""Welcome to the game, ...."" Sydney Bloom, a loner VR hobbyist, stumbles on a whole new dimension of VR when she inadvertently discovers that she can ""pull"" anyone into VR with her via the phone lines. When she innocently uses it on a man she is dating, she learns, to her horror, that he's a serial rapist/killer. To complicate matters, her inquiries into VR have brought her to the attention of a super-secret intelligence operation called ""the Committee"". Her life is changed forever by the words""Welcome to the game, Sydney Bloom ....""
On her first VR assignment for The Committee, Sydney must find an unhappy and spiteful teenage genius - who after making a momentous discovery has run away from the top secret weapons research establishment where he worked - before he can do any harm. During her search, Sydney must try to deal with her own sense of solitude.
Sydney investiagtes the mind of Janine, a cashier at her workplace whom she discovers is stealing. Sydney herself gets pulled into the excitements and thrills of these criminal activities.
Sydney is assigned to to subconsciously prod Jackson Boothe, a troubled employee of the Committee, into returning to work. In doing so, Sydney discovers that Booth is an assassin, and he murders Sydney's Committee contact, Dr. Frank Morgan.
Oliver Sampson becomes Sydney's new contact for the Committee, and he pushes her into trying to trace who hired Boothe. Sydney discovers that Dr. Morgan's corpse has been cryogenically preserved.
Sydney is kidnapped by a faction of the Committee who brutally question her to discover her secret. She manages to contact Duncan for help, and he enters into VR in search of her. Oliver is somehow in possession of the journal of Sydney's father, but is he on Sydney's side?
Oliver instructs Sydney to make a VR link to a test pilot in a psychiatric hospital. The pilot keeps seing fire and hates his father. Sydney enters the hospital disguised as a patient, and plants false memories of child abuse into the pilot's sub-conscious. These memories may, however, may or may not be Sydney's own. Also, Sydney franatically tries to decipher her father's journal and discovers that he was a member of the Committee.
Sydney enters VR to probe the mind of a self-confessed traitor scheduled for execution, to find out why he did it. She discovers he was being blackmailed by people who held his son hostage, and in the process, Syndey must come to terms with her anger towards her own father. The bank is foreclosing on Sydney's childhood home and she asks the Committee for money to save it.
Sydney decides to take a holiday from her work at the Committee and returns to her childhood home in Pasadena. The previous inhabitants claims the house is possessed by demons, while his daughter insists an angel saved her life during a fire. As Sydney explores the house, she gradually remembers bits and pieces from her past, and also discovers a secret room where her father conducted his early VR experiments.
When an armed man takes hostages in an air traffic control tower, Sydney is ordered to establish a VR link. In the process, she discovers a cover-up over the reason for a crash several years earlier: the crash was actually caused by a bomb planted by the Committee in an attempt to assassinate Oliver.
An increasingly careless and disillusioned Oliver assigns Sydney to an unknown contact. This contact turns out to Oliver's former lover, Alex, who may know the whereabouts of Sydney's father.
Duncan wakes up one morning to discover that he is a wealthy and successful artist, and that it was Samantha - not Sydney - who survived the car crash as a child. Everything is turned upside down and the lives of all the characters are quite different. It all turns out to be VR scenario orchestrated by the very much alive Dr. Bloom to test Duncan's loyalty.
Sydney and her sister Samantha are reunited and, along with Duncan, they into VR5 to discover what really happened the night of the car crash. It turns out there was no car crash: Sydney's memories were altered by her father to protect her from the Committee. A faction of the Committee is after Sydney; Oliver is assigned to murder Sydney but rebels. Sydney goes into VR7 to rescue her mother from her coma.
