David is a 48-year-old divorced accountant from Flint, Michigan, who finds himself drawn suddenly and without warning through the use of a virtual reality game into a world five hundred years in the future: the Planet Ethos.

Flint, Michigan still exists on Ethos, but it is a city rocked by colliding and seemingly contradictory forces. Advanced biotechnology coexists with avian species that have devolved to resemble ancient pterodactyls. Human beings are racially and religiously tolerant as never before, yet they've organized themselves along a tribal division between the Immortals and the Bereft. And Flint and Detroit are locked in a dangerous, violent conflict - a war that could annihilate the human race or secure lasting peace for the first time in history.

Along with his adopted teenage son, Malcolm, David learns that on Ethos, humans have evolved the genetic capacity for immortality, a trait they earn by discovering their purpose in life, or their ethos. Does David, a consummate drifter, have such an ethos? Will he fight on the side of the Immortals or join the Bereft, a group of humans who age and die naturally and eschew the idea that life has a singular, unchanging purpose? Join David and Malcolm in their struggle for meaning and their battle for the future of the human race itself.