The time is the near future, a few years out. Every state has an active secessionist group. Walker Beale, marketing executive at computer games company Xynapse, faces the outsourcing of the company's core—the Games Division, including his best friend. Violence, factional and random, is droning from the media. Walker, known by his friends to be a little off center, feels it all howling through him like a wild wind.Under the Nevada night sky he receives a vision. He will leave Xynapse and build out a space—a circular wall bejeweled with mica and glass and shards of mirror from the old MGM Grand, a circle of power for eight hundred cars, a classic drive-in theater—and with it, a rescue of a time.Walker puts everyone dearest to him in jeopardy and sets a collision course with the forces of his time. As darkness falls and the white fusillade of light hits the screen of the Ring of Stars, the country is speeding away from him into civil war.