In the distant future, Verloc Nim wakes up in the middle of nowhere suffering from complete amnesia. He remembers nothing of his former life. But when Verloc is handed his diary by a robot-monkey called Churchill, he is able to revisit his past.

His life, he discovers, has been a miserable one. He lost his business, his family and his friends, simply because he refused the technological advancements pushed on him by society: the pharyngeal filter, the eye implants, the genetic modifications – Verloc went without all these. He had been astray in a society he deeply resented – until his brother, Conrad, took him to another planet to retrieve a mysterious biorobotic experiment called AÂMA...