"How can you drink tea from an empty cup?" That ancient Zen riddle holds the key to a baffling a young man found with his throat slashed while locked alone in a virtual reality parlor. The secret of this enigmatic death lies in an apocalyptic cyberspace shadow-world where nothing is certain, and even one's own identity can change in an instant.

Detective Lieutenant Doré Konstantin is up against it. Konstantin is Chief Officer in charge of TechnoCrime, Artificial Reality Division. It sounds better than it is - in fact, the AR Division consists of three people and a case load of nearly impossible to solve crimes. Now, as if handling her heavy case load almost single-handed weren't bad enough, she's got a stalker to deal with. A woman named Susannah Ell claims that she is being stalked by her ex-husband, Hasting Dervish. It seems implausible at first - Dervish is an extraordinarily rich and powerful man, who should have better things to do. But as Konstantin starts to look into it, she discovers that it's not quite so impossible to Dervish has traded places with an Artificial Intelligence, and is busy committing crimes no one has ever thought of before.