Zero Cool--real name Dade Murphy--is a legend among his peers. In 1988, he single-handedly crashed 1,507 computers on Wall Street, creating worldwide financial chaos. Eleven years old, Dade Murphy had a record with the F.B.I.--forbidden to finger the keys of so much as a touchtone phone until his 18th birthday. It's been seven years without a byte... and he's hungry. Kate Libby, handle Acid Burn, has a souped-up laptop that can do 0 to 60 on the infobahn in a nanosecond. When Zero Cool collides with Acid Burn, the battle of the sexes goes into hard drive. But all bets are off when they must pool their resources to battle The Plague, a master hacker employed by a corporate giant and using his considerable talents to worm his way into millions. Worse yet, he has hidden his own scheme by framing Dade, Kate and their friends in a diabolical industrial conspiracy. The young band of renegade hackers sets out to recruit the best of the cybernet underground to clear their names.