Dr. Dana Avalon is from Gotham, the last modern metropolis on Earth in the year 2112, built by Prometheists in the late 21st century above the shattered skyscrapers of Manhattan rising out of the Atlantic Ocean.

As the leader of Prometheism, and the reincarnation of the movement's founder, Dana realizes that the war is lost in the present. To end the reign of Traditionalist totalitarianism, the Future of Modernity must be retrieved by traveling back in time to 1980.

Dana acts as an assassin to rewrite history so that the Soviet Union can survive into the 21st century and join the United States in resisting the Olympian Imperium. In her own timeline, the USA disintegrated within half a century of the fall of the USSR, and Neo-Confucian China handed Earth over to the Nordic "Celestial Ancestors" in 2048.

Dana remembers key events in her previous incarnation as Jason Jorjani, and makes her way into Jason's life during his childhood and adolescence, redirecting his path. Shapour Bakhtiar, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Donald Trump all feature prominently in her timeline revision.

This is a sequel to Jorjani's novel Faustian Futurist. Some of the main characters of that book, including its protagonist, Nikolai Alexandrov, reappear here in an even more autobiographical context.