For the comfort of the human beings about to be uploaded into the system, the virtual environment inside the BioGrid - a biological computer housed in the root network of a genetically modified forest - is designed to mimic the human world. But when the Big Pulse ends life-as-we-know-it in a flash, barely enough time is left to upload a single human personality matrix. The BioGrid is the only computer on Earth to survive the global disaster and our ability to communicate with it is lost. Over the next three hundred years, Ficus Polaris evolves in unexpected ways, the intelligence and mobile rootlets of the forest enabling it to grow vast and wild. In the scattered pockets of what is left of humanity, it is known as the Carnivorous Forest. By default, Raine Naidu has become the human template. When he finally awakens, the governing intelligence inside the BioGrid is splintered; each tree having become a distinct entity. Wars are being waged from within and without over the fate of the BioGrid; and Raine finds himself holding the destiny of a new sentient life-form it his virtual hands.