Zane Zaminsky and Calvin, radio astronomers employed by SETI, detect and record an extraterrestrial radio signal from Wolf 336, a star located 14 light-years away from Earth. Zane reports his discovery to his supervisor, Phil "Gordi" Gordian, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but Gordi dismisses the findings and later destroys the tape. Zane is terminated due to alleged budget cuts and blacklisted, which prevents him from working at other telescopes. While having troubles with his girlfriend Char, Zane takes up a job as a television satellite dish installer and secretly creates his own telescope array with the aid of his customers' dishes in the neighborhood. He operates it covertly from his attic with the assistance of his young next-door neighbor, Kiki. After again locating the extraterrestrial radio signal, Zane realizes that it is being drowned out by a terrestrial signal originating from a Mexican radio station. He attempts to seek the help of Calvin but finds that he has died, supposedly due to carbon monoxide poisoning (though he was actually murdered). Zane travels to Mexico and discovers that the radio station has just been destroyed by fire. Exploring the area, he stumbles upon a recently constructed power plant where he meets Ilana Green, a climatologist from NCAR, whose atmospheric analysis equipment is confiscated by the plant's aggressive security forces. Before they are released from the plant, Zane notices that one of the guards resembles Gordi. Ilana explains that the Earth's temperature has rapidly increased by a few degrees, leading to the melting of polar ice and a shift in the ecosystem. She is investigating the power plant, which seems to be one of several recently built facilities across the world that may be responsible for the rise in temperature. As Zane and Ilana regroup, Gordi dispatches agents disguised as gardeners to release a device in Zane's attic that makes his equipment vanish. Zane leaves Ilana at the hotel and goes to investigate the power plant, but scorpions planted in her room kill her. Sneaking into the power plant, Zane discovers it is a facade for an extraterrestrial base. The aliens blend in with humanity by wearing an external skin, and the base emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases. Zane escapes and returns to the nearby town to seek help from the local inspector. However, the aliens bring Ilana's body to the police station, implicating Zane as a suspect in her death, prompting him to flee back to the United States. Zane confronts Gordi at the JPL headquarters and coerces him into confessing that the aliens are raising Earth's temperature to eliminate the human race and create a more livable environment for themselves (like terraforming). Gordi suggests aliens were behind the recent NASA failures; inquiring, "Ask yourself why an antenna won't deploy on a deep-space probe. Or ask how they could launch a $6 billion telescope without testing its mirror." Zane secretly records the conversation and reveals the recording to Gordi, who dispatches agents to apprehend Zane. Returning home, Zane discovers that his attic has been emptied of all equipment. He enlists the help of Char and Kiki to journey to a radio astronomy array with the intention of sending his recording to a news satellite. Gordi and his agents sabotage the telescope controls, so Zane entrusts the tape to Kiki and instructs him to transmit it when given the signal. Zane and Char run to the telescope's base, lock themselves in the control room, and make the necessary adjustments. When Zane orders Kiki to activate the tape, Kiki reveals himself to be an alien agent and unlocks the door. Gordi enters and seizes the tape. Zane subdues Gordi and his agents with liquid nitrogen. While retrieving the tape from Gordi's jacket, one of the agents accidentally releases a sphere that begins to engulf the room. Zane and Char flee upward through the radio telescope station's access shaft before the device causes the base to implode and the antenna to collapse onto it. From their vantage point on the antenna, they spot Kiki below and tell him to inform the other aliens that Zane will soon broadcast the tape.

