Meet the happiest, smartest, and sweetest kid of them all! He'd gladly bicycle across town to give you his last nickel if it might help you to that extra scoop of ice cream. But as much as he cares about you, me, and well, just about everybody, his love for his mom is what puts the true twinkle in his eye, the deeper dimple in his smile, and the pitter-pat in his heart. For this, he will pay the price.

Despite all the valiant efforts to turn her body into a toxic vessel of waste, Mom now faces a gruesome death, awash in misbegotten filth, which can only be forestalled by an amazing, dazzling, awe-inspiring medical feat performed by a troupe of traveling surgical magicians. But their stunts don't come cheap, and Mom is freshly banished from work. It'll take more than her darling boy's lunch money to save her! Now this fine young fella must harness all of his love, perform his most mind-boggling calculations, and apply all of his strategic genius to make Mom's problems disappear into thin air.

A few games of chess ought to do the trick.

Well, maybe a few dozen. But when pitted against the talents of his opponents, which include an android engineer, a living jewel, a loony psychotherapist, the smartest muppet ever conceived, and an alien super-genius from another galaxy, he is kissed tantalizingly by the lips of ruthlessness. And he comes into the watchful gaze of characters even more dangerous than chess players.

After bicycling his way through death and mayhem, dragging his mind through eleven dimensions, and staying up way past his bed time, he finds himself naked in the dark, under the scrutiny of the filthy world outside his hometown. And he discovers there are more ways to be checkmated than he'd ever thought possible.

As precious hours tick away for Mom, this young whiz kid embarks on a bloody and destructive adventure across the faces of an Earth slathered with pavement, adorned with commercial strips, bejeweled with litter, perfumed with smog, and crawling with tens of billions of increasingly tear-thirsty inhabitants who want nothing more than to checkmate him.

As the twinkle in his eye fades, our hero braves caverns full of subterranean beasts, menageries of rutting perverts, a ruthless megalopolis, an uncaring desert, a megalomaniacal cyborg, and downright rudeness, all the while pursued by a gang of junkie bounty hunters, desperate for their next fix, and a murderous breakfast fanatic who believes the key to restoring balance and nutrition to the universe is this boy, the kid from the door next to dystopia.