Dr. Sanger, neuropsychologist, worked to save the mind of his brain-damaged and comatose fiancee. Sadly, by the time he had developed his masterwork, the Luria Transform, a hard-and-software prosthetic, he had to face the truth: she would probably die long before the technology could be refined enough to save her. To keep himself sane, he plunged himself entirely into his work, eventually uncovering tantalizing glimpses of a new state of human consciousness. Into this program was plunged Kama Tanestra, a young, intelligent, heavily brain-damaged failed suicide. When she was irrevocably and mysteriously altered by the research, Dr. Sanger was desperate to understand, and jacked himself into the local computerized interpretation of her world... with terrifying consequences. He found himself in an environment he could not comprehend, goaded and guided there by his former experimentee. Armed only with the information that he must "die twice in order to succeed, or fail", Dr. Sanger set out on the hero's trail, encountering and dealing with death, revelation, companionship of a rare and special kind, and the essential inconsequentiality of his own species, which he must nonetheless strive to save from total annihilation.