Hilary is a doctoral student in psychology from a school no one has ever heard of with mediocre math skills and no professional research experience to speak of. But that doesn’t seem to bother Dr. Leo Reinhart, eccentric director at the prestigious Krohl Institute for Brain Science. What Hilary has over other candidates, including mathematician Amal, is a willingness to grapple with the most difficult problem in neuroscience: the hard problem of consciousness. Billionaire Jerry Krohl thinks Amal might be better-suited at his hedge fund, and Hilary wins the position on Leo’s elite team of researchers. But what her colleagues at Krohl don’t know is that Hilary is troubled by a painful decision from her past, which feeds her religious convictions, despite the incredulity of her partner Spike, and the attitudes of a field that is seemingly at odds with the concept of God.
Five years later, and Hilary is a seasoned researcher, invited to attend a round-table on consciousness in Venice, while her eager-to-please assistant Bo finalizes the research project they’d been developing together. When Bo crunches the numbers, the results are startling, and spark a debate among Hilary’s colleagues and the scientific community about the nature of goodness, the existence of altruism, and the source of morality. Truth twists and history haunts these scientists as they attempt to parse the brain from the soul, the truth from the lies, and the coincidence from the divine.