Burton Steen is 52, exhausted, in chronic pain, and increasingly irrelevant in a world moving on without him. His medical-sales career is being displaced by automated ordering, his marriage to Jeanie has gone emotionally quiet, and his daughter Leah has grown tired of receiving advice when what she wants is her father. One sleepless night, desperate for relief, Burton combines medication, morphine, psychedelic mushrooms, and electrical stimulation from a TENS unit. In the resulting break from ordinary perception, he sees a conversation with Jeanie before it occurs.

Exactly twenty-four hours later, the conversation repeats word for word. Burton begins testing the phenomenon and confirms that he is seeing fragments of the next day. But the tests reveal a brutal rule: once Burton clearly sees an event, he cannot prevent it. He can only alter the circumstances around it or prepare for what follows.