Synopsis/Details
Private investigator Arthur Halloran is haunted by nightmares of a woman held captive and tortured by a man. Losing faith in modern medicine’s ability to provide answers, he shuns his therapist in favor of the supernatural, seeking the help of a Shaman. Arthur performs a ritual and finds himself standing over a dead man’s body – with the murder weapon in his own hands.
His world unravels as he runs for his life from masked hitmen and from his PI partner who claims he saw Arthur commit the murder. An encounter with a mystery man reveals that Arthur was part of a genetic editing experiment that was covered up by brainwashing its test subjects, and that his partner and therapist were complicit. After killing them both, a now brave, fierce Arthur finds a new home among The Aberrationists, a group of other discarded test subjects who live way out in the canyons, away from civilization. He finds the woman from his dreams living among them and they live happily together as a couple, surrounded by only nature and good friends – until he’s summoned to one last dream, where he finally confronts the captor.
The captor reveals that he is Nicholas Vun Brown, an alternative therapy pioneer who treats patients’ traumas using simulated storylines, and that Arthur is actually a famous writer whose overactive imagination had somehow overridden the simulation. Fearing that this highly publicized case would destroy his life’s work, Vun Brown gives him an ultimatum: either Arthur unplugs himself from the simulation and they both wake up, OR they both stay trapped here forever in a loop of nightmares. Arthur then realizes that the woman he lived with can’t exist because she died in his car as an underage girl – when they were secretly dating. He also remembers the kind of person he was, a self-entitled, money-grubbing playboy whose only motivation was greed and lust. Burning with guilt, Arthur tangles with Vun Brown and unplugs him from his own simulation, which kills them both and finally earns Arthur his redemption.
