When a newly-hired programmer at the Trantor Group, Mindwiped by Sortmind abuse, proclaims himself an alien from the planet Cnzaar, Trantor Group CEO Peter Trantor scrambles to reassure his latest client, the lovely but unreadable bank executive Anna Winstead, that his telepathic Sortmind app really isn’t as deadly as people assume.
High school art students Oliver Perrine, traumatized by the terrorist bombing of the public library, and Sam Emersonn, coolly pragmatic and politically aware, struggle to define themselves against their fascist fathers, the founders of the reviled Citizens Against Telepathy. Sam’s sister Teresa discovers she’s a link in generations of power people, and that she and Oliver belong to the secret society of Tree Leopards.
Architect and reluctant CAT political activist Mitchell Emersonn telepathically reviews his girlfriend Shelley’s files after she too declares she’s an alien from Cnzaar. A library clerk invents hallucinogenic Concentrated Telepathic Tablets and spreads them to the Canterra Art Institute, where Sam and Oliver consume the drug and find themselves confronting Sortmind’s unnerving redefinition of reality.
Thalia Aster, the mayor of Canterra, is unable to hold the city together as the fanatic Open Telepathy Foundation, led by charismatic ex-preacher Edward Duce, battles the soldiers of Citizens Against Telepathy at the Memorial Day Pledge of Resistance Rally. When the frenzied militias attack the Trantor Building’s Sortmind servers and the app begins evaporating, Oliver has to sort out his adolescent fantasies and discover what’s real.
