Eighteen-year-old Arthur Trewe is a "debugger": an operative sent to corrupted private virtual game worlds to exfiltrate those trapped within. Direct-to-brain VR technology has become so immersive that safeguards are necessary to protect users. White shards are such protected vanilla servers, without pain or harm. Grey shards have had the protections stripped away to deliver the full spectrum of human sensation, including suffering. The most perilous are black shards, where players can suffer brain damage or even complete braindeath.
Lately, a series of such black shards have been corrupted by "dreamers": malicious AIs that warp the story-core from collaborative role-player to puppeteer of a sadistic nightmare. The only way to free users trapped within is to enter the game world posing as a player and interacting with the story created by the core. Once inside, the operative must stay in character to avoid "waking" the AI until the hostages have been rescued and the dreamer expunged.
After several human operatives die in shards corrupted by dreamers, powerful AI agents are deployed. Known as "daemons", these AIs are so effective at hunting down dreamers that they're put in charge of debugging missions, but they still need humans to guide and protect them. Arthur isn't thrilled to be babysitting his own potential job replacement, but he has to admit that Mantis, his AI partner, is smarter, funnier and – depending on her mood – more charming than he is. Charming enough that, between missions, he finds himself spending more and more time online with her in VR worlds of their own devising rather than deal with his own real-world problems.
At the rate his peers are dying, he tells himself he doesn't mind being replaced by AI – as long as he qualifies for a Gold Level career performance bonus first. Yet when a series of black shard missions gone awry raise troubling questions about the nature of the dreamers and the games themselves, Arthur is forced to make a choice between what's left of his career as a VR operative, his feelings for Mantis and uncovering the truth that lurks at the heart of the story-cores.
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