John Matthews is a janitor in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  He talks to his wife, Kristen, as he drives to work.  He is exhausted and weary from his difficult and long days and the two discuss their economic and other systemic troubles.  John never sees Tara, a security guard with her own struggles, when she loses control of her car and barrels into him on the Scranton highway.

John wakes up into a foreign world where a guide named Sophia shows him a new and different society.  This world is called Amoena Vieta and Sophia shows him a vivid and exciting new societal structure there. It has re-imagined language, government, basic rights, transportation, religion, economics, education, the legal system, media, taxes, and other societal systems and institutions.  All of the institutions and systems described eliminate or largely mitigate the constant social problems that exist in his world.
As John hears, sees, and learns these things, his life continues to hang in the balance