One thousand years after the nanite bombs murdered most of the Earth's population, Laura awakens from her cryopod in a museum in what used to be Aberdeen, Washington, in a society of apparent pacifists with, aside from various robots, is some somewhere technologically in twentieth century.

Here is the Greenlands, a land of citizens in green and politicians in gold, where violence is illegal, aggressive emotions are immoral, and all acts of violence are carried out through robots, where the elites, the members of the upper class who also make up the politicians, rule the others with greater privileges and wealth. They alone are able to purchase superior robots that allow them to defeat every conflict and have every advantage and with no physical reprisals possible, they have every incentive to press their advantages upon those below. Clearly, the terrible regime of the old world that Laura had come from was long gone, but now she had to deal with this one.

To Laura, these people appear as though children, most especially the elites who have no sense of personal discipline or even the ability to handle pain. She learns quickly enough that any outsider, including herself, even unarmed and without really trying, could easily overpower any group of them since they are unwilling and incapable of fighting back. Before a kindly museum patron named Matthew, who was there when she awoke and becomes her closest friend there, takes her to a doctor to help her remove the bio-blocker that prevents her from taking out her suit of bionic augmentation armor with its built-in weapons and tools and her fly-shaped bionic android named Dylan from their dormant molecules in her body, she learns even more of their unwillingness toward violence when she is taken out with all the other young, non-elite, non-politician females to satisfy a group of murderous, sadistic raiders from outside who have invaded Washington.

In an act of self-defense and the defense of others, Laura fights back against the raiders, and this unnerves the society and the raiders themselves, who were very used to easy victories. When the doctor finally takes off the blocker that allows her bionics and bionic android out of her body, she discovers that her pod might be the only one in Washington but there are tens of thousands more, mostly in France, and that is where she is determined to go, to find her love from before, Justin, and all her lost friends, but escaping the Greenlands is not as easy as it sounds. Her actions have caused a great schism in the society, making the young, especially the females who were forced to submit to depravities before she came along, question the pacifism that the society preaches as its ultimate virtue.

They do not wish to allow her to leave and it would seem that Laura could leave against their wishes but the longer she is there, the more she realizes things are not what they seem, and that if she does not step carefully, the raiders might be the least of her problems. The authorities of the Greenlands are angry with her and they might not be quite as pacifistic as they claim.