At a little bookstore in town, clerk Joe flirts with a client named Ash. They hit it off and get coffee together while discussing the concept of having “a final purpose”. From then on they start dating and get in a serious relationship.
One morning at a café Joe mentions he still doesn’t know what Ash’s job is. She dodges the question and instead announces she has something important to tell him, starting by sharing an “I love you”. Nearby, Hunter bumps into a man that calls him out for it, so Hunter strikes him down.
At the table, Ash says she isn’t from “here” but before she can explain, Hunter approaches her and shoots her in the head. While Hunter leaves the gun on another table, a crying Joe clings to the body. After the initial shock, Joe tries following Hunter, who mysteriously disappears in an alley.
For the following two weeks, Joe is so depressed that he cancels all his plans and never leaves the apartment. His friend Oliver keeps trying to visit, so eventually Joe lets him in. Oliver has brought coffee but Joe can’t taste anything and feels his arms so weak that he just drops the cup.
When Oliver tries to offer some words of comfort Joe doesn’t want to hear them, so Oliver leaves. That night Joe buys a gun and a bunch of bullets. He says he’ll see Ash soon and tries to self-delete, but when he presses the trigger nothing happens.
Joe tries a couple of times but it doesn’t work, so he tests the gun by shooting at the sofa. The bullet does come out now and causes some damage, but when Joe tries to self-delete again it still doesn’t work. The apartment AI hears the shot and want to call the police, but Joe tells her it was just an accident.
Then Joe shoots the window to break the glass and jumps out as he hears Ash’s voice calling his name. To his shock he finds himself floating in the air with all the glass shards surrounding him. Suddenly he wakes up in his bed and he assumes it was all a dream because the sofa is fine and the gun is still on the table.
The AI says there are messages from Ash and Joe panics, so he runs out of the building. As he walks down the street, he sees a woman with a strange effect on her face. He also thinks he sees Ash’s face on the billboards.
His phone keeps getting messages from Ash, which should be impossible. He’s too scared to look at them and visits Oliver to ask for advice. Oliver thinks those may be pre-recorded messages Ash prepared in case something happened to her, so Joe finally decides to open them.
A video of Ash plays, explaining that if he’s seeing this something happened to her. She needs him to go to the bookstore and pick up a special order under his name. Meanwhile in a dark room, Erica and two operators are tracking Joe’s movements.
Soon Joe makes it to the bookstore and picks up the special order, which is a small book. There’s a love note from Ash on the first page and when Joe reads it, his head starts hurting and his vision gets blurry. Thankfully it only lasts a few minutes and he gets to leave, unaware a man is following him.
The guy reports to Erica, who orders him to take Joe down and retrieve the book. The operators use their computer to activate more men, who start following Joe as well. One of the men even gets in the elevator with Joe, pretending to be a tenant.
On his way to his apartment Joe gets a message from Ash saying the strange may kill him. Joe rushes into his place and tries to close the door, but the man blocks it with his foot and opens fire. The home AI tries to contact the authorities but she appears to be offline.
Then Joe runs to get his gun from the table and misses his shot, so he hides instead. When the man comes closer, Joe tries shooting again and also misses. The guy gets ready to attack, however Joe body suddenly moves against his will and shoots the stranger with perfect accuracy.
A very confused Joe hears someone in the corridor and carefully approaches the door. A second attacker appears and Joe quickly disarms him, triggering a fight. The guy makes Joe drop his gun too and easily overpowers him until suddenly Joe begins dodging at an impressive speed, allowing him to knock the man down with just one move.
The man immediately recovers and asks for help, now he starts beating Joe up with a skill he didn’t have before. Joe throws him on a table and when the enemy tries to retaliate, he smashes his face against the wall. The man says he doesn’t understand before Joe knocks him out with a punch.
Afterward Joe returns to his apartment and sees Ash on the screen, but it isn’t a message - this is a live feed. At the same time the body by his door disappears. Ash explains she didn’t mean to abandon him, she just had trouble hacking into the system and time works differently where she lives.