Hopper, an archaeology professor, is exploring a remote cave system on the trail of missing hippies from the 1970s. After discovering what appears to be a cowboy paused in place in a tunnel, he returns to town and dismisses his graduate students, Taylor and Jackie, stating that their research is done. Several days later, as Hopper has not returned, Taylor and Jackie go looking for him, with their friend Cara, who brings her sister, Veeves, and her friend Furby. Following Hopper's trail to the campsite by a cave, they find an entrance with climbing ropes leading inside. They decide to follow it, but Furby chooses to stay behind as backup for the base camp. They lower themselves into the cave, hearing strange noises. When Furby does not answer their radio calls, Jackie tries to climb back out, but the rope frays, and she falls, injuring herself and Taylor. Calling for help, they receive a transmission from inside the cave and follow it. At a different junction, they discover another opening to the cave and Furby, dead with a broken neck. Watching his video recordings, they notice several days elapsed from his perspective, while only an hour had passed in the cave. He began researching the hippies' belongings, discovering they were Hopper's parents and that they were accompanied by his sister. His parents were following legends of the Fountain of Youth and speculated that this cave system was the root of the story. Furby found another cave opening. After several days, he went into the cave to retrieve keys for a vehicle but fell when his rope severed. Taylor deduces the cave is inside a time distortion where events move more slowly. With few options, Cara free-climbs out of the cave to get a GPS signal. Outside, the terrain has become barren, and there is no signal. Returning to the cave, comparing video recordings, Cara has experienced about thirty minutes on the surface while she had been gone at most a few seconds from the others' viewpoint, confirming Taylor's theory. Reviewing Furby's footage again, they learn that he survived the fall but was murdered by a caveman. Cara and Taylor deduce the time difference is much more drastic than they suspected and entire years are passing within seconds, meaning the few hours they have been in the cave is enough to span several thousand years outside. Hearing more howling, Cara prepares to climb out again for help but is interrupted by a futuristic 8-foot-tall humanoid spaceman descending via a retractable ladder. A caveman suddenly attacks, but is subdued non-lethally. They flee just to find a whole tribe of cavemen inspecting the dead bodies of the cowboy and Hopper's parents. Discovered, Taylor fights the cavemen and is killed. The spaceman returns, protects the others from the cavemen, and then places Taylor into a healing pool of water. More cavemen attack, and the spaceman is exposed to the air in the caves, which is toxic to him. Dying, he shows the students several media clips about their disappearance and indicating that humans have left a dying Earth, resettling (and evolving) on Mars. Taylor finds Hopper injured in front of another time dilation, containing his sister, a legion of conquistadors and a cavemen horde virtually frozen in the midst of a battle over control of a waterfall, the source of the time distortion. Hopper explains the field is strongest here, making rescue of his sister impossible; he tells Taylor to go and save the others, as he is also dying. Preparing to leave the cave with the spaceman's ladder, the students are attacked by cavemen before they can get through; Cara is grabbed and pulled through the portal before she can help her friends. From their perspective, she instantly reappears through the portal, futuristically dressed and with tentacle-like mechanisms which pull her friends through. A short time later, Furby awakens, along with Hopper and Hopper's family, all having been retrieved and resurrected with the healing waters. The others arrive, happily explaining they are in a space station and have a lot to talk about.

In the year 2039, Earth is attacked by an alien civilization from Alpha Centauri. Force field domes are put in place to protect cities, and a totalitarian global military government is established to effect the war and the survival of humans. The Centaurians have never been physically seen. Thirty years later, Spencer Olham, a designer of top-secret government weapons, is arrested while on his way to work by Major Hathaway of the Earth Security Administration (ESA), being identified as a replicant created by the aliens. The ESA intercepted an alien transmission which cryptanalysts decoded as programming Olham's target to be the Chancellor, whom he was scheduled to meet. Such replicants are perfect biological copies of existing humans, complete with transplanted memories, and do not know they are replicants. Each has a powerful "U-bomb" in their chest in the exact design of a human heart, which can only be detected by dissection or a high-tech medical scan, since it only arms itself and detonates when it gets in close proximity to its target. Detection via the special scan works by comparing against a previous scan, if there was one. Major Hathaway begins interrogating Olham. As Hathaway is about to drill out Olham's chest to find the bomb, Olham breaks loose and escapes, accidentally killing his friend Nelson in the process. With the help of underground stalker Cale, Olham avoids capture and sneaks into the hospital where his wife Maya is an administrator to get the high-tech scan redone and prove he is not a replicant. But the scan is interrupted by security forces before it can deliver the answer. That evening, after fleeing from the city, Olham and Maya are eventually captured by Hathaway's troops in a forest near an alien crash site, close to the spot where they spent a romantic weekend just a week or so before Olham's arrest. Inside the ship they discover the corpse of the real Maya, and Hathaway shoots and kills the replicant Maya before she can detonate. Hathaway thinks he has killed the true impostor, but as his men move debris away from the Centauri ship, the real Spencer Olham's body is revealed as well. At that moment, Olham realizes aloud that both Maya and himself really are alien replicants, and the secondary trigger (his awareness of what he truly is) detonates his U-bomb, destroying himself, Hathaway, his troops, and everything else in a wide area in a fiery nuclear explosion. A news announcement states that Hathaway and the Olhams were killed in an alien enemy attack, implying that the government covered up or are unaware of the truth. Cale wonders if he ever really knew Olham's true identity.

