When Dr Alex Oslac is tasked with archiving the Herabridge school history to celebrate its 500th anniversary, she encounters a past master of the school who died in World War 1. From that moment she is haunted by dreams of past lives in his company throughout history. Worse, when she looks up the details of those dreams she finds them all to be true. Is she going mad, or is there something else going on? Something so huge she couldn’t possibly get her head around it… Until after she dies.
Alex and Daniel have moved on to new adventures, supported by Almega and the ubiquitous Omskep. In Anqueria, where the worlds of the imagination can be made real, anything is possible -- dragons, hyper-intelligent rodents, ghosts, robots on the rampage -- but at least they're finally home... aren't they?
Without Almega to help them, in an entirely new world and with powers greater than ever before, Alex (Oslac) and Daniel (Eridar) face the future. They have a few remaining problems to solve, a universe to create containing a uniquely gifted species, and one final mystery to address, but as Oslac's powers leave her, she fears mortality is not just for those at the lowest level.
The adventures of Daniel and Alex continue, but this time we are with them in one of their trainings. Gorthan is still in charge of Crada (The Anquerian Alternative) and Darthyn is one of his most respected dragons. Together with the humans who now live on Mithgryr, it’s time to explore the rest of their world. All is not well on Crada, however. Some dragons don’t care for the humans and want them gone, by any means possible. All they need to succeed is for Darthyn not to return from his trip.
The Siphians are a telepathic rodent species who solve problems for the universe (first introduced in The Anquerian Alternative), but when the problem is on their own doorstep, things get a lot more complicated. When one of their own is captured by an insect queen who sees them as dinner, the Collective pulls out all the stops to remove the invader.
Meanwhile, lurking in the forest, the giant sikets weave their webs and watch with interest. Whoever wins, someone's on the menu.
On Saros, the last Ygaran outpost before the massive energy field known as The Deyar blocks the way, Zhirini is caught in the shelters under her bombed city. A senior grade medic, accidentally left behind when the Anarxgy forces broke through the defence perimeter, she thinks she's going to have to struggle on alone until she succumbs to the inevitable. That is until enterprising Defence Coordinator and rogue genius Beyok stumbles across her. He's not willing to give in so easily. He's got an idea. They're going to steal an Anarxgy ship and escape to Ygaran space. Problem is, the Anarxgy are on their tail and The Deyar is in their way.
On the mining planet of Omneminer, where corporate power is everything and pollution has driven all but the poorest humans and aliens to live inside or underground, Karia Kanarvan has just been promoted to Detective Inspector. Called out to a routine industrial accident, a chance encounter reveals that more is going on than meets the eye, leading to a web of intrigue that goes right to the top.
Karia has a secret that she must maintain at all costs, which makes the attentions of investigative journalist David Hatcher somewhat concerning. Even more so when she discovers that he is the son of Philip Gurdan, head of one of the five corporations that runs Omneminer.
Thanks to an accident, Alex finds herself within the computer, Omskep, but without an avatar. She has no means of escape until everything in the prime universe is dead, trillions of years in the future. With Almega guiding the crossovers, Alex jumps from universe to universe across the millennia, while Daniel acts as her aid and her only contact with Almega and the way home.
The problem is that this time neither she nor Daniel can choose where they go, and the darker side of the multiverse is sometimes revealed.
The Djaroubi are an adventurous, resourceful, mammalian species who live a simple life, concerned only with raising their cubs, catching their food, staying warm in the winter, and making the most of their lives. They are totally unprepared for the arrival of the Parchti – an advanced species from the planet Narzhin – who realise that the unusual structure of Djaroubi brains would make them the ideal central processors in Parchti robots (Daribots) provided they don't remember who and what they are.
Waking up on a spaceship headed to the Parchti home world as nothing more than a brain in a box but with his memory intact, Herrass is determined to start a revolution and end the carnage before all the Djaroubi are obliterated. First, though, he needs to find his partner, Gilesh, and that won't be easy because all Daribots look alike, and there are thousands of them on Narzhin.
In the 22nd century, Dr Abigail Darius is a physicist investigating the possibility of membrane universes. When her funding is cut off, her husband, Dr Mike Fitzroy, finds a way to allow her to continue her investigations using a DIY rig in their basement. She finds the universes, but everything changes when someone replies to her message.
The humans on the other Earth are mere shadows, waiting to die, and the suggestion is made that people from our Earth move over there to replace them. But how? Is it safe? What about the people already there? How do you decide who would make good candidates to start again on another world?