Michael is a washed-up special-forces man in a world he doesn’t understand. Haunted by memories he can’t escape, he navigates life in the Fifth Common Era, where human happiness hangs by a thread and technology drives changes that nobody can predict.

At the heart of society’s fragile balance is the Sanity Engine — a quasi-sentient algorithm that has evolved to control nearly every aspect of human life. Michael doesn’t understand the Sanity Engine, but that’s no surprise — nobody does.

But deep within the shadows, among the chemically erased memories and the corridors of the unconscious mind, something more profound stirs. For a boy named Jaimie is waking up. And he is not alone.