Two students at a West Coast university, Arian and Ernest, at the urging of their idealistic professor, Dr. Malley, attempt to do something important with their lives. They make the bold decision to enlist in the army to fight in Afghanistan after graduating from college. Dr. Malley also attempts to reach a talented and privileged but disaffected student, Todd Hayes, who is not at all like Arian and Ernest. He is naturally bright, comes from a privileged background, but has apparently slipped into apathy upon being disillusioned at the present state of affairs. Now, he devotes most of his time to extra-curricular activities like his role as president of his fraternity. Malley tests him by offering a choice between a respectable grade of 'B' in the class with no additional work required or a final opportunity to re-engage with the material of the class and "do something." Before Todd makes his choice, he must listen to Dr. Malley's story of his former students Arian and Ernest and why they are in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a charismatic Republican presidential hopeful, Senator Jasper Irving, has invited liberal TV journalist Janine Roth to his office to announce a new war strategy in Afghanistan: the use of small units to seize strategic positions in the mountains before the Taliban can occupy them. The senator hopes that Roth's positive coverage will help convince the public that the plan is sound. Roth has her doubts and fears she is being asked to become an instrument of government propaganda. She informs her commercially-minded boss of her plans to call out the senator's new strategy for what she feels is a ploy, but is shot down. Ultimately, Irving's version of the story is run without the critical interaction. Whether Roth gave in and toed the company line or quit her job is not clear. In Afghanistan, a helicopter carrying Arian and Ernest is hit by Taliban insurgents. Ernest falls out, and Arian jumps after him. Ernest's leg is badly wounded, and he suffers a compound fracture, rendering him immobile as the Taliban arrive. After a drawn-out gunfight, the U.S. soldiers run out of ammunition. Rather than getting captured, Arian helps Ernest stand up, facing the enemies and turning their empty weapons against them, an action which prompts the Taliban to kill them. The unit commanders attempt a rescue of the downed soldiers, sending A-10 Warthogs, but weather, time, and distance interfere. Hayes is watching television with a friend. A reporter is discussing a singer's private life, while below runs a strip announcing Senator Irving's new military plan for Afghanistan. Hayes suddenly falls quiet, contemplating the choices with which his professor had left him.

The crew of the joint British and American Space Shuttle Churchill, under the command of Colonel Tom Carlsen, finds a 150-mile-long (240 km) spaceship hidden in the coma of Halley's Comet. Inside, the crew discovers hundreds of desiccated bat-like creatures and three naked humanoid bodies (two male and one female) in suspended animation within glass containers. The crew recovers a bat-alien and the three bodies and begins the return trip to Earth. During the return journey, mission control loses contact with Churchill. A rescue mission discovers that Churchill has been gutted by fire. The crew is dead and the escape pod is missing, yet the three containers bearing the bodies remain intact. The bodies are taken to the European Space Research Centre in London. Prior to a postmortem, the female alien awakens and drains the life force from a guard. She escapes the facility and drains other humans of their life force. The two male vampires awaken and violently attempt escape, but are apparently destroyed by grenades thrown by another guard. The guard drained by the female alien revives two hours after his death, with the ability to drain others of their life force. The Churchill escape pod is found with Carlsen inside. He recounts the events aboard Churchill, including feeling compelled to open the female vampire's container and share his life force with her, leading to the draining of the Churchill crew's life force. He set fire to the shuttle to save Earth from the same fate and escaped in the pod. When hypnotised, it becomes clear that he has a psychic link to the female alien, and he reveals her ability to shapeshift. Carlsen and SAS Colonel Colin Caine trace her to a psychiatric hospital in Yorkshire, where they believe they have trapped her within the heavily sedated body of the hospital manager, Dr. Armstrong. The two male vampires have survived by shapeshifting into the soldiers who killed their previous bodies, and now are infecting London's population. The female alien escapes from her sedated host and disappears. Martial law is declared as vampires multiply by absorbing the life force of humans. The life forces are channeled by the male vampires to the female vampire, who transmits the energy to their spaceship, now in geosynchronous orbit over London. Hans Fallada impales a male vampire with an ancient weapon of "leaded iron." He, Carlsen, and Caine surmise that the vampires have visited Earth periodically with the coming of Halley's Comet, creating the vampire legends. Caine finds Fallada, possessed and manic, and shoots him. Fallada dessicates. Caine retrieves the weapon from a dead corpse which explodes into dust. Carlsen tracks the female vampire to St Paul's Cathedral, where she is lying upon the altar, transferring energy to her spaceship. She reveals she and Carlsen are now a part of each other due to the sharing of their life forces. Caine kills the second male vampire and throws the weapon to Carlsen, who impales himself and the female alien simultaneously. A burst of energy blows open the dome of St Paul's. The two ascend the column of energy to the spaceship, which returns to the comet as Caine watches.

