When Dr. Jim Dutton is forced to accept the fact that the bonobo ape he and his family have been raising and have come to love is, in fact, an augmented ape, engineered by the corporation he works for, his investigation takes him to a SAC facility in Africa with "a covert genetics lab, a missing band of blue-eyed apes, crude buildings decorated with skulls, and, deep in the shadows, human corpses savagely hacked to pieces.