It's 2020 and the world is facing an unthinkable crisis: shortages and contamination have made drinking water scarce. Hayden Shivers is a lowly filter and drains engineer employed by Drixa, a mega-corporation with a monopoly on water. When he stumbles upon a method for synthesizing fake water, Hayden is promised a big promotion if he signs over his patent to Drixa. As the company hustles to get the product on the market, Hayden frantically tries to stop them until the new water is confirmed safe. The situation grows increasingly dire as advice pours in from all fields: a fanatically loyal manager, a cynical divorce lawyer, a muckraking reporter, and his brilliant mail-order "maid." Told in a brilliantly off-kilter style that reverberates with the sublime and the paradoxical, H2O traces and retraces the overlapping family and corporate intrigues that threaten to turn a life-saving invention into an instrument of disaster.