Steven Grlscz, a charming, intelligent and reclusive vampire, selects single women as targets for his feedings. Steven can only feed on victims who fully feel love for him, as blood alone isn't enough; to this end he thoroughly researches each woman, and then manipulates her into falling in love before feeding on and killing her. Afterwards Steven is forced to expel slender, intricate crystals (physical forms of a person's dominant emotion) from his body if the love she felt was overshadowed by another emotion, such as despair or disappointment. The pain of doing so is akin to passing kidney stones, and thus Steven seeks a perfect lover in order to prevent this. After Steve watches police officers remove the body of one of his former lovers from a tree, he happens upon another woman, Maria Vaughan, in the Waterloo Station of the London Underground. He prevents Maria from committing suicide and begins dating her. This results in Maria falling for Steve. He eventually proposes to her, but immediately afterwards Steve entices Maria to his bedroom, where he drains her blood. After disposing of the body of Maria, Steven is seen by a passerby, who notices his van and later mentions this to the police. Maria's corpse is found after being netted by an illegal fishing boat, prompting Steven to call the police. Two detectives come to question him and his relationship to the victim, and while he appears innocent enough, lead Inspector Healey is immediately suspicious of Steven. While visiting a nearby factory, Steven notices another potential target: an engineer named Anne Levels. Anne's independence and quirky charm intrigue Steven, who asks her out. The two begin a relationship, although Anne is quick to note Steven's mysterious nature. Inspector Healey and Sergeant Roche continue to trail Steven as their prime suspect. Following Steven and Anne after a dinner date, Healey is attacked by a small gang in the Underground. The gang's leader takes Healey's crucifix, a gift from his wife, but Steven appears and manages to talk the gang into letting Healey go unharmed. Still wary of his suspect, Healey is nevertheless grateful to Steven for his help. The relationship between Steven and Anne progresses, but Steven soon notices that his healing abilities are starting to weaken, with a small cut continuing to bleed for days. Meanwhile, Healey is able to obtain a photograph of the van's driver, but a glare prevents anyone from clearly seeing Steven's face. Still, Steven is called in for a police line-up, with a toll operator Steven had earlier encountered acting as an eyewitness. The witness cannot remember who he had seen due to seeing hundreds of people that day, to the disbelief of the police; there is an implication that Steven might have had something to do with this memory lapse, as it is revealed that he can see through the one-way glass concealing the toll operator and inspectors. Anne and Steven are later attacked by the gang from the Underground, who demand Anne in exchange for Steven to be let go. Steven goes with the gang members, but after getting enough distance Steven overpowers them and saves Anne from being assaulted. The couple spends the night together, and Steven finds himself genuinely falling in love with Anne. The pair converse about a psychological concept: the notion that people have three minds (the human mind, the mammalian mind and the reptilian mind, with the lattermost representing primal or survival instincts). The movie's title comes from this conversation, during which Anne, sharing a childhood incident with Steve, asks him whether her actions were driven by the "horse"/mammalian mind or the "crocodile"/reptilian mind. Steven is met at work by Healey, who informs him that he is no longer a suspect in the murder of Maria, though the inspector personally remains unconvinced of Steven's supposed innocence. Steven and Healey share their philosophies about good and evil, and before parting ways Steven returns Healey's crucifix, which he had taken back from the gang. After this, Steven is called by Anne, who insists that she come to his apartment to see him. When she arrives, Steven attempts to drink from her as he did Maria but finds himself unable to go through with it. He finally reveals the truth to a horrified Anne, who tries to run from him. He confesses to her that he loves her and does not wish to kill her. Steven informs Anne that, due to not having fed on the blood of a lover, he is slowly dying; even a small wound would kill him within twenty minutes from blood hemorrhage. Despite the danger and knowledge that he has murdered others, Anne decides to stay and look after him. Steven's body is ultimately driven to near-death by his hunger. He informs Anne that he has run out of bandages, and she offers to go buy some. She returns early and sees Steven preparing to finally kill her. He chases Anne to the roof, and though she claims to no longer love him, Steven states that even if there's no more love in her heart, it's still in her blood, which would suffice. Rather than be fed on by Steven, Anne leaps off the roof. Steven is able to grab her arm in time, but she uses a metal chopstick (doubling as a hair stick and Anne's "lucky charm") to stab his hand. Steven screams in agony but manages to hold on and pull Anne to safety. She departs, shaken, as the mortally wounded Steven retreats to his apartment study, reminiscing as he finally dies, with the sketches of all the women he had targeted over the centuries surrounding him.

