Four distant characters —Toshi Yukawa, a formerly convicted, incarcerated, and reformed hacker; Marta Mota, a Brazilian journalist in Iraq; Jan Steiner, a forcibly retired ethnomusicology professor who has urged that all music should be free and made by amateurs, and pushed against the canonization of musical idols; and Mitchell Payne, a chiptune artist headed to a competition in Sydney — all get an unplaceable earworm stuck in their heads at the same time. Toshi Yukawa realizes it is a rapidly spreading computer virus. Marta Mota starts researching it after many people also tell her they have a familiar but unrecognizable earworm. Jan Steiner has been presented with an iPod containing all the music he has ever written about by his department, and was begrudgingly longing for something new and unheard when the earworm strikes him. Mitchell Payne, gearing up for competition, tries to no avail to get it out of his head and can barely talk to his interviewer backstage. At a coordinated moment, while Payne is performing onstage, music across the world stops and the devices play a melody that immediately after nobody can remember but everyone is obsessed with. The internet is abuzz. Jan Steiner, meanwhile, has slipped and fallen on the sidewalk, breaking his hip. Thinking he'll lie there all night and freeze since nobody hears his calls, he fishes around for the iPod as respite, but it's broken. He puts the dead earbuds in anyway, through which he hears what is presumably the song: "a vast and silent fantasia: the wired world recovering a theme it long ago misplaced."