In the near future, Sam, a middle-aged man, takes his luxury self-driving car on a trip down the expressway to visit a company named Vitek. Vitek is known for their cutting-edge fertility technology, and they offer couples the chance to alter and improve their child’s genetics. Sam meets with HT, a representative, and HT explains how the process works. Vitek allows parents to bring certain traits forward and push certain ones back, creating a specified, elevated offspring. He then informs Sam that Sam’s wife, Annie, has chosen three specific profiles for their potential future child, all very different, of which he should choose the one he likes the most. HT shows Sam three videos of these potential kids.

Sam’s imagined son, Daniel, is shown in three different lifetimes. Though he takes different paths and has a different personality type in each, his life is characterized by three acts; a happy childhood, a difficult second-act where he struggles to find himself, and an idyllic discovery that leads him back to happiness later in life. Sam becomes upset at this, but HT reminds him that he is currently in his own third-act, having already passed through his most challenging period. Sam is confused, and says that he thinks he and Annie still have another act left in them, and HT responds that his analysis shows that Annie is only on her second act.

Angry and confused, Sam goes to a nearby bar and gets drunk. He starts talking to a man named Beezer, and when Vitek comes up, Beezer tells Sam that he thinks Vitek is a secret division of the defense contracting company Raytheon. Beezer claims that genetic alteration is the defense system of the future, and that Vitek is going to use their store of genetic information for a more sinister purpose. As Sam gets more drunk, he provokes Beezer, the bartender Nick, and another man at the bar, who eventually knocks him out with a punch to the face. When Sam wakes up, Nick tells him about how hard he and his wife struggled to take care of their four children, and implies that Sam is ungrateful about his wealth and privilege, and ignorant of the fact that he has never had to make hard decisions in his life. Sam storms out of the bar. He returns a while later and shows the men that he had gone to Vitek and demanded they return his sperm sample, which he proudly and defiantly slams onto the bar, having just made his first life-changing decision.