In 1983, teenagers Martin Asher and Matt Soulsby meet on a bus to Mont-Laurier, Quebec. The bus breaks down, and the two acquire a car, which soon blows a tire. As Matt changes the tire, Martin comments that they are about the same height and kicks him into the path of an oncoming truck, killing both him and the driver. Taking Matt's guitar and clothes, Martin continues on foot, singing in a voice similar to Matt's. 21 years later, American FBI profiler Illeana Scott is summoned to Montreal by SPVM Inspector LeClair, to assist the local authorities in apprehending a serial killer who assumes his victims’ identities, enabling him to travel undetected across North America. Illeana interviews art dealer James Costa, an eyewitness to the killer's most recent murder. He makes a drawing of the killer, so the authorities track down the suspect's apartment, finding a decaying corpse chained to the ceiling. Martin's mother, Rebecca, claims to have seen her son, believed dead in Matt's place years earlier, alive on a ferry to Quebec City, leading to the body buried as Martin being exhumed for forensic examination, and he becomes the primary suspect. At Rebecca's home, Illeana questions her about her son, learning that Martin was an unwanted child who became unstable after the death of his favored twin brother. Illeana finds a hidden passageway behind a cabinet leading to Martin's secret room, where she is attacked by a hidden assailant, who escapes before she can identify him. Illeana deduces that Asher targets his victims to live as someone different than himself and that his latest target is James after his apartment is ransacked. He is used in a sting operation to lure Asher, but the trap fails. During a show at his gallery, James is attacked by an assailant, presumed to be Asher, whom Illeana tries to apprehend but loses in the crowd. The police prepare to move James out of town, but he is confronted by the assailant, who attacks him and kills his police escort before driving away with James at gunpoint. Illeana gives chase, causing the car to crash and explode just as James manages to escape. James visits Illeana's hotel room, where, having grown close over the course of the investigation, they make passionate love surrounded by gruesome crime scene photos. Illeana awakens to find herself covered in James’ blood, but he has merely popped the stitches he received after the car chase. As James’ stitches are repaired in the hospital, Illeana is called to the morgue, where Rebecca is unable to identify the charred body of the assailant, and Illeana realizes that Asher must still be alive. Before Illeana can reach her, Rebecca enters the elevator and is confronted by James, revealing himself as the real Martin Asher. He kills his mother, and Illeana is shocked to see him covered in blood before the elevator doors close again, and he escapes the hospital. The police determined that the assailant killed in the car chase was Christopher Hart, a drug addict and art thief to whom Asher owed money. In the struggle in his apartment, Asher killed Hart and staged being taken hostage. Pursued by the police, Asher escapes by train and selects his next victim, taunting Illeana by phone before disappearing. Admitting to having consensual sex with Asher, Illeana is fired from the FBI. Seven months later, Illeana is living alone in a desolate farmhouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, apparently heavily pregnant with Asher's twins. She is confronted by Asher, who declares that they can start over and live together as a family, but Illeana refuses. Enraged, Asher beats her and prepares to choke her into unconsciousness, seizing a pair of scissors from her when she defends herself and stabbing her in the belly. Illeana stabs Asher in the heart with the same scissors and removes her prosthetic pregnant belly, explaining that the past months were a carefully planned trap. He dies, and Illeana informs LeClair that the ordeal is over.

