A newspaper editor by day and monster-hunter by night, middle-aged Dinesh Bekeyah soaks in the polluted cityscape of Delhi. With an organized group, Dinesh hopes to hunt the World-Destroying World Machine (WDWM, or "Widdam") which has been suffocating the world in pollution in its breath, abkihawa. Dinesh is active on the dark web, where his research has led him to discover that the Widdam is related to the sentient "megamachines," designed by a Swedish roboticist named Carl Johansson. Across the world in Shiprock, New Mexico, a geologist named Valerie Begay spots an unauthorized drone and shoots it down. She returns home and reflects on the history of the land, how drought and fracking have devastated communities. The pond by her childhood cabin is dry. The geologist encounters a decommissioned fugitive Saur, a kind of robot evading the drone the geologist shot earlier. The Saur is looking for a Saint of the Waters. The Saur escaped the Arctic after a code from the AI darknet liberated it from the code designed by Johansson. The Saur asks for asylum in the Navajo Nation, and tells the geologist it found a cave of water nearby. The next morning the Saur takes the geologist to a cavern of water hidden from view. A middle-aged man named Jan ascends the Swedish massif Akka, seeking to uncover the secrets left behind by his father Carl Johansson. He discovers an early Saur mining prototype named Martina decaying in the wilderness. Martina severely malfunctioned while put to use for a mining operation nearby a Sami community. Jan returns to Stockholm and confronts his father about Martina, who reiterates that he did not sabotage his own creation despite government officials accusing him. Carl eventually confesses to sabotaging Martina after he was frightened by its power. In Delhi, Dinesh's day is disrupted by a terrifying roaring. It is rain.