The book starts out with Hari Seldon repeating the phrase “I am finished” over and over in his mind. Hari, bound to a wheelchair and cared for by Kers Katun, seems ready to curl up and die, as his doctors have told him he does not have long to live. After a long life full of adventure and intrigue he finishes his final task of recording the infamous Seldon Crisis videos for the Time Vault which will be installed on Terminus. He feels that everyone’s attitude toward him changed once he was done with the final message, like they have no more use for him.

Hari latches onto an opportunity to join a research project with a soil expert named Horis Antic. Horis has a theory to predict the occurrence of Chaos Worlds which uses soil composition analysis. Hari is intrigued because he always thought that something was missing from his own equations. He sneaks out of Trantor along with his guardian and Horis Antic. Very soon the entire crew of their survey ship, which is supposed to help confirm the correlation of Hari and Horis’s theories, is ambushed by some rebels from a the chaos world of Ktlina led by a woman who seems somewhat familiar to Hari. She turns out to be Sybl, the female programmer that resurrected the Joan of Arc sim. She had escaped to Ktlina from Trantor after the debate fiasco between Joan and Voltaire in Foundation’s Fear.