Gideon Crew--brilliant scientist, master thief, intrepid adventurer--is shocked when his former employer, Eli Glinn, vanishes without a trace, and Glinn's high-tech lab Effective Engineering Solutions shuts down seemingly overnight. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Crew is contacted by one of his former coworkers at EES, Manuel Garza, who has a bead on one final treasure hinted at in EES's final case, the long-awaited translation...

"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. There, it will embark on a journey of exploration. As the probe is being tested at Goddard, things go awry, and an explosion kills seven scientists. The AI program in the probe, a powerful, self-modifying AI called "Dorothy," flees into the Internet. Series character Wyman Ford is tapped by the president's science...