"When I was born I was so small I was mistaken for a french fry. I was never an ordinary child. My best friend was a seagull. I was also illegal. Artificially intelligent people like me had been banned ever since that thing with the Twelve Elevens. Mother raised me for profit. Buyers and sellers had other plans for me, but then I grew a mind of my own. This is the story of how my brain ended up inside this box." Candles is a black-market, "artificially intelligent person" (or A.I.P., or "ape" in the colloquial sense, as in 'the planet of the'), an organic being, farm-raised on genetically engineered smoothies and destined for auction to the highest bidding criminal enterprise. Gifted with the ability to communicate with foul-mouthed seagulls and ill-tempered felines, this gender-less, age-less, race-less creature has to find its way to escape from the clutches of its mother and other assorted enemies, in this fairly exciting and ultimately utterly unexpected story.

Pandora Paige Alexander is the main focus of what the government has cleverly named the P. P. A. Project. The project is a series of government run facilities, tests and inspections to learn and replicate a rare condition Pandora has lived with for more than 90 years and yet still has the face of a 17 year old. But what Pandora didn't expect after all these years of tests and questions is that there is more to her than simply a rare genetic condition but the key between this world and another.