Jonathan Moore, an 18-year-old veterinary student at UCLA, is an expert at "Gotcha", a popular Assassin -like game where students chase each other on campus using paintball guns. Jonathan and his roommate Manolo travel to Paris during spring break. While alone in a café, Jonathan meets Sasha Banicek, a 24-year-old Czechoslovak woman, and later loses his virginity to her. Instead of going to Spain with Manolo, Jonathan accompanies Sasha to West Berlin to spend more time with her. In their hotel room, Sasha tells Jonathan that she has to go to East Berlin to pick up a package, as she works as a courier. One night, after arriving in East Berlin, Sasha sneaks out of their hotel room while Jonathan is asleep and meets with a German man, who tells her the location of the pickup of her package. Unknowingly, Sasha is monitored by Vlad, a Soviet agent. The next day, Sasha tells Jonathan that if she ever instructs him to meet her at the Café Friedrichstrasse, it means that he must immediately leave East Berlin, and hands him a package with a strudel. Noticing that Vlad is following them, Sasha tells Jonathan to meet her at a butcher shop near their hotel in one hour. Vlad chases her, but she escapes. She is ordered by the German man to use Jonathan to get the package over to West Berlin. Sasha meets Jonathan at a subway station, slipping an object into his backpack and saying that she will meet him back at the hotel. However, she later calls him and tells him to meet her at the Café Friedrichstrasse. That night, while Jonathan rushes to Checkpoint Charlie to cross into West Berlin, Sasha is caught by Vlad and the East German secret police; she is strip-searched by the Soviets, but nothing is found on her. Vlad arrives at the border crossing to search for Jonathan, who has crossed the border safely before he could be captured. Once in West Berlin, Jonathan finds that his hotel room has been ransacked and his traveler's checks have been stolen. Vlad and his henchmen eventually find Jonathan at the Spandau Citadel, the location Sasha gave him, where he meets a woman who asks for the object Sasha gave him. She is confused when he gives her the strudel, before Vlad shoots her. The agents chase Jonathan through the Citadel. Jumping into a water canal, Jonathan escapes and stumbles upon a German punk rock band headed for Hamburg, who offer him a ride to the airport. Soon after Jonathan safely makes it back to Los Angeles, a band of Soviet agents led by Vlad also arrives. Jonathan finds the object planted by Sasha, a film canister, in his backpack. He visits his parents and tells them what happened in Germany, but they do not believe him and instead accuse him of being a drug addict. Jonathan calls the CIA for help, telling them about Sasha and the film. Temporarily arrested for ramming a car, Jonathan returns the next morning to find his apartment broken into and looted. The CIA tells Jonathan to bring them the film canister. At the CIA's Los Angeles headquarters, Jonathan is surprised to find Sasha working there. Jonathan arranges a meeting with Sasha at UCLA and uses Manolo's help to separate her from the CIA agents. Sasha admits that she is actually Cheryl Brewster, a CIA agent from Pittsburgh, before Vlad and his henchmen appear and chase the pair through the campus. During their flight, Jonathan seizes a tranquilizer gun from the veterinary sciences building and uses it to incapacitate their pursuers. The Soviets are arrested and the CIA agents thank Jonathan for his help in obtaining the film. Cheryl/Sasha tells him she wants to continue their relationship, and they kiss. After they part, Jonathan talks to an attractive student who previously rebuffed him, and she coldly turns him down. As she walks away, he aims the tranquilizer gun and shoots her in the rear.

A G8 meeting is being held at the luxury Grand Hotel in Heiligendamm on the Mecklenburg Baltic coast in Germany. The world's most powerful economists are gathered to enact important provisions that will deeply influence the world economy. One of the guests is a mysterious Italian monk, invited by Daniel Roché, the director of the International Monetary Fund. He wants the monk to receive his confession, that night, in secret. The next morning, Roché is found dead.

