Dr. Michael Sterling suffers from extreme social anxiety, which he combats by using a Dot. He controls this symbiotic robot from his condo. Due to the unrest of the non-gifted side of humanity, he is forced to step out from behind his beloved Dot and into the real world. This change begins the destruction of his career, with him not being able to function in public without his anxiety overwhelming him.
His last chance to save himself and his career is cancer research, but what he finds is unexpected. The Soul. He sees it for what it is, a vital part of the body, not unlike the heart or lungs. Finding that cancer is hiding on the skin of the soul he builds Soultracer to map and block cancer from returning to the body, effectively curing cancer after it is put into a remissive state.
Fame, wealth, and fortune follow, but in a society plagued with overpopulation, starvation, and homelessness, did he do society a favor? Or did he prolong the suffering of humanity? His answer; Soulbraider.
Being gifted like her father, several years later, Dr. Sue Sterling works as a champion of the Soulbraider project to "braid" the souls of the dying to the souls of the living to preserve a soul line. What she finds is that the secret purpose of Soulbraider. Population control. Her father explains that a soul isn't generated at birth, it arrives. Soulbraiding creates miscarriages and stillbirths in the future, thus reducing the population. At first, she is horrified, but eventually, brought to the understanding that this is the most humane way to slow the birthrate.
Fully consumed with guilt and curiosity, she begins her monstrous experiments where she disproves her father’s theory. Souls move backward in time, not forward. She embarks on a journey to rebuild Soulbraider to attach the soul to the one body part it never connected to, the mind. With this Sue sets in motion her first step into following her soul into the past so she can try to fix overpopulation before it begins.
Her two twin teenagers discover what is happening and destroy Sue's version of the Soulbraider, but not before they are both braided and forever entangled to the fate of the Soul’s passage backward.