In an alternate Great Depressions New York City, a pulp writer comes up with idea of “industrivism” for her new story. Her manuscript is delivered by her friend and foreman of the nearby factory, Jake, to his aged German employer living in a giant iron pod in the factory’s basement. Industrivism generally posits that the human body can be improved through manufacturing developments similar to factories’ use of assembly lines. Like the idea of the American Dream, industrivism’s ambiguous optimism is commercializable to the old man, and he publishes the pulp writer’s manifesto to lure idealistic recruits to his factory.

Despite giving up his Jewish community for the position as a foreman of the factory, Jake remains ignorant of the factory’s outputs. The workers too, are clueless. Jake is reminded of the incineration factories in Germany that act as a front for genocide. When Jake asks what industrivism is, one worker says it is the heart of a diesel engine. 

Jake’s employer sets up a meeting with the pulp writer and discloses his identity as Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine presumed to be dead. His solitary iron pod transforms into a tank suit, allowing him to move about. In fact, the tank suits are the factory’s products, along with other diesel-powered prosthetics for wounded veterans that are also modeled on the new recruits. They tell Jake their bodies never need to sleep again.

Against Jake’s wishes, the pulp writer accepts Diesel’s proposal to write propaganda about himself and the might of diesel technology under the idea of industrivism. 

In the end, Jake throws the pulp writer’s latest manuscript spewing the “anti-Communism, technological-organic unity, and physical immortality” rhetoric of industrivism into the office of Espionage.