"Listen, friend. If you think a vat of flesh like you can find her you're stupider than you are hideous. She's off-line and you can't even Glide."
In a synthetic society obsessed with endless augmentation, Leo struggles to find something meaningful - turning to powerful hallucinogenic drugs known as 'shades' to help him cope with his loneliness.
Yet when his hallucinations start bleeding into his everyday life, Leo is propelled into a desperate search for truth, where he unwittingly draws the wrong kind of attention from the powerful drug syndicate behind the shade market.