Al Jackson is a trainee on his first day on the job at Anachronis Eats, a temporal food delivery service, fulfilling orders for customers in the 2030 from restaurants that closed years ago. When his trainer Vic takes him through the Amazon Pepsi Cola Temporal Portal to 1985 for a pizza order, Al learns how the entire retail/commercial timeline is dedicated to patronizing nostalgic temporal tourists. But not everyone from the Amazon Pepsi Cola timeline is pleased by the appropriation and temporal gentrification taking place.

It’s the new economy. Enron is a reliable energy company, Pets.com has a bright future ahead of it, and the world is chirping with the sound of modems handshaking across the World Wide Web. In the height of the dotcom boom, Chris Jung moves to Austin to find himself. Unfortunately, between his Philosophy degree and lackluster high-tech skills, he finds himself to be a bike messenger for startups that are throwing weekly beer bashes, talking about going IPO and spending wads of capital though they can’t quite say exactly what it is they do. When Chris is assigned to run deliveries for an obscure tech firm, he learns that the fate of all existence hangs in the balance and is recruited to assist in its salvation. It doesn’t come with stock options or health benefits, but Chris can’t resist the opportunity to be a part of something profound. In the process, he hopes to find existential meaning and possibly a desk job.

It’s been 5 ½ years since the Shift first plunged the industrialized world into darkness. Left with only a few old diesel engines and Classic Rock albums recorded on vinyl, the EMPs have forced the survivors to adapt to a world devoid of computers, bereft of a global economy and reeling without Facebook.

Our favorite obsessive-compulsive Chris Jung has grown up (a little) and now leads the Vicious Rabbits Bicycle Mounted Cavalry through the necropolis of the DC Beltway region, protecting Rochelle and her allies in the Orange Pact from bandit raids. Meanwhile, Reverend Rita Luevano struggles to maintain an uneasy peace between the Unitarian majority and the Christian minority in Greater Monticello.

The Orange Pact allies are threatened by foes all around. Outnumbered and outgunned, they stand against the rising tide of chaos and tyranny largely through the wily interventions of the intelligence organization known as the Swan, headed by Meredith Jung. But the darkness is closing in on this little slice of sanity in the Shenandoah Valley. Meredith knows it’s only a matter of time until the Lambs of God in Lynchburg decide to attack, and when they do, there will be no stopping them. Furthermore, Meredith carries a secret so potentially devastating that it dwarves the prospect of being overrun by religious fanatics bent on their destruction.

Rita is called to join Chris and his Bicycle Mounted Cavalry on a mission of utmost urgency that leads them into the heart of darkness: suburban Maryland. Along the way, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Between Meredith’s secret and the revelations uncovered in Maryland, Chris, Rita and Meredith find themselves where they would really rather not be, at the center of the vortex where the entire fate of humanity hangs in the balance.

The time has come. A massive asteroid is hurtling toward earth and will wipe out all life when it hits. The Lambs of God are preparing to slaughter the Orange Pact communities. And Captain Chris Jung has been tossed into a mundane alternate reality where the Shift never happened to languish in a soul-sucking cubicle while his counterpart from that reality awakens in a world sundered.

Jamil, the organic computer, has a plan that could save the world in both realities: the Shiftiverse, where the Shift happened, and the Mundaniverse, where it didn’t. Part of that plan requires that Rita Luevano venture to the furthest reaches of no man’s land, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Somewhere within herself, Rita possesses a knowledge acquired from her Mundaniverse counterpart that could be the key to humanity’s survival. Accompanying her is Chris Jung from the Mundaniverse, who finally gets away from the office like he always wanted to, just not in the way he imagined.

Meanwhile, Meredith Jung and Ezra Rothstein prepare the Orange Pact for the inevitable onslaught by the Lambs of God while the interim leader of Monticello threatens to undermine the alliance. Despite knowing the end is coming, Meredith rallies a final stand against their oppressor. Mundaniverse Chris will be called to fight for his life while Shiftiverse Chris, lost in a world without Vicious Rabbits, will be called to be a warrior once more. And Rita will discover that saving humanity means more than simply saving the world from annihilation.

Chris, Rita, and Meredith have been on a journey that began long before the world came crashing down, a journey that leads to the moment where the fate of the entire planet in both realities coalesce. Across the span of the quantum divide, each must find a strength hidden in a shared past.