What is it like to have absolute power? You'd be Superman, right? Righting wrongs, making people happy, bringing peace and justice to the world? That's what Washington, D.C., computer programmer Rob Lewis thinks when he wakes up one morning to discover that he can read minds - and change them. He can cure steam-grate crazies and make law-abiding citizens out of criminals. But he can't control his own darker side. Terrified that he will destroy the way of life he so cherishes, he runs away from his wife and his family and his comfortable suburban home to the streets of New York City. Now a homeless derelict, he survives by his power alone, isolated from other human beings and his own humanity, a moral and physical wreck. But just as he hits bottom, he meets Dr. Edwin Amadeus Barbarossa, a cheerful neurobiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. Together they set out on an exciting and painful quest for a desert in Uzbekistan, where at last Rob finds the answer to all the questions that have been tormenting him: What am I? Am I a god or a monster? Who has done this to me?