When young Black computer engineer Cory Sergeant agrees to test a time-travel simulation, she intends to visit the day of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Instead she finds herself trapped in an extremely detailed simulation of an 1860 Alabama cotton plantation.
She must playact the part of her avatar, a newly arrived white male tutor, in order to survive while trying to find a way out of the sim, which feels all too real. But slavery horrifies her, and she struggles to secretly better the slaves’ lives without bringing catastrophe down on herself and every person on the plantation. As she becomes part of her employer’s household she is tormented by her moral convictions and the knowledge she has of the coming Civil War.
A beautiful slave woman is murdered and Cory must find the murderer, or escaped the sim before the killer turns on her. And will she ever find a way back to her twentieth-century life, her fiancé, and her career?