The novel takes place approximately 30 years after the end of Spin. The membrane surrounding the Earth has disappeared, and people are actively populating the oil-rich planet, named after its main continent, Equatoria. You can get to Equatoria by taking a ship on a sea voyage through a giant arch built in the Indian Ocean by the Hypothetics. In one of the oceans of Equatoria there is the same arch through which you can get to another planet, and so on in a chain, but each new world is more and more hostile to people. The book begins with a series of mysterious events in Equatoria - a storm of glowing ash sweeps over the planet, earthquakes occur in the oil-bearing region of Rub Al Khali, although geologists say that this is impossible. At the same time, the remains of nanomachines are visible in the ash falling to the ground, and sometimes living organisms are born in it. The scientist's daughter, journalist Lisa Adams, finds herself drawn into these mysterious events as she investigates the mysterious disappearance of her father. Maybe he became the “fourth”, that is, he underwent illegal Martian life-extension treatment and is now hiding from the Department of Genomic Security, which is hunting for such people (the Mars terraforming project was a success, and now the Martians are far ahead of earthlings in biotechnology). The pilot Turk Findlay is involved in the search for Lyse. Together they contact their father’s Martian friend Sulean Moi, thanks to whom they, in turn, meet the main character of our story, a twelve-year-old boy named Isaac, who was specially created by a group of renegade scientists to communicate with the Hypothetics. The latest mysterious events on the planet coincided with the appearance of a number of unusual abilities in Isaac.