The novel opens in the early spring of 2101, 50 years after civilization collapsed from runaway climatic warming and stubborn unwillingness on the part of the ruling political powers to consider anything more reasonable than a collective orgy of murder/suicide. An electronic demigod residing on a Pacific Northwest mountaintop is visited by several members of a nearby clan of surviving Homo sapiens, who tell it the tale of their recent journey to the scene of the final battle to the death of nearly all of the last 30 million people on the North American continent. Artifacts just retrieved from Sacramento might very well solve the demigod's puzzling ignorance of the story behind its own abrupt awakening while crashlanding on Marys Peak in 2055. The A.I. demands to hear the full story of an 84-year-old human's involvement in the final battle of the dying civilization in northern California. This story turns out to be far more complex and involved than the A.I. had previously realized, including a significant risk that reanimating the Supreme Commanding War Machine A.I. might lead to the demise of all remaining sentient entities on the planet, both biological and electronic. The details of the battle to the death of the four main factions struggling to survive the ongoing climatic disaster, the dwindling options for growing food, the collapsing infrastructure of economic production, and the hardening of attitudes toward each of the other factions included enough brief flowerings of hope, courage, sacrifice, and decency that the several dozen demigods around the world all decide to risk their own lives and sanity by repairing, rejuvenating, and reanimating the long-dormant A.I. who may very well be their own direct ancestor. The demigods were joined in this decision by the ~10,000 surviving members of Homo sapiens and similar numbers of their GMO cousins, the Homo perfecti. All surviving parties to the story insist on hearing and preserving the Honest Obituary of the civilization that perished so brutally, so stupidly, and so apparently quite unavoidably, all the while laying seeds of what may yet be a better future.

The author was born in the waning days of Harry S. Truman's presidency, raised on a family farm in southern Minnesota, and profoundly scarred by the Cold War's nightmares. He authored a wide variety of scientific and technical articles on various aspects of crop production during his 43-year-long career as an agricultural research scientist. His retirement from the USDA-ARS in 2019 provided him with additional time to pursue hobbies of great personal interest, including reading, gardening, hiking, plant breeding, computer programming, earning contract bridge Master Points, and doing all sorts of things with his grandchildren. Previous efforts to write science fiction stories stalled out in their first few pages, but not this one! He currently lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with his wife and their three demanding pets: a double yellow headed Amazon parrot, a young orange cat, and an even younger Wheaten Cairn Terrier puppy.