When Christopher Knowles awakens in a hospital to discover that his body has been crushed in an accident, his surgeon, Dr. Benjamin Mannstein explains that without all of the life-support systems, he’s as good as dead. Mannstein’s colleague, Kevin Gertz, has been experimenting with a micro-chip device he’s invented at Johns Hopkins. It’s called the Gertz Router and it enables a surgeon to sever the spinal cord of one patient and patch it electronically to the brain stem of a different patient. The router shows promise but the donor they find is a brain-dead teenage...girl. The surgery, while successful, is just the beginning of their problems.