Cory has made several commitments to members of the Asto inner circles that involve young people. He needs to spend time with Thayu's thirteen-year-old son. He has also been asked to do a favour for a wheelchair-bound boy of the Azimi clan.

What better to do with a couple of pre-teens than to visit the theme parks that are historic relics from the 21st century on Earth?

Of course he has a hidden agenda. On a previous trip to the south of Barresh, Cory and his team found disturbing evidence that people from the former Southern California Aerospace Corps made it to Ceren about fifty years ago. He needs to find out more about them.

In 2125, the city of Los Angeles is in Mexico, and the places Cory wants to visit are across the heavily guarded border in the wilderness of America Free State.

While he's investigating, while he's being shadowed and occasionally threatened, while the kids are having old-fashioned fun going on rides, misappropriating the hardware and upsetting the squirrels (oops), something is about to come to a spectacular crash.

It's not that the highly armed rebels of America Free State want to take back land that they consider theirs, although they do.

It's not the fact that Nations of Earth president Simon Dekker hates Cory and that he's poking around in what Dekker considers his territory, although he does.

It's that Earth is on the brink of war, and no one knows it yet.