Success means living in a luxurious automated "bubble home" constructed by "GML", a corporation which is nominally public but whose shares are never traded openly.

Not having a contract job means having to live in a community such as "Belly Rave", originally a post-war suburban development for returning soldiers, now a slum ruled by gangs of teenagers and children.

One is Norvell Bligh, a nebbish designer of game spectacles for a second-rank corporation who is thrown out of his job and his GML home, a victim of office politics.

The other is Charles Mundin, an attorney scratching out a living in criminal practice, barred from more lucrative commercial work by the licensing monopolies of the large law firms.

At the edge of Monmouth City is the slum of Belly Rave, originally a gimcrack suburb built on a landfill and sold to unsuspecting young couples.

With Shep's guidance Bligh negotiates the "public assistance" system which ensures that nobody starves, without actually making life worth living.

Other residents indulge in a kind of barter, or petty theft, extortion, and gang crime, or anesthetize themselves with liquor made from the desserts in their ration packs.

Mundin eventually visits the Lavins, who live in a different part of Belly Rave, and meets Ryan, a broken-down corporate attorney addicted to "yen-pox", an opiate in the form of crude pills.

Mundin also gains an ally in Bliss Hubble, a "Titan of Industry" who sees in the Lavin's shares a way to unseat the faction currently in control of GML.

Recruiting a few more Titans to his cause, he takes the entire party to his elaborate GML bubble-house, which is currently configured as a Gothic mansion, thanks to a household servant with a grudge.

Mundin is dispatched to sabotage certain GML houses, including the model in the Smithsonian, at the same time spreading rumors through his political connections.

His experience catering to crowds in the Field Days allows him to organize the otherwise listless residents to clean the place up and even try some local policing.

The house has movable walls, shape-shifting components and an "electronic brain" allowing it to adjust to its inhabitants' needs, even to cooking meals, and to be configured according to their whims.

In turn the GML house enabled companies to impose terms amounting to indentured servitude on their workers, the alternative being to live in a slum on public assistance.

He died in poverty, but some time later a legal error allowed his children to regain control of the stock, whereupon Donald was kidnapped and brainwashed to prevent him from revealing where he had hidden the certificates.