Richard Thompson is a former Marine and network administrator whose unemployment, addiction, and estrangement from his two sons leave him vulnerable to an unusual offer from Neural Hive. There, the disarmingly genial Dr. Carnegie recruits Richard into an experimental program that uses human brains as individual nodes within a distributed computing network designed to harness the mind’s capacity for prediction and pattern recognition. As Richard begins experiencing violent images and unfamiliar memories that undermine his sense of identity and reality, he becomes increasingly consumed by Kylie O'Reilly, a ubiquitous motivational media personality whose relentless optimism takes on a more invasive and unsettling significance.