Before she can explain what happened to her, she must share some history. Many years ago, technology started to advance too quickly. Artificial intelligence came to be with advanced behavioral modeling and ultra-realistic rendering.
All this was driven mostly by the entertainment industry, but it got the attention of intelligence agencies as well. Hunter was a brilliant software engineer who was hired by Sentech, one of the big firms. He gathered as much information from the real world as possible and fed it to a machine to analyze process control, however he also had a private project on the side.
His goal was to incorporate all this data to create a virtualized but living reality that would be fed by a constant stream of information. Hunter couldn’t do this alone and one day he received a message from another coder offering help. They agreed to work together and created the first D.
U. or Digital Universe, which was a fully realized population. The only thing missing was actual people with their own emotions and agency.
Hunter started to use his D. U. to run all the tests he wanted, from high-risk surgical implants to advanced weaponry.
Soon Hunter became Sentech’s CEO and things started to move even faster. He offered his D. U.
to test all kinds of things without consequences, claiming that simulated people were cheaper than real ones. For a whole decade Hunter kept testing and created almost 500 D. U.
models until he hit the jackpot with the current one. This makes Joe realize he’s nothing but a computer program, but Ash calls him an actual man who she loves. Ash is a real woman living in the real world who works for an intelligence agency and Hunter only killed her model in the D.
U. . She continues to share Hunter’s story, explaining all his experiments were unethical so the government eventually outlawed the modelling technology.
However instead of destroying it, Hunter hid it in the digital universe. The day he shot Ash he disappeared thanks to his admin permissions, but doing things against the laws of physics may corrupt the D. U.
and cause glitches because the D. U. stops feeling real.
All this time Ash has been trying to find Hunter’s hidden technology, and during her mission she met Joe and fell in love with him. The book she sent him carries another layer of data that they need to get out soon. While looking at the pictures Ash used during her story, Joe realizes that the other programmer is his friend Oliver.
In real life, Oliver hasn’t been seen in years. Ash wants Joe to contact Oliver and ask for his help since she can’t get back into the D. U.
, which makes Joe wonder who stopped him from self-deleting and gave him extra skills. Meanwhile Erica visits Hunter, who keeps playing with a strange orb. She explains the Joe mission is causing too many issues that her team can’t patch fast enough and the only way to be sure nobody gets into the D.
U. again would be isolating it from the global networks. However Hunter refuses to do that since it would interrupt the feed of information.
Erica points out that they’re risking exposure and he’s killing billions of people, but Hunter only goes on a rant about humanity’s progress. Before Erica leaves, Hunter asks her to find the real Ash. Sometime later Oliver contacts Ash, although he only has thirty seconds to talk.
She tells him she wants his help shutting down the D. U. but also with Joe, so Oliver promises to stay in contact and hangs up.
At that moment her alarm rings announcing the arrival of some armed men wearing strange masks. Ash manages to stay hidden and sneaks out of her apartment when they aren’t looking. There’s a drone patrolling the streets, but once again she manages to hide before it sees her.
Thanks to her computer tracking Oliver’s call, Ash follows a map and finds his home. He only lets her in when she proves she has no fire weapons, just a knife. Ash shares details about her experience in the D.
U. with him, saying she’s accepted that the programs are pretty much real people. She doesn’t think they should be experimented on but they don’t deserve to be shut down either.
Oliver doesn’t tell her why he’s been living in the D. U. but he does admit he was the one who stopped Joe from self-deleting and gave him extra skills.
He realizes Ash truly is in love with Joe and agrees to help, so he tells her about an old building of his where she can hide from now. Soon Oliver gives Ash the means to go back and she gets to reunite with Joe. This sudden change in code is noticed by Hunter on his computer.
Joe doesn’t know how to react to Ash now that he knows he isn’t real, but Ash assures him that he is and kisses him. The moment is interrupted when Ash is suddenly pulled out of the digital universe and she reappears in her room. Oliver explains he had to do that because Hunter is onto them, so Ash has to run away.
Soon a masked man is following her. In the D. U.
