Nigel Seven is a Conscripted Organism Gear or COG serving the Technocratic Aristocracy as one of its lowest ranking members. But when his frontal lobe implant that stymied Nigel all his life malfunctioned Nigel Seven awakened and rejected his station in life and sought to escape. The living machines discover him out of place but decide it is easier to give him a new station in life than try to sort him out and return him to where he came from. Thus Nigel Seven is elevated in social rank but after marrying an aristocrat he is elevated to the highest rank in the Technocratic Aristocracy. The Living Android Superior Technocrat assigns Nigel Seven a job overseeing a superstructure full of COGs telling Nigel he is to see to it none of them ever manages to achieve what he has. But Nigel Seven has his own ideas what the final fate of the COGs and the other lower ranking members of the Technocratic Aristocracy shall be.