The enslaved king of 22nd Century cyberspace has come of age and seeks to regain control of his life and escape his father's cybernetics lab. Since babyhood, Alex McGregor has been the human host of an AI, Sander, thanks to a man-made retrovirus that converted Alex's cells into biological supercomputer components. This is kept a secret, lest the public deem him a high-tech zombie and panic. Sander remotely operates most of Earth's machines, including ones providing vital societal services. In one of his many online locations, the AI thinks like a teen boy, goes by Sander Michael Gabrielson, and has a foster dad who loves him as his foster bro's equal. Now Alex's technophobic girlfriend, Manna Jenkins, has inspired Alex's plot to break free of his brainwashing scripts, escape his bio-dad's cybernetics lab, and uninstall Sander from their shared offline body. Sander fears this will kill Alex and render his prosthetic brain inoperable. He seeks relationship counseling with his foster bro, Elisha, a conservative ministry student hiding that he's intersexed. Unless Alex and Sander can become one again, Sander's upgrade will go awry and cause a global tech catastrophe that could prove fatal to everyone he loves.