Two millennia after World War III, in the New Order year 1901 AE, StarProbe Tech Lt. Anen Kel was searching for a resolution to the interstellar communications problem known as the Anomaly when his intercept beams awoke a comatose alien creature drifting in high orbit over earth. As Kel and his android companion, CR, ultimately converse with the spaceborn being who calls himself the Spherit, the alien realizes that he has been an unconscious time traveler since he was struck by a nuclear blast during WWIII.

He has been awakened in what is for him the 42nd century—but with his 21st century viewpoints still intact. Until he can begin to understand how the earthworld has come to be wholly dominated by the techno-philosophy of O Theory, nothing of this braver new world will ever make sense to him—