In a dystopian alternate 1991, the media conglomerate North American Assessment and Advertising Agency (NAAAAA) buys people as test subjects for the entertainment industry. A disaffected woman named Rachel [Betsey Brown] sells her four-month-old infant, also named Rachel, to the company, and is subsequently accepted as an employee herself.
Thirty-one years later, the senior Rachel has been cloned six times as the pop star Mommy 6.0 [Chloe Cherry], while the junior Rachel has grown into a childlike, severely developmentally stunted artificial fan of Mommy 6.0’s concerts and public persona, her entire life controlled by the company. Aside from the anonymous NAAAAA employees who clean her cell twice a year, Rachel has had no physical human contact, a glitchy AI chatbot called Poorspigga her only social connection, and thus she has no conception of the difference between human physicality and figures on a screen.
She begins to develop muddled, tentative sexual feelings for Mommy 6.0, barely understanding the maternal bond between them, and starts acting out in company review sessions. Subsequently NAAAAA promotes her to a product reviewer to take advantage of her burgeoning sexual awakening. She wakes up dressed in a motion capture suit, housed in a green screen studio, and is forced to constantly demonstrate the use of a wand vibrator branded with political slogans for the entertainment of a baying online audience of commentators and consumers. While Rachel initially enjoys the masturbation, the constant use becomes painful and dehumanizing, and she begs for it to stop.
NAAAAA promotes her again, this time to a content creator in a small office-like cell, as the artificial younger daughter of a performative family of livestreamers, the Ormonts. While she connects with the kindly parents, an long-married actor couple who play up their marital discord for the audience, she finds herself confused and overwhelmed by her “sibling,” Darci Ormont [Dasha Nekrasova], who is another NAAAAA celebrity. Darci is an abrasive and controlling political commentator who hosts a wildly popular Traditionalist Catholicism-themed show where sexual impropriety is displayed for pornographic consumption, and subsequently punished. Rachel tries her hand at creating her own show, but is not very successful. Her only serious fan is a strange woman who messages her interrogative questions about her political identity. NAAAAA announces a contest to meet Mommy 6.0, and she seems to win the opportunity only to discover it is a cruel prank by Darci, who was posing as her friend to gather data. Rachel is turned into an embarrassing laughingstock by the internet audience, and breaks down yet again.
Unable to fulfill any role at the company, Rachel is dumped on the street outside NAAAAA’s headquarters in Union Square. She is told she cannot apply to go back inside for another six months. Rachel is overwhelmed by the enormity of being in the physical world, and ends up as a homeless woman shuttling back and forth along the L train between Union Square and the 14th Street/Sixth Avenue station. Six months later Rachel begs to be let in and is accepted, having been too traumatized by the real world to deal with it.
Sixty-one years later, Rachel is an old woman dying in a hospital bed. A NAAAAA representative offers her two choices of retirement: uploading her mind to a digital server to continue her employment or release back onto the streets of New York. Rachel chooses the former, and is subsequently reunited with the digital ghosts of Darci, the Ormonts, and Poorspigga, as well as Mommy 6.0. The two kiss, and embrace, yet Rachel is confused why the interaction doesn’t provoke the feelings she wanted. Mommy 6.0 only responds in marketable platitudes. Rachel, distraught by the absence of humanity, subsequently asks to have her digital mind shut down, which is granted.
