In 1972, a gifted student at Berkeley writes the first computer virus. When it's run on the university mainframe it simply vanishes. Thirty-five years later, a government computer system issues ostensibly baseless assassination orders, and its creator goes in search of the ghost in the machine. What she discovers is a legacy black-ops program from the Vietnam Era that is alive and killing today. As she fights to prevent her brainchild from becoming a weapon for government-sanctioned murder, Marnie McCloud is pitted against adversaries hell-bent on wielding the machine with Machiavellian ruthlessness to achieve their political ambitions. Joined by an eclectic band of characters, she plots to bring down the system before it is used to start a war of biblical proportions, and in doing so, she becomes marked for termination by her own creation.