In a building in Amsterdam, an elevator inexplicably begins to function alone. After a lightning storm causes a power failure and traps four people in the elevator, the elevator fails to open even after a subsequent power restore, and the passengers almost suffocate. Soon, subsequent malfunctions prove fatal as an elderly blind man falls to his death when the elevator doors open to an empty shaft, the building night watchman is decapitated, and a janitor is seemingly burned alive. Felix Adelaar, a technician from the elevator company Deta Liften, begins to examine the electrical system in an attempt to find any anomalies. During the course of several inspections, he meets Mieke de Beer, a journalist for De Nieuwe Revu, a local tabloid. When inspections reveal no apparent problems with the electrical system, Felix becomes obsessed with the continuing malfunctions of the elevator; this has a negative impact on his marriage as his wife Saskia begins to suspect he is having an affair with the journalist. When Felix pays yet another visit to the building, he notices a van parked outside from Rising Sun, a manufacturer of microprocessors for automation and a secret supplier of experimental microprocessors to Deta Liften. Felix and Mieke, after collecting newspaper clippings about Rising Sun, try to meet with the company's CEO, who acts nervous and answers abruptly. Mieke invites Felix to meet up with her former university professor who specializes in electronics. The professor explains microprocessors' sensitivity to external factors, such as electric fields, magnetic fields, and radioactivity, which undermine the proper functionality. He tells about a computer built years ago which suddenly began to self-program and went out of control. The next morning, Felix's boss angrily suspends him for his unauthorized visit to Rising Sun. That evening, the owners of Deta Liften and Rising Sun meet to discuss how to stop the elevator's computer processor, which is built from organic material, from killing people. Saskia leaves Felix, taking their children with her. With nothing left to lose, Felix goes to the building to solve the elevator mystery. He discovers that the elevator has a sentient mind when it tries to prevent him from accessing its microprocessor. Instead Felix climbs into the elevator shaft and finds a pulsating box; inside is sticky goo covering a silicon chip —the elevator's heart. As Felix attacks the box with a wrench, the elevator uses its counterweight to knock him off balance. He manages to land on a ledge just below the elevator doors, and is rescued by Mieke just before the elevator is able to crush him. As Rising Sun's CEO arrives to see that his experiment failed, he pulls out a pistol and fires into the biocomputer to seemingly kill it. The computer then shoots one of the broken cables out to drag him inside the shaft and hangs him. As a shaken Felix and Mieke walk down the stairs the elevator's heartbeat continues.

Matias takes home a MacBook Pro left at a cyber café. While Skyping with his friends Damon, A.J., Lexx, Serena, and Nari, he receives messages from "Erica," who is its owner, Norah, demanding the MacBook back. Matias decides to return it before receiving messages from "Charon68". A.J. realizes the MacBook is connected to the dark web. When Charon68 mentions trepanation, Matias stops responding. Matias finds snuff films on the MacBook and traces an address in one to the home of missing 17-year-old Erica Dunne. Matias receives a video call from his deaf girlfriend Amaya, but it is Norah, demanding the MacBook and threatening to kill Amaya if the police are contacted. When Nari seeks help, Matias claims it is an alternate reality game he is developing, though Nari remains suspicious. Matias convinces Amaya to visit him; Norah follows her. Matias removes cryptocurrency from Norah's account, promising to return the money and laptop in exchange for Amaya and Erica's safety. Matias directs Amaya and Norah to the subway - once their signal is lost, he tells his friends the truth. More Charon accounts join the chat, posting a video of Lexx being thrown off a roof and a deepfake of A.J. planning to attack a shopping mall, part of a swatting attack on A.J. As police storm A.J.'s house, the Charons play a gun-loading sound effect from his computer, and the police fatally shoot him. They ask Serena to save either her terminally ill mother or Nari; when she refuses to choose, all three are killed, including one Charon. Matias meets Amaya, leaving the laptop open so Damon can copy its files. Damon tells the Charons that everything has been recorded. The Charons create a deepfake of Matias kidnapping Erica and bringing an unconscious Erica to Matias' apartment. Damon realizes the Charons intended for Matias to find the laptop so they could frame the group for their crimes. A Charon hangs Damon by his closet door while another writes a false confession and suicide note on Damon’s laptop remotely. Amaya calls Matias, who realizes the Charons hacked his messages to lead her astray. He helplessly watches as she is lured into a warehouse and abducted. The Charons vote to determine Matias' fate, ultimately deciding he should die and fatally hitting him with a van. Erica wakes up and approaches the computer, begging for help before discovering a hole in her skull. The camera pans back to a large desktop setup displaying feeds of various Charons in front of their cameras celebrating, revealing the entire ordeal was broadcast live on the dark web.

