Built in the wake of W3, the Wind and Water War, the Trintico Corporate Society was established by the great leader Merwin Burgess and engineered by the brilliant Michael Faraday to conform to the sanctions of the Global Power Authority. Within the three separate, sovereign and interdependent city-states of Trintico, the people were protected from the horrors of the post-petroleum wastelands that surrounded them. They worked hard to maintain their way of life. through natural selection of values and habits, they developed a social machine that became a self-imposed dystopia. Polarized and unsustainable, the machine has now encountered two young people who will oppose its construction and operation because it opposes them. Shevi and Jackson will resist the will of the Social Machine until they overcome it or it destroys them.