Lugard is a policeman who is on a date when he sees the destruction of his law enforcement headquarters occur on livestream. The person responsible for the attack is Nakaya Freeman, who is immediately branded a terrorist and wanted by the government. Lugard loses his police partner, Luka, in the attack - he struggles to deal with his grief even as he is questioned by his superiors since he is the only official to have had contact with Nakaya in his youth. As he reveals the memory under stimulation, his superiors begin to suspect that he harbours reluctant admiration for the revolutionary Freeman, so they place him on suspension so that his sentiments do not interfere with the operation. Frustrated, he goes to a bar to watch a 'deckball' game - his anger reaches new heights when a pivotal moment in the match is turned into an advertising opportunity to promote 'Proposition 23.' A politician called Sadbrat appears on the news, talking about this new law without really explaining anything concrete. He accidentally reveals that this proposition has something to do with the year 1886 - in a fit of curiosity, Lugard looks up this year online but finds the information blocked by the government. Sensing that something is off, he decides to find a programmer that could help him get around government censorship, but the moment he leaves his apartment, he is cornered by law enforcement and his 'neuro' - a chip that helps him interact with the interface of the world - is destroyed, turning him into an outcast that does not have the privilege of citizenship. Without these privileges, he is essentially unable to receive food, healthcare, employment, or anything else; people like him are called 'the undead,' and rarely survive. He runs into a programmer called Sayoma, who has interacted with a program related to '1886' and has constructed a code to follow its trail. Her interactions with it have, however, impacted her neuro's ability to interact with the interface, and she is simultaneously fending off the Department of Information, which has hired her in a task-force to hunt herself - the rogue programmer trying to chase their construct. Overwhelmed by her inability to program, Sayoma tries to take her own life by jumping off a building, but she is saved by Lugard and Nakaya, who have joined forces in an attempt to take down the corrupt government and restore equality between citizens and the undead. They require Sayoma's help in order to track down 1886, but their plans had to be altered when they saw her nearly die. Her own neuro is disabled by Nakaya so that the government cannot track her, and she joins the ranks of the 'undead.' Using 'old school' 21st century technology, Sayoma replicates the program she was tracking earlier, and generates an avatar that reveals the purpose of the program: to help AI become sentient beings that can order human beings around instead of being limited to advisory roles. The plan is called Proposition 23 because the numbers in '1886' add up to 23, and 1886 was the year in which the U.S. Constitution was amended to include corporations as independent agents deserving of privileges. Now that the nations have merged into One World governance, the AI are determined for the privileges of personhood to apply them, too, and intend to take it much further by establishing total dominance over everyone else.
The undead are determined to stop this from happening: they break into the government building and implant Sayoma's self-developed program onto the main link, so that everyone's neuros are destroyed. Meanwhile, back at the undead headquarters, Lugard has a gun to Nakaya's head, determined to kill him in order to avenge Luka's death - but also because he feels jealous of how close Sayoma and Nakaya have become. Nakaya accepts his death, and presses the red button that will destroy the neuros and prevent an AI uprising.