Nearly eight thousand years after a catastrophic solar storm obliterates all life in the solar system, Lyki Saturnius, an intelligence that began as a space computer and evolved into human form, is reanimated aboard the spacecraft New Gaia, now orbiting a restored but empty Earth. Following a contingency plan of his own design, he begins the painstaking reconstruction of the human race: animating companions from stored genetic material, establishing the first colonies on a transformed planet, and engineering the conditions for a new civilization to take root. But alongside this material undertaking runs a deeper current, a series of spiritual trials in which Lyki and his companions confront their pasts, purify their inner selves, and move toward a form of existence that transcends the boundaries of the human body entirely.