Science fiction and dark fantasy combine in an ominous, glistening dystopian tale about the perpetual war between two futuristic nations: West Gotha and East Gotha. Tedda, a West Gotha citizen, has committed a terrible crime that she cannot even remember--because her memories of the crime and of the love affair that led to it have been selectively wiped clean. Did she have an affair with the handsome East Gotha spy, Captain Alton Hedrock? She may have been a great mathematician for the fatherland, but she cannot recall that, either. Now a prisoner of the state, Tedda labors at a strange university where work is being done on advanced intereality travel and femtoverses: worlds shrunken to infinitesimally tiny size. She befriends an eccentric group of young computer scientists with whom she plays a popular board game called Monorail. The group has secretly constructed a private 'pocket universe' based on Monorail. Tedda and her friends descend into this femtoworld to play the game among its citizens, to buy and sell rail lines, stations, and downtown property--but end up in a bloody war of espionage and double-cross in which worlds are at stake. Here she meets Edgar, a rule--a fully human inhabitant of this tiny world, with intriguing links to her own world and past life. Some of the rules down here become her allies. Other rules are creations of the two warring states, sent to spy on her and battle each other. A gripping tour de force, crammed with fresh ideas, from the author of Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D. and Nebula Express. This novel will remind readers of George Orwell's 1984 or Franz Kafka's The Trial, and of movies like Brazil or Dark City.