Jake McCall is a combat vet who now works as an assistant wrestling coach for a small college whose major claim is its wrestling team. He is married to a beautiful, caring wife and has a precocious five-year-old boy, and his life with them in a peaceful college town is idyllic (perfect outcome for a combat vet with PTSD). Or so he believes.
One day, a rough encounter with an older man claiming to be Jake's real father sets off a long repressed memory, one of having seen the old man before, as a child, he was claiming to be the real father then, too. Back then, Jake's mother came to the rescue as the putative father tried to drag him off. As the cops came and dragged the old man off, and the boy was told he was just a crazy person, the boy forgot all about it, and went on with an idyllic childhood. Or did he?
As three cops suddenly jump the old man, Jake springs into fast action, becomes a super-charged fighting machine, killing all three. And the old man disappears. Jake has three dead cops at his feet. He starts to fall apart. Violent, horrible memories suddenly flood his mind.
Jake turns himself in to the college town police. They don't believe his story, there's no dead bodies or missing cops. He goes home to his wife and receives comfort. Violent memories continue.
On his own, without telling anybody, Jake goes to the VA to get treatment for PTSD. There he finds that there is no proof anywhere that he was ever in the service. So who the fuck is he? What is real?
Long ago, floating particles from outer space took forms in human brains and have controlled human bodies by altering MEMORIES. A violent world-takeover now looms, an apocalyptic day that has been set for over a century. The players in this multi-generational plan are known only to each other, and only at certain times.
Jake McCall is at the center of the resistance to this plan, the lynchpin of the whole operation. And he has no idea.
The aliens have taken him, cloaked his brain with an array of false memories and perceptions, and robbed his life of the one thing he needs to save the world.
Jiu Jitsu.
Back when the alien presence first entered the earth's atmosphere in Brazil, the only people who were able to fight the mind-control of the invader were those Brazilian and Japanese men and women who studied and practiced Jiu Jitsu. They became the masters of the secret resistance, and the framers of the upcoming fight for all earthy stakes with BRAX, the frightening physical manifestation of the invading force.
Jake was born and bred to fight that fight. Trained from birth by his American father, Brazilian grandfather, and Japanese teacher, a master of Jiu Jitsu at age ten, the Golden Child of the resistance. But as overconfidence led Jake down the wrong path, the floating particles got to his brain, and removed Jiu Jitsu from his mental equation.
Now he remembers none of it really, and the forces of the resistance have to retrain him by force in the art, so that he can face the monster no one else can defeat.