Bywater's native Seminole Indians believe the swamp will be bloodily revenged by its guardian spirit, a 'dark warrior', for its 'rape' by Frederic and son Jake Schist's oil-drilling, sold out by their own late chief Ted Sallis. The rig is illegally protested against by hot-head ecologists, who get blamed for vandalism on the site. New, outsider sheriff Kyle Williams suspects immediately local adolescent Billy James wasn't eaten during love-making there by a cayman but by a mysterious monster, which already made and soon makes new bloody victims in weird, inconsistent ways. Several people add to the danger.

A renegade doctor is shot dead and entombed with his fiendish experiments in the basement of an abandoned wing of a mental hospital...

The Law Enforcement Technology Advancement Centre (LETAC) has developed SID version 6.7: a Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous virtual reality entity which is synthesized from the personalities of more than 150 serial killers. LETAC would like to train police officers by putting them in VR with SID, but they must prove the concept by using prisoners as test subjects. One such prisoner is ex-cop Parker Barnes. When SID manages to inject his personality into a nano-machine android, it appears that Barnes might be the only one who can stop him.