In New Detroit, 2064, at the height of a new Great Depression, a pessimistic cop and his righteous android partner investigate an anti-technology terror group only to uncover a conspiracy within the upper echelons of government.

SYNOPSIS:

Trillionaire AJ Kardashevich welcomes a group of kids to an exhibition about Renaissance Androids, sentient machines created by dissolving a donor’s brain in a nanite solution. The essence of the donor lives on in an android body. Columbia, a classic AI, urges AJ to send the kids off to his gifted children program. Afterward, AJ welcomes the chief of police and demands she takes in Isaac, a Renaissance Android. Isaac works as a private eye investigating the Luddites who view Renaissance Androids as an attempt to replace all of humanity, and they will fight at all costs.

Isaac gets paired up with Alex, an augmented ex-marine, and the detectives – reluctantly – go to work. The two investigate a Luddite who wants out after discovering their secret financier. He winds up dead in his apartment when he tried dumping the evidence tagged Protocol Destiny. Alex connects with a housebot in hopes of finding any evidence, but it gets hacked and takes Alex hostage. Vanguard, a private military company, crashes the scene, and the housebot escapes. The two detectives visit Alex’s augdealer Vik, who explains a hacker has been terrorizing his men. Anyone who caught a glimpse of the files was killed by their implants. Vik states only a Singularity could do this instantly, and the process which created Isaac could be used on a living human to create the Singularity. But such an intrusive procedure will induce necrosis with no replacement because the body rejects all implants. Vik thinks children would not be as susceptible to necrosis.

A hunt for the hacker and Singularity begins. Vanguard and the deep state want it for control. The Luddites want to destroy the industrial system, and the detectives seek justice. After setting their differences aside, Alex and Isaac finally work together and learn the hacker is a young genius named Claire who escaped AJ’s program. She found Columbia’s location and believes it to be the Singularity. The Ex-Luddite knew Isaac’s donor: Vanguard owner, Isaac Freedman, an East German expat who came to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Vanguard works for AJ, and unbeknownst to the Luddites, AJ is funding them for false flag operations to gain jurisdiction for Vanguard. Thinking that AJ uses children for the Singularity and since Isaac can’t be hurt by Vanguard tech, the detectives team up with the Luddites to confront AJ and his true nature in a turn of events: Columbia is not the Singularity, he is. Born from his mind, when he underwent the procedure with only parts of his head and torso left. The AJ everyone interacted with was a remote-controlled android. AJ reveals that Freedman was his adoptive father, and together they construed Protocol Destiny, a trap:

The deep state approached AJ with the request to create the Singularity, to experiment on children. Seeing his cancer-ridden father disillusioned with America – believing it will end the same way as the GDR – AJ, in a last-ditch effort, used the procedure on himself and faked the experiments for a ruse against the powerful while leveraging the Luddites as domestic terrorists. Protocol Destiny is the self-destruction of the government. For the dirty secret to never come out, Columbia forces the leaders to nullify most of the government, ending the new Great Depression, which left most people destitute and bartering. AJ staged the showdown, so the people celebrate Alex and Isaac as supposed lone heroes for preventing the Luddites from destroying the Singularity: a tech explosion for the people. AJ’s last action is the commencement of a new manifest destiny into space.