Australia.
Exit, stage left.
Holmes, Mckee, Egg, John and Pauline step out of a manhole 10 meters above the Australian wilderness. They set up camp by a brook in a Eucalyptus grove and decide to launch an attack on their enemy through the Overworld.
John says that perhaps their enemy is an AI. Egg tells him that's obvious, and starts exercising - jumping in the air, swinging from trees, etc. Henry enters the Overworld and tries to 'hack' their enemy, scanning incoming/outgoing communications to and from the ruined city VR. He doesn't find any outside, localized units that the VR is communicating with. He decides to pause the VR. Realizing that the Overworld is a distributed system, he tries to prevent the VR's signals from propogating, until it slows down to a stand still due to lack of processing resources. Much hacking takes place. John supervises, and tries to spy on the enemy's VR, to see if they are detected. He feels someone 'watching' him, but the enemy doesn't show awareness of the hacking.
Meanwhile, McKee walks to the source of the brook (a small spring), and Pauline tags along. McKee notes that although Pauline has her familiar scent and perfume, she doesn't seem to be sweating as much as one would expect.