Ominous booming sounds have shaken the Carolina coast for over a hundred years. Sent to investigate their growing frequency and strength, journalist Silas Tharpe finds his estranged wife Donna slipping away with the mysterious Payne, the Security Chief for an operation known only as The Colony. Silas finds help from an unlikely pair of allies: the retired mathematician Gus and his roommate Jules, a Cajun sailor who allegedly died in WWII. With their help, he crosses a Gateway to Pristine, an Earth where humans never evolved. Faced with a growing rebellion from the Colony's downtrodden labor force, Payne and the Colony will do whatever it takes to retain their rule of this untouched world and all the resources it holds, even if it means killing Silas and the rebels, and destroying Silas' Earth.