The Graveyard Game is a science fiction novel by American writer Kage Baker, the fourth installment in the time travel series concerning the exploits of The Company.

They were recruited as children to serve the Company in its ostensible mission to preserve artifacts from the past for a better future.

Animal rights movements and other activists pass laws eliminating the consumption of meat, dairy products, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco and many other stimulants and foods.

Joseph, apparently talking to his father-figure, Budu, fills in historical detail in the storyline and discusses his own motivations.

Joseph persuades him to try out a new virtual reality helmet, which turns out to have a fault that disables cyborgs' implanted monitors for 24 hours.

Initially reluctant, Joseph drives Lewis to Bodega Bay to talk to Juan Bautista who was the last cyborg to see Mendoza.

To Joseph's shock, the man is a double for Nicholas Harpole, the religious fanatic with whom Mendoza fell in love in Tudor England, and who was subsequently burned at the stake.

Further research turns up a well-born man, apparently a natural son of someone in high places, with powerful friends who guide his life.

They spend time in the country of "The Innocents", an imagined novel combining elements of Animal Farm and Watership Down.

This novel and its loony fans are among the catalysts for the growing animal-rights movement which will eventually ban meat consumption in many countries.

Lewis' Company conditioning, intended to keep cyborgs out of forbidden places, causes him to re-experience his suppressed memories of being disabled and kidnapped in medieval Ireland.

He begins to understand why the Company left him in South America for 700 years, until the events recorded in Sky Coyote.

Joseph seeks out Suleyman, a former Barbary Coast pirate who has built up an independent power base in Fez, Morocco.

Suleyman reveals that he himself is working secretly against other factions, some of whom seem to be creating new diseases to wipe out humans.

Edward was working for people who wanted to gain possession of Santa Catalina island, off the California coast.

Finding his cover blown by a strange little man, Lewis drops out of sight and heads to Spain for another meeting with Joseph.

At the end of the previous installment, Sky Coyote, his first-person narrative concluded with him expressing a certain ill-defined unease at his life, which by then had moved from Spain to Old California to Hollywood.

Lewis's news of Mendoza's appearance in 1996, coupled with the discovery that her disappearance in 1863 had been connected with the identical twin of the man who ruined her in Elizabethan England, begins his estrangement from the organization he has served since prehistory.

He finally decodes the information given to him by his own father, Budu, which reveals to him the hidden Company graveyards where damaged and inconvenient immortals sleep.

The novel ends with him turned into a demon of sorts, a malevolent free spirit determined to bring doom on those who have abused him and his loved ones for so long.

Literature Specialist Lewis was introduced in Sky Coyote as a mild mannered Company flunky with no skeletons in his closet.

In this novel his tragic background, both as a victim of the mysterious little men and as a man doomed to love an unattainable woman, come to the fore.

Budu happened to have been an Enforcer, an 8-foot killing machine with mixed ancestry from humans, Neanderthals and God knows what else the Company used.

A major plot element throughout the book is that all the cyborgs have implants that transmit everything they see and hear to a central database.

Not only does the U.S.A. fragment, California descending into anarchy, but the rise of extreme animal rights agitation and various prohibition movements means that in the future meat-eating, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, chocolate and all manner of other social and private stimulants are illegal.

One of the main plot points of this series is the discovery of certain artifacts on Santa Catalina by members of the Drake expedition.