In an alternate world where telling time is illegal, Conrad Newman, a death-row prisoner, wins over his sergeant by using his makeshift sundial to alert the sergeant of inspection times. In his world, people only use calibrated timers to indicate the progression of a fixed time interval, and clocks of any kind are outlawed.

As a teenager, Newman's English teacher, Stacey, revealed to him the potential maliciousness of a clock: not only does it calculate how long a worker takes to complete a task, but it can then empower the boss to make his employees work faster.

After realizing Conrad possesses an illegal watch, Stacey takes him to the ruins of the once great city of Chronopolis. In order to accommodate 10 million workers and prevent congestion within the city, each socioeconomic class had been assigned a different time zone and were only allowed to do certain tasks within a specific time window. Despite the system's ability to maximize efficiency, life for people were constraining, and they mutinied against the system, destroying the clocks all over the city.

But when Conrad spots one clock still running, he starts to believe he could somehow reboot the system. He runs away from a suddenly hostile Stacey, who he suspects is a Time Police, and finds an old man still living in Chronopolis named Marshall. The duo team up to fix clocks around the city, until Marshall kills Stacey and Conrad is arrested for the death.

During his last days in prison, a guard gives Conrad a working clock, and its marvelous ticks send Conrad into deliriousness.