From this frame story and a box containing several objects from his past, Quare pieces together what he believes is true about his life leading to the early 22nd century.

Joshua ran away from home early in his teens to escape his abusive father, and stayed in an upstairs apartment at Gwenny's Diner.

He entered the US Army at the behest of some Party organizers, and he was put in contact with a KGB operative who provided him with an injection to keep him from receiving or transmitting AIDS (which mutates into mutAIDS and spreads soon after, wiping out a large percentage of the population of Earth).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB diversified and became "the Organization," a counter-insurgency group that supplied technical and logistic support to every side in the Eurowar, a NATO-Central European Union-Russian conflict in the early 21st century.

Joshua, as an agent for The Organization, begins his violent operative career with a gang rape involving US soldiers, and then sets out a series of terrorist-like missions to intensify the war.

After the Eurowar ended, Joshua took in "Alice", a war orphan from Prague in an incident where he got the dog tag – and inspiration for future alias – "John Childs".

When Joshua finally ventures forth to meet his Organization contact in Red Sands City, he's confronted by a tremendous hustle and bustle of people preparing for the transfer ship descendants to arrive from the 25th century and either destroy One True (and the population on Earth under its control) or confine it there.

But despite making no sense, rape, murder, and a very unpleasant future, it's still an excellently written and vastly ambitious book, with a scope both science fictional and literary.