Thorn thinks he's a cop keeping thoughts legal in his city. But when he messes up his elevator ride to heaven, which is actually supposed to kill him and recycle him as food, he finds out he's just one clone out of millions in research labs in a prison in the asteroid belt. For revenge, he helps the elderly lab workers who want eternal life, as they think their scientist bosses have cloned it and their labor union has negotiated it for them. Thorn falls in love with a young hippie woman who is too often only a hologram when he wishes she was flesh, and adopts a son whose psycho killer father is a clone of himself. Many other problems erupt. Memory can be dubbed from clone to clone but is that all that makes us who we are? Mutated monsters created by rebels attack from lakes, caves and elevator shafts. Realizing their computers are going to be cannibalized, the cars go on a murderous offensive. Sabotage from the ideological anarchist children of the union workers put the asteroid and its worker's city in danger of destruction. The entire planet Earth might already be doomed from subsequent contamination.