The body is baggage. The soul is expendable. Nemo's mother and father left him behind to enter "the Bin"—joining twelve billion uploaded personalities who live in crime-free, disease-free and deathless virtual societies. Nemo has come of age on a dangerous, near-deserted planet populated by a handful of stragglers: religious fundamentalists and rebels, the creeps and the crazies. Now he is twenty-one. And on a rare, reluctant visit to the parents who abandoned their flesh and blood son for cyber-utopia, Nemo has met the perfect woman: a new Bin arrival named Justine, a beautiful pop singer who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night. Now an inconvenient attraction is leading two lovers into a perilous mire of irreversible choice. For Justine has no body to return to. And Nemo the renegade has sworn never to sacrifice his own; to live, age, and die instead in a bleak earthly hell. Because, as an outsider, he may enter the Bin for short periods of time. But if he ever decides to stay...there will be no way out again.

Seventy years have passed since an army of religious zealots "destroyed" the Bin. Now, in the rubble of New Jerusalem—the ruined city once called Washington—a young Christian Soldier named Sam has uncovered a prototype housing a single uploaded personality. The release of renegade geneticist Walter Tillman from his hundred-year prison leads Sam to an even more astonishing discovery: the Bin, with its billions of inhabitants—including Tillman's lost lover, Stephanie, who desires the freedom of death—still exists, unbeknownst to the mad messianic leader Gabriel and his Army of the Lord. But soon Gabriel, too, will learn of the Bin's survival. And as doubts erode Sam's religious fervor, as Tillman strives to reunite with his love, and events on Earth and in virtual Heaven more rapidly toward a violent, inescapable conclusion, the destinies of disembodied and planet-bound souls alike will converge.