Cecil is an eleven-year-old boy living in New York City whose mother constantly confuses him with his college-age brother. He has friends at school, but none of them seem to understand his fascination with old scientifically-minded manuscripts, like Newton's Principia Mathematica and Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Tyler Rose is a thirty-something anthropologist's assistant. Since his girlfriend died in 9/11, he has bounced from job to job, never moving up the ladder and never leaving New York City. On the surface, nothing connects the two, until a ten-thousand-year-old human is discovered frozen in time in a glacier in the Alps. Rose and his colleagues work on the iceman for a few days, chipping away at the ice, when the iceman suddenly awakes from his state of suspended animation and escapes into New York City. Rose is given the order to find and contain the iceman within three days, but Cecil will do his best to keep the iceman out of the clutches of the lab.