A spacecraft presumed to be of alien origin is discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, estimated to have been there for nearly 300 years. A team of experts, including marine biologist Dr. Beth Halperin, mathematician Dr. Harry Adams, astrophysicist Dr. Ted Fielding, psychologist Dr. Norman Goodman and U.S. Navy Captain Harold Barnes, is assembled and taken to the Habitat, a state-of-the-art underwater living environment located near the spacecraft. Examining the spacecraft, the team is perplexed to learn it is not alien at all but rather American in origin. However, its technology far surpasses any in the present day. The ship's computer logs cryptically suggest a mission that originated either in the distant past or future but the team deduces that the long-dead crew was tasked with collecting an item of scientific importance. Norman and Beth discover the ship's logs, with the last entry noting an "unknown event". A holographic reenactment of the event reveals that hundreds of years in the future, the ship encountered a black hole, which apparently led to a crash landing in the ocean, back in the 1700s. Soon after, Norman and the others stumble on a large, yet perfect sphere hovering in the cargo bay. They cannot find any way to probe the inside of the sphere, as the fluid surface seems to be impenetrable. On observation, Norman ominously notes that the sphere reflects everything in the room, except them. When they return to the Habitat, Harry hypothesizes that everyone on this team is fated to die. Harry notes that the black hole is referred to as an "unknown event" in the future logs. However, here in the present, they have knowledge of the historic event, yet it is unable to be explained later on. During the night, Harry returns to the spacecraft and is able to enter the sphere. Norman follows Harry, where he finds him unconscious next to the sphere, and returns him to the Habitat. The next day, the crew discovers a series of numerically encoded messages appearing on the computer screens. The crew is able to decipher them, and comes to believe they are speaking to "Jerry", an alien intelligence from the sphere. They find that Jerry is able to see and hear everything that happens on the Habitat. A powerful typhoon strikes the surface and the Habitat crew is forced to stay in the Habitat several more days. During that time, a series of tragedies strikes the crew, including attacks from aggressive jellyfish and a giant squid and equipment failures in the base that kill Ted, Barnes and the team's support staff. The survivors, Beth, Harry and Norman, believe Jerry is responsible. Norman discovers that they had misinterpreted the initial messages from Jerry, and that the entity speaking to them through the computers is actually Harry himself, transmitted from his mind while he is asleep. Norman and Beth eventually realize that when Harry entered the sphere, he gained the ability to make anything he imagines a reality, and they conclude that all the horrors that have befallen the Habitat were manifestations of Harry's fears. Norman and Beth sedate Harry with enough sleeping drugs to put him into a dreamless sleep to prevent him from doing any further damage. However, when Norman is attacked by a snake, Beth realizes that Harry alone could not have been responsible for everything that had happened on the Habitat and she confronts Norman, accusing him of entering the sphere when he went to retrieve Harry. Beth's suspicions prove to be correct but after experiencing her own nightmarish vision, she confesses to Norman that she too entered the sphere. When rejoined by Harry, the group realizes that the crew of the ship must have also entered the sphere and they ended up killing each other after being driven mad by their fears. Under the stress of the situation, Beth has suicidal thoughts, which causes the detonation mechanisms on a store of explosives to engage, threatening to destroy the base and the spacecraft. They race to the Habitat's mini-sub but their combined fears cause them to reappear back in the spacecraft. As a psychologist, Norman is able to see through the illusion. He triggers the mini-sub's undocking process and overrides the others' fears that they will not escape the destruction of the Habitat and spacecraft. The sphere is untouched by the explosions. The mini-sub makes it to the surface as the surface ships return. As Beth, Harry and Norman begin safe decompression, they realize that they will be debriefed and their newfound powers discovered. Fearing humans are not ready for this ability they agree to erase their memories of the event using their powers, to ensure the "unknown event" paradox is resolved. The sphere then rises from the ocean and accelerates away into distant space.