Xeno yearns to have access to The Nth Dimension like The White Boys, famed telepaths who suffered brain damage when they made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Out of work as a bartender since the Shoki Pao dance club mysteriously burned down, Xeno's lackluster lifestyle is getting harder to maintain. The public pill silos that dispense Sunlite, a one-size-fits-all mood elevating drug, haven't been refilled in months, so the citizens of Metropa turn to designer drugs like Black Magic, an addictive knock-off with terrible side effects.
Having survived an overdose of Black Magic, and successfully revived by Drinama, a brain implant slipped to him as a Mickey at a job fair, Xeno earns an entry level position as an agent for secret service organization Intellegella. Garry, his handler, introduces Xeno to the industrial version of the black box, allowing Xeno's pineal gland access to synthetic sensory perception with the turn of a dial, along with the Noumenol patch, a skin absorbed drug that stabilizes his vital signs so that he doesn't suffer a cardiac arrest.
Xeno's initial mission is to test the black box on the field, under Garry's watchful eye, and to locate Trianne, an ex co-worker, ex model, ex pole dancer for the Shoki Pao, gone missing and showing signs of spontaneous human combustion, an emerging side effect of Black Magic, and a public safety hazard.
All he has to do is bring Trianne back to Intellegella for treatment. It's that simple . . . according to Garry.
Maxine is an 18-year-old girl who is bored and lonely, living in California in the year 2351. She's always been fascinated with how humans used to live in houses, drive cars, and the fact that there used to be forests and parks everywhere. Now, after a war that nearly erased humanity, people are forced to live a strict, dull, communist lifestyle. Everyone seems okay with this way of life. Everyone except Maxine. Maxine had always been special; she was often able to predict events. How? She didn't exactly know...yet. When she starts having dreams about a tropical island where people live as they did in the 21st century, she meets the man of her dreams: literally. Her new boiling emotions bring her to wonder...what if it's a real place? When she starts her search for the island and bumps into Elis-the man in her dreams-she suddenly knows it wasn't all just a making of her imagination. Finding that island could mean finding the answers to her burning questions, and maybe even answers to questions she didn't know she had.
However, not everything is what she thought it would be when she finally finds the island, and her dreams become a harsh reality. Elis turns out to be someone else, and when another man swoops in every time Maxine is in danger, she becomes confused about what love really is. The Advisors, the ten women governing the world, want to assimilate the people of the island, not knowing that those people have an extreme advantage over them. Maxine also learns that her family has been lying to her about who she really is. Ultimately, when the Advisors come to destroy the island, she must face the fact that she is the key to the island's salvation, and embracing her rapidly developing abilities is the only way to do so.