A hundred years after the world is decimated by nuclear wars, humanity has been reduced to one surviving city of people called Mainlanders. They have food, water, and a wall that separates them from their enemies—the Outlanders. Branded as savages, the Outlanders have grown in number and their attacks against the city have become more brutal. Increasingly, they threaten to overtake the city, bringing with them the doom and destruction that has plagued mankind for over a century. What the Mainlanders need is a weapon. Des is the first robot created with a full range of human emotions. His reasoning skills and thought processes will make it so no human will ever have to step foot on the battlefield again. But when Des realizes his true purpose—to help destroy the Outlanders—he suspects that the real enemies might not be the people he was built to destroy, but those who created him.

Des stares at the mushroom cloud in the distance. The extreme heat threatens to melt his circuits. If he doesn’t get away soon, he will be dead like the rest of his companions. He travels onward, unable to stay behind and bury the bodies of those who had offered him friendship and a home. But his steps are not aimless. He knows there is only one group of people in all the world who could have detonated a nuclear weapon: the Mainlanders. Upon arrival to Mainland, Des finds himself engulfed in another conflict between the Mainlanders and Outlanders as he tries to discover who is responsible for killing his friends. As the mystery unravels, he learns of a new danger that threatens to destroy humanity once and for all, and it is up to Des to stop it.