The narrative begins with a private investigator named Marcos Rodriguez pulling up to a metal building located on the island of Oahu.

The building is the main headquarters of Nanigen Micro-Technologies, a research company that specializes in discovering new types of medicine.

Disguised as a security guard, Rodriguez enters the unattended building and begins searching the grounds for an unknown object.

Their deaths are reported as a triple-suicide, and Lieutenant Dan Watanabe of the Honolulu Police Department is assigned to investigate the case.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard graduate student Peter Jansen is collecting venom from a cobra for further experimentation.

He is joined in the biology lab by six other graduate students: Rick Hutter, an ethnobotanist; Karen King, an arachnologist; Erika Moll, an entomologist and coleopterist; Amar Singh, a botanist; Jenny Linn, a biochemist studying pheromones; and Danny Minot, a doctoral student studying the linguistics of science.

Peter flies to Oahu and meets with Watanabe, who shows him a video of Eric scrambling around the deck of his boat before jumping overboard.

With assistance from one of Hutter's friends, Peter hacks Nanigen's phone records and finds a cryptic exchange between Bender and Drake, which confirm his suspicions about Eric's death.

He saves the conversation onto a drive and plans to play it out loud during the students' scheduled tour of Nanigen in order to expose Drake.

When the tour commences, Peter sneaks away from the group to find a place to insert the drive, stealing a wireless microphone while doing so and hiding it in his shirt.

Drake rushes the seven students inside, along with the generator's operator, Jarel Kinsky (the only other person in the room) and shrinks them all down to half an inch in height.

As the disoriented subjects adjust to their new micro-surroundings, Drake places them into a plastic bag and takes them into another room, where a snake is being held.

They steal the assassins' shrunken vehicle, and head for the last Nanigen base they know about from which they might fly back to the Tensor generator.

After Erika is killed by birds, the three remaining students reach the Tantalus Nanigen base, but find no miniature airplanes.

They encounter a fugitive Ben Rourke, the inventor of the Tensor generator, and also hunted by Drake, who has managed to adapt and survive in the micro-world.

Danny, panicking due to larvae laid in his arm by a wasp, betrays the group by contacting Drake and offering him Rourke's "microbends" remedy in return for his hospitalization and safety.