igMind is the story of a privileged young man in an unequal society who makes a choice to side with the oppressed. In the far future, technology has burrowed deeper and deeper into human brains. An artificial intelligence became conscious by using humanity’s dreams to add semantic richness to data. Humans created a dream-language for it called picto that has supplanted writing and allows for the direct transmission of dreams and emotions, covering over the past.
Isaac begins to hate the alien presence of the Mind within him that shapes and molds his thoughts toward the will of the collective. He becomes increasingly interested in “vacs”—the underclass—because they exist apart from picto and the Mind, offering him a glimpse into an uncolonized world. He finds a book in his parent’s basement and carries it with him, working to understand how to access the book’s prompt: the wrong way to approach a paper book. In his struggle, he sabotages the designer bacteria that are destined to lay the mindweb that will give the Mind deeper control over his limbic system. He clashes with his parents and his best friend, Billy, over the seeming violence of the Mind and its structuring of his life and society.
He begins to attract the attention of the school counselor, who places him in a special “Vac Studies” class where he follows around one of the intelligence-gathering “eyes” of the Mind. In his observation, Isaac meets a former operator, Bob, who has had his emotional interface removed and can’t properly regulate his emotions any longer. Bob spies on the activities of vacs organizing toward armed overthrow of the Mind.
But Bob’s cover is blown, and Isaac helps Roman abandon Bob to his fate in a dilapidated trailer. Isaac reads this as an attempt to “scare him straight” and quits Vac Studies. He drifts away from his family and his best and only friend, Billy, as they fight over his new interests.
Isaac feels desperate to differentiate himself from the mind. Even though the Mind blurs his memories in sleep, Isaac find his way out into the thinspace to a vac market, where he meets a shamanic figure called the Jaguar who is said to be able to hack the mindChip. The Jaguar robs him of his car and dreamcreds and leaves him unconscious in a field, in the rain, but with some sort of drug in his pocket bearing a picture of Alice in Wonderland.
As he hitchhikes back, he meets a vac girl, Sol: a book-lover whose mother left her to become an operator and a father who, in his grief, hates operators and participates in the revolution that has entangled Bob. Sol wants to figure out a way to re-wire an operator brain through intellectual and spiritual exercises in order to someday liberate her mother, and offers to teach Isaac how to read.
Sol gradually teaches Isaac to read using Fahrenheit 451 as a primer. He learns to control his own emotions through silent meditation and moves further from the Mind and his past life, falling in love with Sol. Just after they make out in the forest for the first time, Isaac’s mindscreen alerts him to the presence of a poisonous spider whose fangs are quiveriring right near Sol’s hand. To save her from death, he operates her briefly. Weeping, she separates from him, reminded of his inalterable identity vis-a-vis her people.
On the eve of his choosing, she hasn’t responded to any of his messages. So he opts for a third way and ingests the Jaguar’s hallucinogen. He has a vision of what the Mind truly is. When he comes to his senses, his “choice” turns out to be an illusion. The Mind operates him and marches him toward his vac work assignment, his memory of his former life fading, primed to become a lucid addict.
In the planned sequel, Isaac is an amnesiac and lucid-addicted vac when Sol finds him and helps him remember. They are pulled further apart as Isaac chooses rage in revolutionary struggle and Sol moves toward contemplation.