A thriller on afterlife, featuring a Los Angeles crime reporter. Visiting the graves of his family, killed in a plane crash, Joe Carpenter sees men attack a woman taking pictures. It turns out the camera captures images of afterlife from the graves, a hush-hush scientific breakthrough over which people are fighting.

Bean's past was a battle just to survive. He first appeared on the streets of Rotterdam, a tiny child with a mind leagues beyond anyone else's. He knew he could not survive through strength; he used his tactical genius to gain acceptance into a children's gang and then to help make that gang a template for success for all the others. He civilized them, and lived to grow older. Then he was discovered by the recruiters for the Battle School." "For Earth...