Growing up alone on a spaceship with only two hundred kids and a talking computer named Mother to keep him company, Johnny Turnbull never knew that he was any different than most people. Sure, he's the only one who can talk to Mother, but until he arrives on Orbis 1, he doesn't think that this skill is anything too strange. Soon, however, he finds out that he's the first human softwire, a being able to communicate with computers. This ability is very rare, and has never been seen in humans, not only on Orbis, but ever. Unfortunately, though, this isn't the biggest surprise in store for Johnny and his companions. No, it turns out that the children's parents were indentured servants, and now that the adults are no longer alive to do the jobs that they had been promised for, the kids will have to work twice as hard to pay off their debt, slaves to the aliens living on Orbis. It's bad enough that everyone wants to use Johnny for their own purposes, but when he discovers a virus bent on destroying the planet's computers, he's the one who is blamed for everything that goes wrong. Unless he can prove what he's seen, Johnny will become an outlaw on a foreign planet, and be lucky to escape with his life.