Book excerpt: A young man is having an identity crisis while working as the head of the Investigations Department for the Los Angeles bioengineering firm Engineering Genetics Organizations and Systems. A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, EGOS has developed and produced a groundbreaking technology in the form of a consumer product called, oddly enough, Egos. This product allows customers to become a fictional character or a dead celebrity for six to eight hours by injecting a DNA-laced cocktail into their brain stem, revolutionizing the concept of role-playing games. When a colleague stumbles upon an anomaly in a group of Egos that the unnamed protagonist has been injecting regularly for the past three years, the brass at EGOS waves it off as nothing to be worried about--except he is exhibiting behaviors that are in line with the reported anomaly. The truth is, he's started to lose the ability to separate fact from fiction. The more he continues to play the role of someone else, the less of him remains, as the lines of reality and fantasy continue to blur.