Gene Protection Agency agent Logan Ramsay arrests suspected genetic courier Henrik Soren at the Denver airport and squeezes an address from him tied to a delivery of “mining bacteria.” A raid on the Five Points house finds a staged interior and a camera, then two supercold spheres wired to a phone. When the phone rings, the orbs detonate, shredding Logan’s suit with ice shrapnel. He wakes in an ICU bubble with broken ribs and a collapsing immune system as doctors fear a synthetic pathogen. Sequencing confirms an engineered influenza carrying a Scythe DNA-editing payload—the platform that once fueled his mother Miriam Ramsay’s research before a mutation helped trigger global famine. After antivirals and interferon, Logan stabilizes, and initial analysis shows no detectable genome edits.

Back on desk duty, anomalies surface. Logan’s bone density spikes, memory and focus surge, and pattern recognition accelerates. He hides the changes from his boss Edwin Rogers and partner Nadine Nettmann, seeking tests from Dr. Jeff Strand while revisiting the famine’s trauma in therapy with Aimee Frum. At the memorial with Nadine, he weighs quitting. A cryptic warning—“They know you’re changing”—hits as two armed men close in at work. Logan slips away but is abducted and injected.

He wakes in a GPA black site vivarium. Edwin details thousands of targeted edits enhancing cognition, pain tolerance, disease resistance, and more. A polygraph by Hana Jalal confirms Logan didn’t alter himself. Edwin then drops a bombshell: Miriam is alive in a video and threatening a human gene-drive upgrade. Dr. Anthony Romero, a scientist Logan once arrested, measures Logan’s IQ above 200 amid rapidly climbing physical capabilities. When attackers breach the site, a masked operative shatters the glass, extracts Logan, and reveals herself as his sister, Kara Ramsay.

On the run, Kara admits she, too, was recently “stung” by a drone and upgraded. Hiding from surveillance, Logan hacks his GPA file, isolating a tiny insertion in a genomic safe harbor (AAVS1) present in every cell. He deciphers it as GPS coordinates leading to Carson National Forest in New Mexico. There, the siblings find an old electric car and their mother’s decomposed body with her necklace, plus a hardcase with a laptop and phase memory drives. In a recorded message, Miriam claims responsibility for dosing both children (via Soren and a drone) and implores them to “save our species” with her upgrade.

Their alliance fractures. Logan, scarred by the famine, argues the drives must be destroyed. Kara insists reason demands deploying the upgrade to avert human self-destruction. Sensing her willingness to kill, Logan bolts with the case; Kara shoots him in the shoulder. He escapes, disables her car, and barely survives a crash, realizing he has lost the first fight over humanity’s future.

Recovering under aliases, Logan funds himself through high-stakes poker, using microexpression reading and probabilistic mastery. He maps what Kara will need to mass-produce a viral release: secure lab space, elite staff, and specialized compute. When a sudden, quarantined outbreak devastates remote Glasgow, Montana—with tremors, pathological laughter, and 100% mortality reported—Logan drives into the cordon by raft, guided by a trooper whose sister, Tiffany Jarvis, is trapped inside. In her darkened house, he finds Tiffany alive but symptomatic with hyper-clarity reminiscent of his early changes, and her husband Chris dead. After collecting DNA swabs, an upgraded operative named Andrew ambushes him, kills Tiffany, and nearly wins a brutal fight before Logan crushes his trachea and forces a typed lead: an address near Silverton, Colorado.

Back in his van, Logan sequences the samples. Tiffany’s genome shows multi-vector edits mirroring his own upgrade, delivered by non-transmissible packages. Chris’s shows partial edits derailed by a fragment that cascades into prion-like degeneration. The pattern suggests a seeded release: some recipients upgrade, others die. Concluding the outbreak is not person-to-person, he heads to Colorado.

At a secluded lodge tied to an anonymous LLC—Miriam’s hideout—Logan confronts Kara. Over a tense meal, she reveals the current toll: 2,016 upgraded, 274 prion failures (13.6%). She is cultivating a soon-to-be transmissible virus with a projected R0 of 8.7 and shedding in fifteen days. When Logan tries to act, Kara flips the table, evades his shots by anticipating intent, and pins him with a knife, demonstrating she has surpassed him. He bluffs with a concealed ricin disperser; unwilling to die, she withdraws. After she flees, he secures a hair with follicle from her brush—his only route to understand and match her enhancements.

Logan forces access to an illicit Las Vegas lab run by Dr. Ty Feld. After killing guards to establish leverage, he wins Feld’s cooperation and uploads Kara’s genome. It confirms she pushed cognitive and pattern-recognition edits beyond Miriam’s baseline. With time gone, Logan devises a perilous acceleration plan: double gene dosage by activating silent copies, deliver systemic edits via hydrodynamic injections, and push brain-targeted nanoparticles across the blood-brain barrier. Leaving the lab after six days, he carries a cooler of vectors to Washington, D.C.

Before acting, he shadows his family and sees Beth Williams on a date. Realizing he endangers Beth and their daughter Ava Williams and that Beth is moving on, he walks away. In his car, he begins the self-upgrade. The procedure nearly kills him—seizures, sensory overload, and a 148-second flatline—before he wakes with fine control over attention and perception, able to split focus and throttle sensory intake. Now understanding how Kara anticipates and “slows” time, he determines her deployment model: recruit willing scientist-carriers to seed hubs ahead of lockdowns.

Logan confronts Edwin at home, coercing cooperation with what Edwin believes is a sleeper gene, and reunites with Nadine at GPA headquarters. On MYSTIC, Logan parallelizes searches across four blocks: high-risk virologists, Kara’s trusted special operators, a face-recognition model of Kara’s altered appearance, and potential volunteer super-spreaders. He triangulates activity pointing to Lower Manhattan’s flooded, CCTV-dark towers and identifies 94 imminent international departures. He publicly orders a Miami raid to misdirect, then secretly rides the hyperloop to New York with Nadine, warning Edwin is compromised.

In transit, Logan accuses Nadine of being reached by Kara. She confesses Kara upgraded her in Tulum and that she has helped source volunteers. When Logan seizes her bag, she unleashes engineered Asian giant hornets keyed to his pheromones and loaded with deadly venom. Using split-focus control, he captures and kills both hornets, restrains Nadine, and interrogates her by reading involuntary reactions as he rattles off candidate labs. Her tells isolate the target: Omega Laboratories at 140 Broadway.

NYPD detains Nadine at Grand Central while Logan and Edwin lead a bio-SWAT approach by water into Lower Manhattan. Rejecting a drone strike, Logan free-climbs the glass facade to bypass booby-trapped stairwells lined with wire and claymores. As JTF-Black moves to seize control and a Black Hawk is shot down, he breaches a live lab floor, kills Kara’s guard Madeline Ortega with a breach charge, and chases Kara upward, nonlethally disabling two SWAT officers in his path and slipping past upgraded operators Deshawn Brown and Rodney Viana. On the 44th floor, Kara sprints for an open window with a BASE rig and a bag of auto-injectors for global seeding. Logan shoots her leg to stop the jump; when she draws a pistol, he fires center mass. Dying, she warns the lab will self-destruct. Logan grabs her harness and the injectors, says a final goodbye, and BASE-jumps out as flames erase the lab’s data.

He crashes into the flooded streets and hides until dawn. In a monitored call, Edwin warns of BOLOs; Logan demands fair treatment for Nadine and reveals the “upgrade” he injected into Edwin was only saline. On the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk, Logan throws the auto-injectors into the East River, grieving Kara while rejecting her methods. He resolves to keep fighting the existential threats she feared—without sacrificing the humanity he refuses to edit away.