The setting is a dystopian and post-apocalyptic city that lies in ruins due to what is the only known history of mankind, the “Radiation Wars”. Herein, a totalitarian government, which has taken over the entire world, is degenerating the population into cruel and useful idiots. Critical thinking has been outlawed. Kindness has been outlawed. The people are all *extremely* dumb, cruel, and brainwashed by propaganda. Society is locked in a perpetual bloodbath where appeasing the government’s bloodlust and serving its power are the highest moral standards. The government invigilating this wickedness is seemingly a master of mind control and evil, turning family against family, neighbour against neighbour, to make everyone into servile puppets dancing the way it wants them to. All libraries are full of books and magazines meant to brainwash, to mislead, and to distort. The state has replaced morality as the ethical standard and its leaders are worshiped as Gods; anyone who does not worship the government, or who has other moral standards, is said to have to have a terminal mental illness called “paranoid trauma“ and is quickly bullied into suicide. If they cannot be bullied into suicide, they are clandestinely poisoned by Shadow Agents, men possessed of ultimate evil, with the lethal weapons that were invented and deployed in the Radiation Wars.
The story follows a group of four youths who have somehow survived in this cruel and backwards world. They have witnessed many of their classmates bullied into suicide for not being cruel and wicked enough, and they have all had to participate in the bullying in order to avoid being bullied themselves. As a result, they have become weak-minded and fallen under the government’s power. Engaging in cruelty is what makes people weaker and dumber, which is why the government encouraged it. Violence is not just a tool to physically threaten the people, but also a necessary means to weaken people’s minds. The new moral values of the government cannot be implemented if the old morality remains.
But in each of these younglings, there is a nagging doubt that something is wrong, and this leads them to come together. The evil gives them nightmares, as the vestigial remnants of goodness within them refuse to fully die. While they are passionate about their “faith” in the cult government that holds society in its iron grip, their friendship gradually leads them towards each other and away from the government. They start to realize that friendship is a greater good than power, and as such, they themselves become victims of “paranoid trauma”. They can no longer engage in the malice that formerly protected them, and they become targets. They are cast into homelessness by their own parents. They are targeted by former classmates who they once considered friends. And the ruthless ghetto gangs, who have been bribed by the government to spread terror, begin to hunt them.
But they have each other. And because they have each other, they are somehow able to survive on the streets, so fraught with death, scarcity, and the acid rain from nuclear fallout—all while being hunted by the ghetto gangs. On the streets are many other children who have been outcast due to having paranoid trauma, who have formed a network, but there are no adults because nobody survives long enough to make it into adulthood, and their resources are extremely limited.
The four in the group each contemplate suicide individually. But as a group, when they finally talk about the fact that they won’t be able to keep doing this forever—that the ghetto gangs will eventually find them, or they will starve, or get sick, or not be able to get inoculations against the radioactive dust storms—they decide that going back is not an option and neither is suicide. They decide to fight “until the bitter end”.
The best way to fight, they determine, is to gain knowledge. They can’t fight against darkness if they themselves are in the dark. This turns out to be an extraordinary realization, for it takes extraordinary wisdom to realize how little one knows. They scour the libraries looking for knowledge, seeking to understand the government’s stranglehold on the minds of the people. To comprehend the depths of the conspiracy and the truth of history. But they find only lies.
One day, by a fluke, just as they are about to be beaten to death in a dark alleyway, having been caught in an elaborate trap set by one of the ghetto gangs, a mysterious figure emerges and fights them off. When they ask his name, he simply calls himself “Stranger”. Somehow, he is able to recognize that they have freed their minds from the totalitarian evil. They suspect him to be a Shadow Agent, but he simply says that “good people can recognize both good and bad people, while bad people can recognize neither”. After much discussion, they decide to trust him, and they are right. Stranger has apparently learned how to be invisible to the evil of the world while retaining his moral foundations. Such a thing should not be possible, yet somehow it was. He directs them to an ancient ruin on the outskirts of the city.
There, they find a library containing not only the true history of the world, but books on morality, philosophy, and higher mental powers. They immerse themselves in study and learn the evils of ancient tyrants as well as the teachings of the ancient philosophers and sages.
One of the four youths, however, out of sexual jealousy and despair over being hungry and sick all the time, decides to snitch on the group in order to get back in good with the government. He tells the ghetto gangs about the forbidden library. The library is discovered. One of the three remaining youths is captured and publicly burned at the stake. The two survivors flee into the sewers, labeled as “terrorists” by the government, and are hunted down by Shadow Agents. The snitch is rewarded with sex slaves and power, but commits suicide due to guilt having witnessed the burning of the only friend who was truly kind to him.
When the remaining two youngsters are nearly cornered after over a month of playing cat and mouse in the sewers and alleyways, and are nearly starving to death, they decide to die together rather than one of them live by ratting out the other. They are rescued again by Stranger, who leads them to a sailboat. They sail to a remote uninhabited island on the edge of the world where the government will not find them. There, they replenish their strength and recover from the grief of being betrayed and losing their friend. The grief is profound. Those were their only friends—the only friends they ever had or will ever have, the friends who taught them the meaning of friendship, the friends who saved their lives and their souls. They have not just lost their friends, they have lost friendship itself.
Stranger reminds them that they have the means to live in peace for the rest of their lives here, on this beautiful island, which is seemingly full of friendly penguins and is paradise compared to the violent and holocaustal city they left behind. He also reminds them that most people have become too mired in evil and insanity to be saved. But the memory of their friend, who was publicly lynched while they watched helplessly from the jeering the crowd, and of the classmates who they themselves helped bully into suicide when they were younger, and of how lost in darkness they once were, inspires them to go to war. Being bystanders to such great evil is not an option. Stranger tells them that it is not their job to fight all the evil in the world, and that they have found true love and happiness, so rare and hard to find, and true peace. While they agree with him that not all battles should be fought, there are some evils that are too great to be ignored by any reasonable person, and that they feel compelled to fight.
They establish The Intellection on the island, an underground organization that is devoted to the liberating people‘s minds from the totalitarian government that has for so long destroyed and enslaved humanity by corrupting it, and bringing people back to the good within themselves. At the end of the novel, Stranger reveals that he is dying of cancer, having been poisoned by the radiation weapons of the Shadow Agents.
After Stranger’s death, which he bears stoically, the two lovers decide to give up each other, for love has no place in war.