Dave's agreement with Doc and Sally is to help the two adventurous scientists disappear into the future. But being left behind by the closest people Dave has to family isn't the bargain the eighteen-year-old expected. When Dave follows after his mentors, calibration issues place him centuries past his target date. Countless years and miles of wilderness separate him from Doc and Sally. Dave must survive in a primitive new world that has been waiting for him for a very . . . long . . . time . . .

"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.

Less than forty years into the future, most of mankind has elected to upload themselves to digital nirvana, where they can live as many lives as they care to in parallel, in as many different fantasy worlds as they desire. A small percentage of humans, however, are loath to give up the mortal coil. These last holdouts are the escapees from the future. The question is, for how long? Will Mother, the sentient internet, be content with gentle prodding to upgrade and uplift? Or will she resort to more coercive means? Has she already, unbeknownst to the final holdouts?