Front du Pacifique, 1944. Pour sauver leur tresor de guerre, les Japonais n'ont qu'un seul atout: un secret nomme Golgotha. Au meme moment, au large des Philippines, un etrange sous-marin allemand emporte les codes de guerre des nazis. Soixante ans plus tard, ces mysteres vont voler en eclats. La conclusion brillante d'un roman-jeu de piste deja culte, ou le techno-thriller rencontre les sciences exactes.
Do you dream of a city at the end of time? In a time like the present, on a world that may or may not be our own, three young people-Ginny, Jack, and Daniel-dream of a fabulous, decadent city in the distant future: the Kalpa. The dreams of Ginny and Jack overtake them without warning, leaving their bodies behind while carrying their consciousnesses forward, into the minds of two inhabitants of the Kalpa-a would-be warrior, Jebrassy, and an inquisitive explorer, Tiadba-who have been genetically retroengineered to possess qualities of ancient humanity. In turn, the dreams of Tiadba and Jebrassy carry them back, into the minds of Jack and Ginny. As for Daniel: he dreams of an empty darkness--all his future holds. But more than dreams link Ginny, Jack, and Daniel. They are fate-shifters, born with the ability to skip like stones across the surface of the fifth dimension, inhabiting alternate versions of themselves. And they are each guardians of an object whose origins and purpose are unknown, a gnarled, stony artifact called a sum-runner that persists unchanged through all versions of time. They can save the future, but they are being hunted down.
En 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, genio matemático y capitán de la marina estadounidense, colabora con Alan Mathison Turing y los especialistas británicos de Betchely Park en el trabajo de descifrar los códigos secretos de las potencias del Eje. Sesenta años más tarde, la empresa de su nieto y también brillante cripto-hacker, Randy Lawrence Waterhouse, proyecta crear un nuevo paraíso de datos y el mayor exponente de la libertad informática: la Cripta.