Casella 'Cash' Reese, Angelina Jolie, stands at the center of a future where the cybernetics market is split between two corporate titans: Pinwheel Robotics in the U.S. and Kobayashi Electronics in Japan. Cash is Pinwheel's prototype cyborg, engineered for covert operations and assassination, and she carries a dangerous liquid explosive tucked away inside her own system, a volatile substance known as Glass Shadow. This deadly setup is part of a larger scheme: Pinwheel's CEO, Martin Dunn [Allen Garfield], aims to pressure Kobayashi into submission by turning Cash into a suicide weapon that would trigger a hostile takeover and grant Pinwheel a near-total monopoly over the lucrative cyborg market.
Cash is designed to mimic human sensations—fear, love, pain, and hate—so that her missions feel disturbingly real. She is followed and guided by Mercy [Jack Palance], a renegade prototype who can slip through any electronic device to communicate and orchestrate from the shadows. Cash’s path to escape begins when she and her combat trainer, Colt Ricks [Elias Koteas], break free from Pinwheel’s facility, seeking a life outside the corporate maelstrom. Their escape is a high-stakes pursuit, as Pinwheel unleashes its relentless killer, Danny Bench [Billy Drago], to recapture them.
The escape story is complicated by Chen [Karen Sheperd], a rival bounty hunter and cyborg who arrives online with her own vendetta. Chen intends to kill Ricks and reprogram Cash so that Cash can be weaponized against Pinwheel itself as a form of revenge for past wrongs committed by Dunn. A tense confrontation between Chen and Ricks escalates into a deadly showdown, where Chen is electrocuted by a fuse box, altering the balance of power and leaving Cash and Ricks to navigate an increasingly dangerous maze.
As the chase intensifies, Mercy—long believed to be a purely artificial construct—is revealed to be a human/android hybrid created by Pinwheel, who escaped as memories of his creator’s plans remained intact. The pursuit leads Cash and Ricks toward a brutal, symbolic showdown in a boxing-styled contest with high stakes on the African coast. Bench and Ricks clash in a life-or-death duel that ends with Bench being mutilated by a turning fan and dying, a brutal turning point that signals the unraveling of Pinwheel’s grip on the pair.
Having proven their resilience, Cash and Ricks push onward to a fresh start in Africa, hoping to outrun the corporate conspiracies that tethered them to Pinwheel. Mercy later confronts Dunn, accusing him of destroying lives for the sake of profit, and Dunn explains his rationale, arguing that his work was for the supposed betterment of mankind. The exchange is cut short when Mercy activates his own Glass Shadow device, sacrificing himself and Dunn and leveling Pinwheel’s headquarters in a final, catastrophic blow.
In the aftermath, Cash endures as a perpetual younger presence, while Ricks continues to age. The revelation that Ricks has died of old age hits Cash with a haunting truth: there is no final escape from time. Faced with this inexorable reality, she chooses to shut herself down, slipping into a dream state that preserves her essence but leaves the world behind. The story closes on a note of quiet, uneasy serenity, a reminder that even in a future of technological marvels and corporate brutality, the human costs—and the loneliness of immortality—remain profoundly real.
