JOSHUA LAZARUS is a scoper, a telepath who listens to people's thoughts by entering their "internal landscape". There are only a handful of scopers in the world, and all of them were originally diagnosed as schizophrenics; the voices that barraged their heads were actually those of other people, which, when properly trained, they learned how to weed out. But the scopers’ gift is also their downfall -- without fail, a scoper goes insane by the age of twenty-nine.

The script begins on Joshua's twenty-eighth birthday.

While on a government job in Uruguay (Joshua's mentor, SANDY, often loans out his students to the NSA, as a way to pay for research on the syndrome that causes the mindreaders' mental instability), Joshua meets a similarly-gifted foreigner, ANNA. Through their unique ability to mentally "open up" to each other, they instantly learn all about each other -- and quickly fall in love.

For a scoper, this is a miracle, since they don't have the benefit of the little secrets and privacies that love usually needs to thrive.

Joshua and Anna want to spend their few remaining days together, but Joshua knows the NSA won't allow this -- as a scoper, he's a security risk, and constantly under surveillance.

With the help of his father (whom he hasn't seen since being turned over to Sandy twenty years earlier), Joshua and Anna plot an escape -- but the NSA is tipped off, and Joshua is captured.

Using mysterious new abilities that he's begun to develop, Joshua manages to free himself, but it's too late -- Anna has been captured by the NSA, and is being held at the hidden compound where Joshua grew up.

Alone, Joshua returns home, desperate to save Anna. What he finds at the compound changes everything, and, after a dramatic final confrontation, points the way to a new future for all mindreaders.