When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself.

While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self, knowing everything he'd known at 80 and gives him access to advanced equations of space and time.

But living life over knowing the future isn't as easy as Cager has anticipated. His every action alters the future he remembers until much of what he remembers never happened at all. And those changes work against him at every turn, preventing him correcting the most serious mistake of his life. Now he must use his advanced mathematical ability to build his own time machine to go back and try again. But he needs a fortune even to begin.

Then he receives help from a strange young woman with no history. While perfecting time travel, Cager and his new partner overcome enormous problems, even being hunted by dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. After that, though, things get really bizarre.