Sailing near the coast of Florida, Gene discovers the body of a young man in a small boat. The man died from exposure and blood loss due to a bullet wound. Searching the man, he finds a plastic bag containing some personal items including a black and white picture of a beautiful young woman in a one-piece swimsuit. Gene plans to learn more about the young woman if the opportunity arises on his planned trip to Cuba in a few weeks to complete the final phase of his last assignment. Shortly after his arrival in Cuba, he attends a gala reception for the Angola veterans where he unexpectedly finds the young woman from the photo in attendance, and discovers her name is Leila. She is in the middle of a growing storm of troubles. Gene attempts to build alliances with the most unlikely groups of people in a desperate attempt to find a way off the island for her. One of those people is Dr. Fracisco Llerana who is seeking a way to leave the island and take Leila's mother to freedom. Unfortunately, his involvement complicates matters for everyone when he stumbles into the wrong side of the Chief Investigator for the Intelligence Directorate. Slightly before Gene's arrival on the island, a group of expertly trained mercenaries called "The Seven Swords of Babylon" joined the "Brigada Internacional de Liberacion" on a special training exercise in a facility located in an area known as Arcos de Canasi. Unknown to the Cuban military they also planned to carry out a second mission, which is to retrieve a stolen ancient artifact. This artifact originally belonged to the Minoan civilization that flourished in 2000 BC on the island of Crete; at least it did before it disappeared from the archeological expedition's artifact room at Knossos. It somehow appeared in the hands of a Russian research team now on their way to one of Cuba's most secure research centers. Lieutenant Colonel Gerardo Medina Fuentes does not like the idea of anything happening to the research scientists placed under his protection, and he is determined to move heaven and hell to insure that every aspect of the research stays undisturbed and under control. Regardless of Gerardo's best efforts, everything goes wrong, and chaos reigns on the island, where over time common people perform heroic acts, love replaces suspicions, good triumphs over evil, and a new hope for humanity dawns in the hands of a sick boy as his body is transformed into a perfect immortal one.

Introductory collection of writings by a creative and subversive thinker, ranging from the origins of "non-philosophy" to its evolution into what Laruelle now calls "non-standard philosophy." The question "What is non-philosophy?" must be replaced by the question about what it can and cannot do. To ask what it can do is already to acknowledge that its capacities are not unlimited. This question is partly Spinozist: no-one knows what a body can do. It is partly Kantian: circumscribe philosophy's illusory power, the power of reason or the faculties, and do not extend its sufficiency in the shape of by way of another philosophy. It is also partly Marxist: how much of philosophy can be transformed through practice, how much of it can be withdrawn from its "ideological" use? And finally, it is also partly Wittgensteinian: how can one limit philosophical language through its proper use? This introductory collection of writings by creative and subversive thinker Francois Laruelle opens with an introduction based upon an in-depth interview that traces the abiding concerns of his prolific output. The eleven newly translated essays that follow, dating from 1985 to the present, range from the origins of "non-philosophy" to its evolution into what Laruelle now calls "non-standard philosophy." Two appendices present a number of Laruelle's experimental texts, which have not previously appeared in English translation, and a transcript of an early intervention and discussion on his "transvaluation" of Kant's transcendental method.