In Chip's time, all people are genetically engineered to look the same, everyone has one of four names, everybody has sex programmed weekly, and everybody is efficiently killed at 62. Everybody on Earth is member of one great big family. Then the hero of the book, Chip, finds a small note rolled up in his pocket: "You seem to be a fairly unusual member. [...] Think about it. You are only partly alive." Shortly after, he finds himself joining a group of renegades that tries to break away of the new, computer-controlled utopia.