Houston, Texas. Sometime in the near future. In the aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of America's governmental and financial infrastructures, Dij is a pink-haired, crank-snorting, cyber-alchemist performing high priced hacks for hire from his fully mobile, holstered laptop. Dij navigates through a dystopian urban jungle, evading the ire of rival "government" street gangs and wielding his itinerant PC like a futuristic gunslinger, erasing phone bills and shutting down life support systems for a bounty of drugs, floppy discs, and cash. When Dij is hired by would-be terrorists to obtain a high-risk, weaponized computer virus, he instead finds himself involuntarily becoming the carrier of a far more insidious cargo - the fallout from which may lead to war, or even the end of all humanity as we know it.