In a period when prisons no more contain inmates behind concrete and steel, the convicted serve their time while asleep, rehabilitating in virtual reality while blissfully unaware of their crimes.

Roger Parker is a professional jail breaker, skilled at navigating these strange penal desire worlds and extracting those imprisoned there—for a cost. Parker wants out of the game, but a powerful senator, desperate to save his kid, convinces Parker to pull one last work. The clincher? A chance for Parker to find his wife, herself interned, dropped somewhere in a treacherous, time-shifting Manhattan cyberscape.

As Parker and his team make their hallucinatory journey between worlds, memory space and motive lose coherence and integrity, and the clock begins to run away: internal security detects the breaker, and sets out to eliminate him—permanently.

Unable to rely on his perceptions, uncertain of the truth or even his very identity, will Parker use . or become broken?