[4] The hero is a survivor in a hypothetical world of quickly changing identities, fashions, and lifestyles, where individuals are still controlled and oppressed by a powerful and secretive state apparatus.

The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state in a future where quantitative analysis backed by the tacit threat of coercion has replaced overt military and economic power as the deciding factor in international competition.

The subsequent economic depression, coupled with the rootlessness enabled by access to online data and strong social pressure to be flexible (the results of corporations wanting highly mobile workforces without strong local ties), results in a fragmentation of society along religious, ethnic, and a variety of class markers, what Toffler called "subcults", including what would in 2010 be described as gangs.

Communities are either walled enclaves of privilege or largely lawless areas entirely lacking protection from corrupt civil authorities.

Infrastructure has been allowed to crumble, and characters who reside within "paid avoidance zones" receive compensation from the government in lieu of actual services.

The novel is set in the weeks following Nick's recapture after several years on the run, alternating between moral arguments with his interrogator, who is trying to discover why the program's star pupil had absconded, and flashbacks of his career.

He uses the stolen 4GH computer access code to cover his data trails and create new identities for himself, easily adopting entire new personas.

In this last role, calling himself Sandy Locke, he becomes the lover of Ina Grierson, a top executive at Ground to Space Industries, a powerful "hypercorp" known to all as G2S.

He visits her at home, helping her to clean out some of her possessions, and meeting her tame cougar, Bagheera – the product of her late father's genetic research into intelligence.

The Hearing Aid worm is designed to scramble network traffic if attacked, but Nick realises that it could be destroyed if the authorities were prepared for the effects and ready to recover from them.

Possibly encouraged by the government, local gangs and tribes raid Precipice, burning down Nick and Kate's house before being overwhelmed by the dogs.

Nick, suffering another overload, blames Kate for the incident, since she, following Hearing Aid policy, cut off a call from someone attempting to warn Precipice.

He finally reveals his location to the authorities when, encountering one of the "Roman circus" operations which broadcast live fights and other bloody exhibitions to the country, he responds to an "all comers" challenge by the father of the leader of one of the gangs, and cripples him in front of a nationwide audience.

This time around, Nick has another plan, and rather than running and hiding, he and Kate spend a number of months travelling the country, aided by an "invisible college" of academics who are allies or former residents of Precipice.

The worm is eventually activated, and the details of all the government's dark secrets (clandestine genetic experimentation that produces crippled children, bribes and kickbacks from corporations, concealed crimes of high public officials) now become accessible from anywhere on the network – in fact, those most affected by a particular crime of a government official are emailed the full details.

In a final atavistic attempt at revenge, the government orders a nuclear strike by a single aircraft from a local Air Force base.

Spider Robinson gave the novel a mixed review, saying that while "the book reads well ..., [i]ndividual sections are often brilliant, [and] the message is incisive and timely", that "as a story it limps" and that many characters, including the main antagonists, "are cut from cardboard".

When they arrive in Precipice, the couple have to abandon their normal "urban pattern" to see the ways in which the town's unique design merges public and private space, along with natural and artificial structures.

Others try to convince themselves that all change is good, adopting the "plug-in" lifestyle where they feel able to relocate to another city and insert themselves into a new social niche with a minimum of inconvenience.

One such is Anti-Trauma Inc. which is hired to "normalise" children in a process akin to deprogramming, the (often violent) attempt to force people to renounce their association with groups perceived as cults.

Anti-Trauma does significant harm to its charges, although as so often happens in Brunner's interconnected society, it also spends much money and time covering up its failures.