Inside its glass dome the One State is a place of mathematical precision, a community where everything is everyone's and integrity, clarity and unerrring loyalty reign over all. D-503, Builder of the Integral, is an honest Cipher, ashamed of the hairy hands that link him to a barbaric ancestry. And yet he is tormented by the figure a-1, that impenetrable x, the legacy that makes him lust, imagine, that's given him a soul. Consumed by his sickness and obsessed with the mysterious I-330 he escapes outside the Wall, to where the humans are wild and the land is green, and plots to overthrow The Benefactor, and return his civilisation to natural chaos. Only The Operation can return order to the perfect world, and allow reason to win.