The first part begins on a New Year's Day, in which a young, 17-year-old Jeff Luty and his friend Carlos Tucay are about to light bottle rockets on Stinson Beach.
The two boys, who are interested in the young but growing nanotechnology industry, dream about establishing Lu-Tuc Space Tech, and have inserted nanorobots into the rockets.
By the next day, the nants have mostly reversed all their advances across Earth and restores it in its entirety until they return to the Moon and are seemingly shot out of existence by a Chinese satellite.
Chu, irritated by the shouting, seizes the jar and smashes the glass open, releasing the orphids to rapidly self-replicate.
Within hours, the orphids, which are heavily connected to the Internet, spread to most of the West Coast, and Ond is wanted by the San Francisco Police Department.
The pursuit of Ond and Chu by both Gladax and the anti-nant/orphid mob ultimately send the two teleporting from the Merz Boat to the Hibrane version of San Francisco, where everything is slower and larger.
Jayjay, Thuy, Sonic and Kitty eventually meet Nektar, who has become head chef at a popular restaurant and the lead personality of a reality series, Founders, which is broadcast to viewers over the orphidnet.
After eating with the other cast members - Craigor and Jil - and leaving Nektar's home, the kiqqies happen upon the body of a former high-scoring quantum gamer who became addicted to the Big Pig and starved to death, motivating the kiqqies to visit the Natural Mind center to calm their minds away from the Big Pig.
Two months after the Natural Mind incident, Thuy is recovering from her addiction to the Big Pig and focuses more on developing her semi-autobiographical metanovel, Wheenk.
Thuy runs out across the street and is rescued by JayJay, who demonstrates his recent mastering of teleportation through the orphidnet to bring them to the Merz Boat of Jil and Craigor.
After torture, JayJay agrees to open the box, only to find it booby-trapped with nant goo which consumes much of his body before Thuy's eyes.
Meanwhile, Jayjay remains on Earth in a coma, being used by the Big Pig to run an entire simulated lifetime of 60 years in his head in six hours.
The two teleport to Nektar's house in San Francisco, where Jayjay tries to play the "Lost Chord" which will unroll the eighth dimension while the nants amass and threaten to eat the world again.
The main characters' lives change after the unrolling: Jil divorces Craigor and marries Ond, Nektar becomes romantically linked to Kittie, Chu manages to heal his autism, and Jayjay and Thuy become engaged.
The science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow reviewed the book for Boing Boing, summarizing it as "pure Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of string theory and the quantum universe that distorts the possible into the most improbable contortions,"[1] and rated it as "one of the most fun, strangest, most thought-provoking sf novels I've read, and it's fantastic to have it show up on the net, ready to be copied and shared."
[2] Booklist stated that "While Rucker’s improbable scenarios sometimes cross the line into pure silliness, his devoted fans and dazzled newcomers to him will revel in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its soaring limits.[3]".
io9's Charlie Jane Anders stated that it "actually pulls off the ambitious multilayered story it sets out to tell," but described the novel as being full of "bizarre idea-spikes" such as the hibrane.