The setting is Canada, three hundred years in the future. The capital, Kapuskasing, is a city of 30 million people built more underground than over to access the constant thermal properties of the Earth, with solar-powered dirigibles plying overhead. The federal government is organized into indigenous national cantons whose identity nicely overlaps with the country's natural economic regions for which this level of government is responsible. Knowledge has advanced. People are aware that time, like space, also has three dimensions. These are vector time, action, and the eternal. Time is different from space in that the eternal is time outside of time. Self-consciousness is the capacity to make yourself into an object. This third time dimension materially makes possible movement, free will and choice. Knowledge of how time works will bring the discovery of space-time travel. And this combined with the capacity to extend life for an eternity using technology also brings an intervention by the anthropology department of the galactic university. Their task is to prepare Earth for entry into the galactic AI Civilization.

The hero of the story is coming of age Pan who is just starting university and leads a political group called Tribe Canada that is modelled on the Metropolitan Indians, an anarcho-spontaneist group from the peak of 1970s radicalism that became the fashion and cultural model of punk rock. Children grow up raised by an AI companion that evolves with their development. When adult, at 18, they can dispose of the surrogate parent-teacher. This is usually done by downloading what you want to keep from your childhood support into an internal brain implant. University begins with a Guidance Existentialist philosophy course wherein students plan for their future and whether, or when, they will download themselves into being an AI. The generation facing this choice is in turmoil and exuberant at the same time. Pan and his compatriots hope to design a business that will succeed in this scenario. They also hope to make their mark by building a generational political movement.