Human civilization has been devastated by a mysterious wind that has erased everyone's memories. Their minds wiped clean, the survivors haunt the ruined cities, scavenging for food. Wateru, whose mind was laboriously restored by a survivor at a government research facility, wanders through America in a jeep, trying to bring knowledge to the people. In San Francisco, he meets Sophia, a mysterious woman with unexplained powers; she joins him on a journey to New York that turns into a transcontinental escape from a murderous and seemingly indestructible robot. Along the way, they encounter the members of a cult that worships an enormous wrecking machine, and two puppetlike survivors in an fully mechanized city. Wateru struggles to fulfill his mission to start people on the long journey back to civilization and he often has to rely on Sophia's extraordinary powers of communication.