Joe finds Oliver and begs for help. Oliver explains Ash is in trouble and theorizes that Hunter will shut down this digital universe soon because all these glitches aren’t worth the trouble and he can just design a new one. That means Joe and all the people he knows will disappear.
Oliver has an idea though: Joe has to release the data his model is carrying. Years ago developers used to leave stuff behind in the code and Oliver confirms he did the same with this universe. The book Ash sent Joe had a backup of this entire D.
U. , that’s the data Ash had been trying to get out. Oliver gives Joe a key and tells him to upload all the data, go home, and wait for a massage with the next steps.
Joe accepts the mission but he stops at his apartment first to get his gun and say goodbye to his AI. In the real world Ash is running away from the masked man, who has opened fire. She makes it to an alley and hides behind a dumpster, only coming out when the man is close enough to attack him.
They start fighting and the guy doesn’t let Ash unleash her dagger, so instead she breaks his mask and hits him a couple of times to bring him down. Then she grabs the guy’s gun and hits him with it as she asks about the D. U.
technology. The man refuses to answer so Ash hits him again and leaves. Sadly as soon as she steps out of the alley, another man hits her to knock her out.
When Ash wakes up, she’s tied to a chair in Hunter’s office. She calls Hunter out for his unethical practices, and he says she isn’t different from him because of what she did to Joe. Afterward Hunter enters the D.
U. to meet with Oliver, who reveals he worked with Hunter because he hadn’t known about his real intentions until it was too late. He calls Hunter a psychopath but still promises he’ll stay out of his way.
At that moment Hunter’s men find Oliver’s real body and shoot him, which pulls him out of the digital universe. Seconds later Joe receives a programmed message from Oliver telling him he’s alone now. Joe enters an old apartment and finds a computer with all the data.
He puts his hand on the control panel and all the information is immediately sent out. This sends an alert to Erica, who orders her men to stop him. Soon two men appear outside the window while Joe uses the key on the screen, which opens a cabinet full of guns.
When the men come in, Joe quickly shoots them down with perfect shots. Suddenly Joe hears Hunter’s voice and disappears, only to show up at the harbor outside the city. Hunter is there already and shoots Joe’s shoulder before threatening his head, pointing out that if Joe dies because of Hunter, he won’t respawn.
Then Hunter uses his control panel to disarm Joe and make him float as he starts torturing him. Joe is about to be unmade but when Hunter mentions Ash, Joe screams in fury and regains control of himself. While Hunter doesn’t understand what’s happening, Joe lowers himself to the ground, recovers his gun, and shoots Hunter, which sends him back to the real world.
In the office, Hunter announces that it’s time for a reboot and a desperate Ash asks him to at least let her say goodbye. Hunter is amused by the fact she’s truly in love with a software and agrees to make the call. Joe gets to share his last words with Ash as he watches the world around him slowly disintegrate.
His body starts getting affected as well, so he tells Ash that he loves her and that even if he’s digital, his feelings are real. Then his phone disappears as well and the ground disintegrates along with the buildings until there’s nothing left behind but darkness. Once the computer confirms that deletion is complete, Hunter orders his guard to kill Ash.
The moment is interrupted by Oliver’s voice calling Hunter out before the orb on the desk begins to shake. Suddenly it starts floating and growing bigger only to disappear. Oliver appears on the screen and Hunter is confused because his men supposedly killed the real body.
While Oliver explains that he hid different levels of universes inside the D. U. , the particles of the orb begin reappearing and form a shape that turns out to be Joe.
A gun appears in his hand and he immediately makes the guard drop his weapon. Then Joe turns toward Hunter, so the guard grabs his gun again only for his body to start glitching. Erica takes the chance to start beating him up until he’s unconscious and she announces she’s done with Hunter’s evil plans, so she releases Ash.
Next Joe shoots Hunter multiple times and makes him fall through the window. Now Ash and Joe can finally reunite. Sometime later Ash and Joe visit Oliver, who explains the universe as a system of different levels and points out that flesh and blood aren’t different from coding.
He only had to cut Joe’s code and paste it in Ash’s level. When Oliver returns to his house, he takes a drink and disappears into yet another level.
